picked up Eve’s bottle of water, drank. “I don’t know what to think. I was just talking about her ten minutes ago, just talking about her with Nadine.”
“You told Nadine about Tina Cobb?”
“I mentioned her. Not by name. Just the cleaning service and how I remembered—just when we were talking, I remembered—that I hadn’t canceled the service for this week.”
No wonder Nadine had given up so easily. She’d already had another line to tug. “Did you know her?”
“Not really. Oh God, I’m sorry,” she said, staring at the bottle of water in her hand. She passed it back to Eve.
“No problem. You didn’t know Tina Cobb?”
“I met her. I mean, she was in my house, cleaning my house,” she added as she rubbed her forehead. “Can I have a minute?”
“Sure.”
Samantha got up, walked around the room once, started around it again.
“Pulling it together,” Peabody murmured. “Calming herself down.”
“Yeah. She’s got spine. Makes it easier from our end.”
After the second circuit, Samantha ordered her own bottle of water, stood patiently until the machine had finished its recital and spat the selection into the slot.
She walked back, opening the bottle as she sat. After one long pull, she nodded at Eve. “Okay. I had to settle down.”
“You need more time, it’s not a problem.”
“No. She always seemed like such a little thing to me. Tina. Young and little, though I guess she wasn’t that much younger or smaller than me. I always wondered how she handled all that heavy cleaning. Usually, I’d hole up in my office when she was there, or schedule outside meetings or errands.”
She stopped, cleared her throat. “I sort of come from money. Not big mountains of it, but nice comfortable hills. We always had household help. But my place here? It’s my first place all my own, and it felt weird having somebody around, even a couple times a month, picking up after me.”
She brushed her hands over her hair. “And that is completely beside the point.”
“Not completely.” Peabody nudged the bottle of water toward Samantha because it seemed she’d forgotten it was there. “It gives us an idea of the dynamics between you.”
“We didn’t have much of one.” She drank again. “I just stayed out of her way. She was very pleasant, very efficient. We might have a brief conversation, but both of us would usually just get to work. Is it because she was in my house? Is she dead because she was in my house?”
“We’re looking into that,” Eve said. “You told us in your earlier statement that the cleaning service had your access and security codes.”
“Yes. They’re bonded. They have a top-level reputation. Their employees all go through intense screening. Actually, it’s a little scary and nothing I’d want to go through. But for someone like me, who can’t always be at home to let a cleaning service into the house, it was ideal. She knew how to get in,” Samantha stated. “Someone killed her because she knew how to get in.”
“I believe that’s true. Did she ever mention a friend—a boyfriend?”
“No. We didn’t talk about personal matters. We were polite and easy with each other but not personal.”
“Did she ever bring anyone with her? To help her with her work?”
“No. I have a team every three months. The company sets that up. Otherwise, it was just one maid, twice a month. I live alone, and I have what my mother says is my grandmother’s obsession with order. I don’t need more help than that, domestically.”
“You never noticed, when she came or went, if anyone dropped her off, picked her up?”
“No. I think she took the bus. Once she was late, and she apologized and said her bus got caught in a jam. You haven’t told me how she was killed. Was it like Andrea?”
“No.”
“But you still think it’s a connection. It’s too much of a coincidence not to be.”
“We’re looking carefully at the connection.”
“I always wanted to write this book. Always. I’d beg my grandparents to tell me the story, again and again. Until I could play it backward in my mind. I loved picturing how my grandparents met, seeing them sitting at her kitchen table with a pool of diamonds. And how they’d won. It was so satisfying for me to know they’d beaten the odds and won. Lived their lives as they chose to live. That’s a real victory, don’t you think, living as you choose to live?”
“Yeah.” She thought of her badge. She thought of Roarke’s empire. “It is.”