talk about zeitgeisty subjects with which they are all familiar: the latest critically acclaimed television shows, celebrity divorces, the merits of the Whole30 diet. The wine flows, the soup arrives; the wine flows some more, and here comes the salad. They are all getting tipsy, although if you pay attention you might notice that the couple are sipping their wine much more slowly than the blonde. Occasionally, the couple’s eyes meet across the table, and then skitter quickly away.
The main course—a winter-citrus salmon dish—has just been set on the table when the meal is interrupted by the sound of a ringing telephone. The dark-haired woman scrabbles in the pocket of her jeans, fishes out her cellphone, and studies its screen with a frown. Conversation briefly stops as the woman answers the call. She mouths a word to her dinner-mates—Mom—and they nod, understanding. As she stands up from the table she gives a helpless shrug of apology, and then she steps out of the room, talking to the person on the other end of the line.
The two people remaining at the table smile awkwardly at each other. The blonde looks down at the perfectly plated dish—Should they wait?—but the man tears into the food as if he’s starving to death and so eventually the woman relaxes, too, and picks up her fork. The brunette’s salmon cools and congeals on her plate.
Meanwhile, she walks quickly through the mansion, through cold, dark rooms that feel even darker the farther she gets from the sound and activity in the dining room. She keeps chatting loudly on her phone until she is a safe distance away, and then she abruptly drops the pretense. The call was a fake, of course. There are apps for that.
The woman finds herself in the mansion’s front parlor, where disapproving dead plutocrats peer down from their portraits, then she cuts through the drawing room and into the office. The office is at the base of the round turret that anchors the center of the mansion, and so the room is circular, with curving walls of inlaid wooden bookshelves. Each shelf nook lovingly displays a singular object: a celadon urn, a porcelain cow, a globe lamp, a curlicue boudoir clock. The desk, a lake of polished mahogany, is bare except for an old-fashioned pen-and-ink set and a framed silver photo of a mother and two young children, taken some decades earlier.
The woman walks to the desk, and turns in a slow circle, studying the room. She focuses in on a painting on the wall across from the desk: an oil depicting a British hunting scene, a pack of dogs chasing a fox through the heather. She moves closer to examine it. The painting juts out from the wall by a telling hair, and the gilt of its frame has worn slightly thin in one spot. The woman pulls a pair of latex gloves out of her pocket and slips them on before grasping the frame in the same place. When she gives it a gentle tug, the painting swings away from the plaster, revealing the safe behind it.
The woman pauses, carefully listening, but the house is quiet except for the occasional peal of laughter, like a needle piercing the silence. She studies the safe. It’s the size of a television, as big as the painting that covered it, and fairly modern, with an electronic keypad. Although not too modern; nothing that’s been recently updated.
With gloved hands, the woman carefully punches in a birth date, one that she recently looked up in an online database of birth certificates: 062889. She waits, listening for the click and release of the lock. Nothing happens. She tries again, three more variations on the same date, in quick succession—061989, 280689, 198906—but still nothing happens. She presses an ear to the safe’s metal surface to listen, like a safecracker in an old-fashioned heist movie, but even if there was something to hear she wouldn’t know what to listen for. Her fingers stab at the keypad, growing frustrated. She has read enough about safes to know that she will get only five tries before the safe detects foul play and cuts off any further attempts.
She collects herself, shakes her hands, tries one more time: 892806.
The safe lets out an electronic whine of complaint.