The hat was what defeated Nico Bellandi.
He could account for the silver tray missing from the pantry, and even for the little sandwiches somebody had persuaded the cook to make. But nothing in forty-one years of living had prepared him for the sight of his guard dog wearing rose-colored velvet and a strand of imitation pearls.
Nico stood on the upper gallery outside his office, coffee halfway to his mouth. Below him, a child’s tea party occupied the terrace beside the rose beds. Rook sat opposite Rosie Whitcomb in a wicker armchair, his massive forelegs bracketing a china saucer.
“Uncle Nico! Rook’s my guest today.” Rosie pointed to an empty place. “You can be one, too.”
At five, she still believed an invitation settled everything.
The dog delicately lapped water from his cup. One hundred and forty pounds of cane corso, with an old scar puckering the skin beneath his collar, and he was trying not to knock over a child’s tea service.
Nico set his coffee against the railing. He had come outside because a construction account was short, two men downstairs were lying to him, and his office had begun to smell of the cigarettes nobody dared smoke in his presence.
He had wanted four uninterrupted minutes.
Instead, he laughed.
The sound surprised him enough that he touched his own chest. Down below, Rosie beamed as though she had accomplished something she’d been working on all morning.
Seven years. He hadn’t heard that sound come out of his own mouth in seven years.
Rook turned toward him, the velvet hat tipping over one ear. Nico had carried that dog away from a burned kennel as a puppy. He had fed him, trained him, taught him to respond to a movement of two fingers. Three years earlier, Rook had stopped an armed man at the kitchen entrance and broken the arm holding the weapon. Men who collected debts for Nico gave the dog a wide berth in the hall.
Rosie leaned across the table and straightened his pearls.
“You’re supposed to keep your hat on at parties,” she told him.
Rook patiently lowered his head.
Nico’s mother had planted the white roses along the terrace wall. They were beginning to open despite the sharp lake wind that still reached the estate from the harbor side of Bellac. The Wisconsin spring had been slow coming; this afternoon, even the stone beneath Rosie’s chair looked warm.
“I saved you the ones without the green stuff,” she called up.
He was about to tell her he’d come down when Rook stopped drinking.
The dog’s gaze fixed beyond the rose beds. His ears pressed back. A low sound rose from him, and Nico’s hand left the railing.
The perimeter alarm followed a second later.
His cup struck the gallery floor as he turned. Steel shutters began closing over the lower windows, their motors grinding beneath the siren. By the time he reached the stairs, his pistol was in his hand.
“Walter. Get to the terrace.”
In the kitchen, Hannah Whitcomb heard the alarm while she was filling a pot for chamomile. She dropped it, and hot water splashed across the floor and over her ankle. Her daughter’s name was the only word she could get out.
She reached the back hall barefoot, still wearing her work apron.
Walter intercepted her at the stairs. The old houseman had a shotgun in one hand and caught her elbow with the other.
“She’s with Rook,” he said. “Come on.”
Outside, the dog had left his chair. Rosie stood behind him, one hand still holding a little sandwich. Rook faced the garden wall with every inch of his body rigid. The pink hat remained caught against his ear.
Two guards came through the terrace doors, and Nico pointed toward the child.
“Bruno, take her. Find her mother. Both of them downstairs, behind steel. The dog stays with them.”
Bruno put away his weapon before lifting Rosie. She caught his collar and looked over his shoulder.
“Don’t leave Rook.”
“He’s coming,” Nico said.
Only then did she let herself be carried inside.
Hannah met them at the bend in the hall. She took Rosie so quickly Bruno barely had time to shift his grip. Walter moved them toward the protected room while Rook followed close enough for his shoulder to brush Hannah’s skirt.
The heavy door closed. The lock engaged.
Gunfire came from the eastern grounds.
Nico went back through the terrace doors. A burst sounded beyond the wall, followed by single shots and then a silence in which the alarm seemed impossibly loud.
His radio crackled.
“Three over the east side. One dead. We’ve got one wounded. Last one’s running toward the outer road.”
Nico looked down at the tea table.
Rosie’s cup stood near the edge of the cloth, a faint crescent of jam on its handle. He touched it with his knuckles. Warm.
He stepped around the chair, studying the broken line of shrubs between the terrace and the wall. From where the intruders had entered, the shortest approach to the house lay well to their right.
Their route had pointed straight at Rosie’s seat.
“Bring the wounded one downstairs,” he said into the radio.
The room beneath the house smelled of stone dust and the oil used on its hinges. Nico waited near the wall while two guards settled the intruder into a chair. The man’s jacket had been cut away from an injured shoulder. He was narrow-faced, with a beard too thin to hide the shaking in his jaw.
Nico let the guards finish securing him.
“You passed an open path to the house,” he said. “You chose the terrace.”
The intruder watched the drain in the floor.
“Look at me.”
His eyes lifted.
“Who paid you?”
The man muttered something about saints in a dialect Nico remembered from older relatives. He tried to smile.
Nico drew another chair close, turned it backward, and rested his hands on its back. He didn’t sit.
“You weren’t trying to reach me. Tell me why.”
The intruder swallowed. His gaze flicked toward the guard beside the door, then toward the ceiling.
Nico moved the chair aside.
“The little table,” he said. “Who was supposed to be sitting there when you arrived?”
For a moment, only the ventilation fan answered.
Then the man whispered, “The girl.”
His jaw clenched oddly. One of the guards lunged, but the intruder was already convulsing against the restraints. Something concealed in his mouth had broken. The guard caught his chin, shouted for help, and tried to keep him upright.
By the time Nico stepped back, the man’s head had fallen against his chest…
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