Chapter 3

The main hall at Briar Glen is forty feet long and lined with Hallorans going back to 1851.

I have walked it a thousand times. I had never once stopped in front of the 1988 portrait.

That night I stopped.

It hangs at the end, over the library door. Judge August Halloran in the center, in a grey suit, one hand on the back of a chair. His second wife, Marlene, beside him in blue. Young Verity at eighteen, in a plaid dress, chin up. And a boy of ten in a bow tie, holding a model airplane - Nate, my husband, before the divorce, before he took his mother's name and left this house the first chance he got.

There was a space between Verity and her father. A wide one. The kind of space a painter leaves when he has one more person to fit in.

Somebody had cut that person out.

Not painted over. Cut. A clean vertical slice with a mat knife, from the top edge of the canvas to the bottom, straight as a ruled line. You could see the white of the raw canvas along the seam.

I put my face close to the frame. The backing board was old brown paper, and on it, where the missing person had stood, the light had left a shadow. The curve of a shoulder. The edge of a jaw.

And at the bottom of the frame, on the little brass plaque that lists the family and the year, one name had been scraped off with the tip of a screwdriver. You could still read the ghost of the letters in the brass.

"You shouldn't stand that close," Cora said behind me.

She had a stack of napkins in her arms. Her face was doing nothing at all.

"Cora. Who was in this picture?"

"I was hired in ninety-four," she said. "She was already in this house when I came."

"Who?"

Cora looked at me for a long second. Then she looked at the library door, and at the lock on it, and went back down the hall without another word.

I heard Verity's heels before I saw her.

She came down the hall smiling, took the frame in both hands and squared it on its hook, the way you'd fix a picture in your own house. Then she stepped back and admired it.

"That canvas was damaged when we moved it from the Cape house," she said. "The movers were careless."

"The backing shows a shoulder, Verity."

"I know." She turned. Up close, her eyes were the same grey as the portrait, and there was nothing behind them at all. "Dara. You've been so good with the foundation books. Do you know what I like about you? You don't invent things."

"I'm not inventing anything."

"No." She smoothed the front of her suit. "The woman in the garden is nobody. She does the roses and she lives quietly and she is not your business." She started back down the hall, then stopped at the library door. She took a key from her pocket, put it in the lock, and turned it.

That door is never locked. Not once, in twelve years.

"I moved the signing up an hour," she said, and went.