“No,” I said. “Bones.”
Blood was the only mother of history. Empathy, money, morality, the law were all a shared hallucination, a dream. The death of care was waking up.
“Stop focusing on spreadsheets,” he said. “The purpose of this gallery is to see into people’s desires. The wealthy define themselves with art. Are they old money? Arrivistes? Barbarians at the gate? That’s the only accounting that matters.”
“Which of those is Dr. Lyon?”
Garrett nodded. I’d asked the right question. “He collects Kandinskyand Matisse. Respectable blue-chip works, except for his one indulgence, his emerging artist: Hiromi Kennedy. She’s our way in.”
“But she hates him.”
“Irrelevant. He started buying art to impress people, but then he caught the bug. He reveals himself with his obsession.”
“With Hiromi, or her work?”
“No difference,” Garrett replied, and went back to talking about why he didn’t keep receipts—the arbitrary values of art.
I remembered Sebastian’s impersonation of him, back when we were little. The waving hands, the precision of his consonants, a disquisition on picking locks as dramatic as Aunt Iris showing us how to defuse a bomb.
Garrett still talks too much, I’d texted Sebastian yesterday. I’d hoped my revenge against the Lindqvists would show how much Peter meant to me, and that I could do more than follow orders. But those beautiful explosions had only illuminated my betrayal. He had not replied.
“Just do what you have to,” Garrett wound up his rant. “Put the numbers wherever they go.”
“The numbers are bullshit. They don’t follow Benford’s Law.”
Garrett made a face. “Benford’s Law applies to expenses?”
“It applies to everything. It’s not Benford’s Suggestion.”
“Fine.” He waved a hand. “Fix it.”
I wondered if Garrett’s account books were my own personal Albany. Maybe the family had sent me here to cure me of math.
“Jessica. May I have a word?”
Garrett startled, and I looked up. Arabella had arrived in the dining room without a sound.
She’d surprised us like this several times. Like a Morton kid in the Great House, she’d memorized the creaky stairs and floorboards. She was bored here, underused.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Arabella said. “It’s time you saw the neighborhood.”
Out on the street, she said, “I slept through most of Delicato’s classes. What’s Benford’s Law?”
I sighed. Not every Morton was a true accountant. “The universe prefers ones to nines.”
Arabella dodged a delivery bike wobbling down the narrow sidewalk. “Go on, but keep it simple.”
“In real-world data, the first digits of numbers follow a pattern. Lots of ones, not as many twos, fewer threes. Hardly any nines.” A shudder went through me. “When Garrett makes up his expenses, he sprinkles in the same amount of each. It’s unnatural.”
“The whole thing sounds unnatural. Why are there moreones?”
“Why are there are more teenagers than ninety-year-olds?”
“Because people die along the way.” Arabella went silent as we waited to cross Prince Street. She hadn’t told me anything about the neighborhood yet, and we were leaving it behind.
She kept glancing at her phone. This wasn’t an informational tour.
“Except that’s not always true,” she said. “Not long ago, our family had more ninety-year-olds than teenagers.”