The Man at Her Door

Vincent must have moved too fast. Sophie drew her chin into the collar of her dress.

He put a knee on the mat. "You haven't done anything wrong. I need you to tell me what happened, the way you remember it."

"Mrs. Ellis was next door getting her phone. We were making bread." Sophie picked at the ribbon on her mitten. "He said his name was Adrian and he used to know Mom. He wanted to know when you come here."

"Did he ask anything about the rink itself?"

"He asked if you still had the old boards." She looked past him to the far end of the ice. "I told him we had lots of boards. Then he asked when you'd be here again, and I said I didn't know."

"Did you know?"

"Sometimes you come on Saturday, but Mom says we don't tell strangers where people are going to be."

Vincent hadn't understood until then how much effort it must have taken her to keep saying she didn't know. He knew adults who gave information away just to end an uncomfortable conversation.

"That was a good rule to remember," he said. "I'm glad you told me."

Sophie held his gaze for a second. Then she lifted her skate so Nina could finish untying it.

Marco's phone rang. He stepped away to take the call, leaving the card on the bench beside Vincent's jacket. Vincent turned it facedown. He wanted the girl to be able to put on her sneakers without looking at the face of the man who'd been in her hallway.

The front doors banged open. A woman in a long gray coat hurried past the ticket counter, still wearing one glove, her hair pulled loose on one side. She swept Sophie up before the girl could put her second shoe on.

"Mom. I have my blade guards in my bag. You're squishing them."

The woman let out a shaky breath and set her down. Then she looked at Vincent.

He knew those eyes. For a second the rink disappeared and he was sixteen, sitting on an upturned crate at a harbor repair shop, watching a girl in a red scarf sharpen his skates better than he could.

"Elena Reyes," he said.

"Good. That saves us an introduction." Her voice was unsteady around the edges. "Nina said there were police coming. Where were you going to take her?"

"I was going to ask you both to come upstairs. We have a private office."

"And after that?"

He'd already been thinking about a car, a driver, the guest rooms at his house. Elena read the answer before he gave it.

"Tell me what happened first," she said. "Then I decide where my daughter goes."

Vincent looked down at Sophie, who had one sock on the floor and was using both hands to fight the heel of her sneaker. He could probably have had the car brought around before she got the shoe on. He put his phone in his pocket.

"A man broke into the maintenance room. Sophie saw him. He had an old staff badge with Adrian Vale's photo on it."

The name emptied the color from Elena's face.

"He went to our apartment yesterday," she said. "Sophie told me when I got home. I thought she'd misunderstood the name. I called Mrs. Ellis after she went to bed and asked her to tell me exactly what she'd seen."

"What did Mrs. Ellis see?"

"A man standing on the landing. She thought he was waiting for me. He'd gone by the time she got back with her phone." Elena pulled her daughter a little closer. "I was coming here to talk to you when Nina called."

Across the lobby Marco was making room for the first officers through the front doors. Vincent could hear a father asking whether he'd be allowed back in for the expensive gloves he'd left in the stands.

"Nina's at the rink until the police finish," Elena said. "Sophie can stay with her in the coaches' lounge. I'll tell her where I am, and I want Marco in the hall. After that we can talk upstairs."

Vincent caught Marco's eye and waved him over.

"If you need to move her later, I'll go with you," he told Elena. "You can tell me where we're going when we get in the car."

Elena gave him a long look. "I might hold you to that."

"Can I have cocoa in the lounge?" Sophie asked.

"If Nina says it's okay."

"Can he have cocoa too?" She pointed at Vincent.

Elena gave him his first glimpse of the smile he remembered. "He used to drink it with three spoonfuls of sugar. I think he'll survive without any today."

"I was growing," Vincent said.

"Your father told you that. The rest of us knew better."

She looked startled at having said it. Vincent felt it too, the ease of the old exchange turning into something he could feel in his throat. The last time he'd heard her say *your father* in that matter-of-fact voice, Carlo had still been alive.

He waited while she took Sophie to the lounge herself. When she came back, she was carrying the little blue ribbon. Sophie had taken it off to drink her cocoa.

Upstairs, Elena chose the chair nearest the door. Vincent sat opposite her instead of behind his desk.

"I came by your father's shop after the funeral," he said. "The shutters were down. No one would tell me where you'd gone."

"Someone broke in the night after the funeral. They went through every drawer where Dad used to keep the receipts. We left before they could come back."

"You could've called me."

"I called the house. Rafael answered." She wound the ribbon once around her finger. "He said you'd asked him to deal with anyone who wanted something from you. I was scared enough to believe him."

Vincent remembered the house phone ringing constantly in those first weeks and Rafael taking it into the kitchen so he could sleep. He had been thirty-six, old enough to know that grief didn't make a man helpless. He had still been grateful for the silence.

"I didn't ask him to keep you away."

"I wish I'd heard that from you six years ago." She looked down at the ribbon. "I also could've tried your cell. I had your number."

He hadn't expected her to say that. She looked up, and for a moment he could see the effort it cost her to leave the admission there without explaining it away.

"Before my dad died, he gave me something Carlo asked him to keep," she said. "He told me to leave it alone unless somebody came looking for it. I thought we had more time."

She reached into the pocket of her coat and set a small brass key on the desk between them. A broken skate blade had been stamped into the round head. Below it was a number.

Seventeen.

"Does it open something at the old shop?" he asked.

"The shop's gone, Vincent. What your father left you is here in the rink."