Chapter 2
The hotel had once been three buildings.
That was the architectural history I knew.
An old private club.
A carriage house.
A commercial kitchen.
All renovated and joined into the Kingsley Grand.
The bakery was older than all three.
Agnes bought it thirty-eight years ago.
Before I knew what a suit cost.
Before I knew my own father’s name.
“What is the tunnel?”
I asked.
She shook her head.
“Not really a tunnel.”
A service corridor.
Built during Prohibition.
Later used by hotel staff to move food between kitchens without going outside.
The entrance behind Agnes’s cellar shelves had been sealed when I was a teenager.
Or supposedly sealed.
Three months ago she started hearing movement behind the wall.
At first once a week.
Then every few nights.
“She called me,” Ivy said.
I looked at her.
“When?”
“Four days ago.”
“Why not me?”
Agnes answered.
“Because you were opening a hotel.”
I almost laughed.
Of course.
People protect me from problems by hiding them until they become disasters.
A recurring family service.
I turned toward Ivy.
“What did you see?”
Two men in hotel uniforms entering Agnes’s basement after midnight.
One was Nolan.
The second she did not recognize.
They unlocked the old wall from the hotel side.
Then disappeared into the passage.
“What were they carrying?”
“Nothing going in.”
“And coming out?”
She hesitated.
“Black document cases.”
Estelle shifted.
Small.
Enough.
I looked at her.
“You know the passage.”
Silence.
Then:
“Yes.”
There.
“How long?”
“Since renovation.”
“Why didn’t I?”
“It wasn’t relevant.”
Wrong.
Any entrance into my hotel that my security director knows and I do not is relevant.
“What did you use it for?”
“I didn’t.”
Another mistake.
Not we.
I.
Defensive language.
I stood.
“Where is Nolan?”
Nobody answered.
Rafe, my senior bodyguard, moved toward the ballroom doors.
I stopped him.
“Quietly.”
No panic.
No scene.
Tonight hundreds of people were inside my building.
We did not need a security stampede.
Then Agnes opened the recipe book again.
One page held handwritten times.
11:40 PM.
1:15 AM.
12:07 AM.
Not recipes.
Observations.
“I started writing down when they came.”
Smart.
Old women are dangerous when powerful people mistake them for scenery.
She pointed to one date.
Last Friday.
“Three men came out.”
“Who?”
“One was Nolan.”
Then:
“One was Estelle’s brother.”
My eyes moved to my fiancée.
Julian Monroe.
Thirty-nine.
Her family’s operations chief.
Not invited tonight because he claimed illness.
Of course.
“And the third?”
Agnes looked at me.
“Your man.”
I felt something inside me go cold.
“Which one?”
She whispered:
“Miles Grant.”
May you like
My oldest lieutenant.
The man who had supervised construction of the hotel from the beginning.
