Pippi kicks open the door to the kitchen and enters the room handgun first. But she’s alone. There’s no sound but the metallic, faintly poisonous plink of a leaky faucet into the stainless-steel sink. Pippi flips on the lights, which buzz and fizzle themselves awake as she stealths across the tile. She swings open the door to the walk-in icebox; the light inside is already on. A mostly empty carton of butter macaroon frozen custard lies on the floor beside a bottle of caramel topping and a tipped-over jar sticky with red juice. Pippi picks it up and checks the label. Just as she suspected: maraschino.
Pippi is familiar with her daughter’s unconventional feeding habits, particularly the one Swanny blithely refers to as “Second Dinner” in the pages of what she’s had the insolence to title her Secret Diary. Swanny eats emotionally, which is to say when she’s angry. It used to be a vice of Pippi’s too, though she had the good sense not to keep it down, and in time, learned to restrict her bingeing to liquids. But there’s something about Swanny’s overconsumption that Pippi almost admires. It’s as though her child believes she can devour the world and still have leftovers for later.
Pippi throws open the servants’ door to the dining room and stops dead. The drop fixtures twinkle above the long table, the Edison bulbs red-gold as dying embers, and a large bowl of ice-cream sundae sits meltingly abandoned on the table. But Pippi sees only the form of the shirtless Mohawked intruder, removing a commemorative platinum plaque from one of the walls with a rusty screwdriver.
“Freeze,” says Pippi, and he does, on his tiptoes, not even making a grab for the trigger of the chain saw strapped to his chest. The raiders never were this soft, this green. “Drop your weapon.”
He unbuckles the power tool’s holster and lowers it to the ground. It gives her enough time to see the scars on his back, half-healed: a name, first and last, carved deep into the skin. Of course. He’s just a calling card for someone else. Then he turns around to face her, his arms raised.
“Is that all you’ve got?” she asks.
“Swear to shit,” he replies. He’s actually trembling.
“No pistol? No ammunition?”
“No, no, swear to shit.”
“Then I’d like for us to work together. You can start by answering a question for me: where are your friends?”
“The study…there’s…a safe, with currency…and…”
Pippi shoots him in the face. The bullet slams downward through the bridge of his nose, out the back of his head, and into the sequoia floorboard with the satisfying thunk of an ax into kindling. He crumples. Pippi kneels down and looks under the table. Swanny’s eyes shine in the darkness. One fist still clutches a sticky spoon. How many times has Pippi found her daughter just like this, beneath the table on the ballroom floor, with her miniature tea set, her china dolls and taxidermied rabbits?
“Stop crying,” Pippi says.
“I’m not.”
“Good, because there’s no reason to. Get up. We’re going to the panic room.”
“Is it…safe?”
“Of course not. But right now your only protection is a tablecloth. Consider it an improvement.”
Swanny crawls out, unsteadily rising to her feet. In the last year, she’s grown an inch taller than Pippi, a fact Pippi refuses to acknowledge, much less accept. But with the chinchilla coat on over those homely unisex pajamas, her daughter looks much like she did as a toddler, clad at Chet’s insistence in frumpy “play clothes” to make swan wings in the snow. It’s always struck Pippi as ungrateful that Swanny refuses to recollect her father, though perhaps it can’t be helped. Even the sharpest mind doesn’t retain much from before the age of three, and it isn’t as though Pippi refreshes Swanny’s memory by talking about him.
“Follow me,” Pippi tells Swanny, and they sneak back through the kitchen, back up the servant stairs. The panic room is in the penthouse, in the interest of an airlift rescue.
“What if they’ve already sealed themselves in?” Swanny whispers when they reach the landing between the fourth and fifth floors.
The thought occurred to Pippi, but she had the tact not to mention it. She continues to ascend. “They can punch in the exit code, of course.”
“But will they do that? For us? If it means exposing themselves to risk?”
“They’re legally obligated. There’s an escape accommodations clause in the contract, I made certain of that.”
“Legally—but—”
“But nothing. How would it look if we were gored three feet from safety? Besides, with all the vetting you got, they’d be hard-pressed to find an adequate replacement.” They reach the fifth-floor landing and round the corner. “Humphrey Ripple didn’t get where he is today discarding sound investments.”
“It’s not Humphrey I’m worried about. Duncan…doesn’t love me.”
“Love takes time.” Pippi swiftly preempts the protest she knows is rising in Swanny’s throat: “And you’ll have time.”
The first bullet clips Pippi in the right shoulder. Her immediate reaction is not pain, not even surprise, but a rage so searing it’s as though the pellet has released a corrosive vitriol from the torn flesh of her upper arm. The perp is wielding a pirate’s blunderbuss, and as he hastens to reload the muzzle with another vintage shot, she pops him in the neck—she was trying for the eye socket, but the pain in her deltoid has thrown off her aim. At least she hits a major artery; this is no time for perfectionism. It’s then that she hears an unmistakable rat-a-tat-tat, a sound like the furious subtractions of an infernal adding machine: a tommy gun. She yanks Swanny out of the way just in time, hurling her halfway back down the fifth flight of stairs.
The study. Of course. Humphrey keeps the house well stocked.
The safe full of currency. The safe full of death.
“They’ve got into Humphrey’s antique gun collection!” she hisses at Swanny, crouching low against the banister, angling her next shot up through the negative space at the center of the stairwell’s helix. But she can hardly see her assailant from this angle: it’s like aiming from the bottom of a well.
“What shall we do?”
Pippi fires seventeen times. The machine gunner stays just out of range. She curses and reaches into her pocket to reload, but she pulls out a handful of diamonds instead.
“Mother?”
“What are you doing, just standing there?” Pippi tosses a bauble to Swanny, then crams the rest of the jewelry back into her pocket. “Take that and go.”
“But Mother, you’re bleeding.”
“And you’re distracting me.” Pippi slams another full magazine into the handle. “Go back to the kitchen. There’s a passage out under the floorboards of the wine cellar. I’ll join you there shortly.”
Swanny hesitates for another second.
“Don’t dawdle. Do you understand what I’m saying to you? Hurry.”
Swanny turns and begins rushing down the stairs.