The Disguised Heiress

I have been the new nanny for eleven minutes when the ex-wife calls me a thief.

"Search her," Portia Lennox says.

We're on the driveway. White gravel, raked. The driver, the cook and the housekeeper are lined up by the portico like a very small jury.

In the doorway, in a suit the color of two in the morning, stands the man who hired me. Cyrus Lennox. Lennox Freight. He hasn't said a word.

Behind him, on the marble stairs, a little girl in a cream dress holds the banister and watches.

Here's what nobody on this driveway knows.

The driveway is mine. So is the house. So is the banister.

Mr. Lennox pays eighty-five thousand dollars a month to live here, to a lawyer in Boston who signs whatever I tell him to sign.

I've lied about exactly one word. The agency has me down as Delia Kemp. Kemp is my father's name. It's on my passport. The other name is on the deed.

"My bracelet was on the hall table," Portia says. "I took it off to do Birdie's hair. Now it's gone, and the only new person in this house is her."

"I've been in the hall for two minutes," I say.

"That's all it takes, apparently."

Mrs. Gault steps forward. The housekeeper. She came with the house. That's in the lease too. She has known me since I was four, and she does not blink.

"Your bag, Miss Kemp."

I give her my bag.

She searches it properly. Then her hand stops. She lifts out a gold cuff, bright and heavy, with Portia's initials inside the band.

The cook says, "Lord."

"There," Portia says. "There it is."

"I didn't put that there."

"No. It climbed in."

Cyrus Lennox speaks for the first time. He doesn't raise his voice. I'm not sure he owns one.

"Ray. Call the agency. Then call the police."

Ray, the driver, takes out his phone.

So this is the man in my mother's house.

I look up. Not at him. At the brass lantern over the door.

"Call them," I say. "And when they come, ask them to pull the camera."

"There's no camera on the front of the house," Cyrus says.

"There is. In the lantern. Look up."

Everybody looks up. Five faces tilted at a brass lantern like it might sing.

My mother put a lens in it when I was fourteen, to find out how I was getting out at night. It found out.

"That's not on my system," Cyrus says, slowly.

"No," I say. "It's on the owner's."

"Then the owner can send it," Portia says. "In six weeks. Like everything else from Boston."

Cyrus hasn't looked away from me. "My security people missed that. How does a nanny know about it?"

"I look up, Mr. Lennox."

He almost does something with his mouth. Then he doesn't.

In my coat pocket is forty seconds from that lantern: Portia Lennox admiring a stranger's bag on the top step, and letting something fall out of her fist into it.

Forty seconds. I could end this now.

Then I'd have to explain how a nanny gets the owner's feed on her phone. And my grandmother would know where I am by dinner.

I keep my hand in my pocket.

"I want her off the property," Portia says.

Cyrus looks at me for one more second. Then he looks at his daughter.

"Miss Kemp," he says. "You'll wait in the car until the agency calls back."

Like a parcel going back. I turn toward it.

Small shoes on marble. Then on stone. Then on gravel.

Birdie Lennox comes down the steps past her father, across the white gravel, and stops in front of me. She doesn't look at either of them. She looks at my hand, hanging there at my side.

And she takes it.

"Birdie," Portia says. "Come to Mommy."

Birdie does not come to Mommy. Birdie turns around, with my hand in hers, and walks me toward the house, and I go, because what else do you do.

Nobody breathes. The cook puts a hand over her mouth. Ray has stopped dialing.

Mrs. Gault says, very quietly, "She hasn't taken a stranger's hand in a year and a half."

Cyrus Lennox steps aside from his own door. For one second his face is not a billionaire's face at all. Then it is again.

"Mrs. Gault," he says. "Show Miss Kemp the nursery."

"Cyrus," Portia says.

"You have your bracelet, Portia. The gate's where you left it."

She comes close as I pass.

"Enjoy your week, Miss Kemp."

"I'll enjoy the house," I say.

The nursery is my old bedroom.

It's been painted twice since I was nine. You can still see where the stars were, little raised shapes under the paint, a whole wrong constellation.

Birdie climbs onto the bed and points at the ceiling.

She's found them too.

"I know," I tell her. "Somebody did a terrible job."

She doesn't smile. She doesn't talk. She keeps pointing, so I sit on the rug and look up with her until the light goes.

Midnight. The kitchen. The long table my mother used to do the accounts on.

Mrs. Gault makes tea without asking how I take it. She knows.

"Miss Kemp."

"Mrs. Gault."

"You stand like her."

"Like who?"

"Your mother. When she was about to say something I wouldn't like, she stood exactly like that. Hands in her pockets. Chin up. Like the room owed her money."

"The room does owe me money."

"Does he know?"

"Nobody knows. You, Mr. Fitch, and the lantern."

"Mr. Lennox has asked Boston to sell him this house three times."

"I know. I'm Boston."

"And the woman?"

"Her fiancé's offered more. Sixty million. Through a company with no name on it."

My phone. Fitch, who never texts after nine.

Ostrander raised it. Sixty-two. Shall I answer?

I type one word. No.

"You had her on that phone," Mrs. Gault says. "On the driveway. Dropping her own bracelet in your bag."

"Forty seconds."

"And you stood there and let them search you."

"If I show it, I have to say who's watching the lantern. And the second I say that, I'm not the nanny anymore."

"And your grandmother knows where you are by breakfast."

"By breakfast," I agree.

She sits down. She never sits down.

"Why did you come, Miss Delia?"

"I wanted to see who was living in my mother's house." I turn the cup around. "Before I decide whether to sell it to him."

"And?"

"He let her search me."

"He did."

"And his daughter took my hand."

"She did. So what happens tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow Mr. Lennox gets up, and his lawyers write to Boston, and ask to buy this house again."

"And Boston says?"

"Boston says the owner is thinking about it."

I finish the tea.

"The owner's upstairs, Mrs. Gault. She's the nanny."