The Red Stain on the Marble
## chapter 01 - The Red Stain on the Marble
The first thing I saw when I returned to Vale House was a young woman kneeling in a pool of red wine.
She wore the gray uniform my stepmother had chosen for the household staff—stiff collar, white cuffs, skirt below the knee. Her blonde hair was pulled into a severe knot, and she pressed a cloth against the marble with both hands while the wine spread around her knees.
Meredith Vale stood three steps above her, holding the half-empty glass.
“Use the white cloth,” Meredith said. “I want to see whether you understand what permanent means.”
The young woman reached for another towel. Her hands were trembling, but she kept her face lowered.
I stopped at the bottom of the staircase with my suitcase in one hand and my father’s locked briefcase in the other.
My father had been buried the previous afternoon. Meredith had spent the funeral accepting condolences as if she had been elected to an office. Now she was drinking before noon while a housekeeper scrubbed the floor at her feet.
“Did she drop that?” I asked.
Meredith’s head turned slowly.
“Adrian. I thought you had already left.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
The housekeeper glanced up. Her face was younger than I expected, perhaps twenty-seven, with pale blue eyes and a red mark where Meredith’s voice had already struck harder than any hand.
“She bumped me,” Meredith said. “Then she tried to pretend she hadn’t.”
“I was across the room,” the young woman replied quietly.
Meredith’s smile disappeared.
“You were not asked to speak, Lena.”
Lena lowered her eyes again.
I had grown up in that house. I knew every reflection the marble could make. The overturned glass lay near Meredith’s shoe, nearly eight feet from where Lena had been polishing the floor.
Meredith had thrown it.
She wanted Lena on her knees.
“Get up,” I said.
Meredith descended another step. “The stain will set.”
“Then someone can clean it without being made part of the stain.”
Lena started to rise. As she did, something swung from the small loop at the side of her uniform.
A brass key.
It was old, long-necked and darkened at the edges, with a tiny crescent cut into its bow. I had not seen it in seventeen years, but I knew it before it stopped moving.
My mother used to wear that key on a blue ribbon beneath her blouse.
She had worn it the last morning I saw her alive.
I set down the suitcase.
“Where did you get that?”
Lena touched the key instinctively.
Meredith’s wineglass tilted in her hand.
“It belongs to the house,” she said too quickly. “The girl must have stolen it.”
Lena’s face lost what little color it had.
“My grandmother gave it to me.”
“What was your grandmother’s name?” I asked.
Lena looked directly at me for the first time.
“Rose Hart.”
Behind us, Meredith’s glass slipped slightly between her fingers.
Rose Hart had been my mother’s housekeeper, closest friend and, according to my father, the woman responsible for destroying our family.
May you like
She had vanished from Vale House the week my mother died.
And now her granddaughter was wearing my mother’s key.
