Chapter 4

I found Nate on the side steps with a whiskey and his phone face-down on his knee.

"Who is the gardener?" I said.

He looked up. "Rose?"

"So she has a name."

"Of course she has a name." He frowned. "She's worked here forever. She came with the place."

"Came with it how?"

"I don't know, Dara. She does the roses. She's been doing the roses since I was a kid." He drank. "Why are you doing this tonight?"

"Because your sister just moved the signing up an hour and locked the library, and because our son walked into a party holding the hand of a woman nobody in this family will name."

Nate set the glass down on the step. He's a good man. He's a soft man. In this family those are the same thing, and he knows it, and it has made him tired in a way that has nothing to do with his age.

"Don't," he said. "Not tonight. Verity's been good to us. She gave you the bookkeeping. She pays for Oliver's school."

"She didn't give me anything. I do the work."

"Please."

That was the whole conversation. I went inside and carried the empty glasses off the terrace rail while the board talked around me about a land easement, and I smiled at all of them, and I thought about the east wing.

Here is what I decided, standing in the pantry with a tray in my hands.

The woman in the sealed wing was old staff. It happens in houses like this - a housekeeper's sister, a groundskeeper who got sick, somebody with no papers and nowhere to go. Verity was keeping her quiet because the foundation's insurance would not cover a tenant in a wing that had been closed since the nineties. That's all it was. A liability. A kindness with paperwork problems.

The Thursday tea was a kindness. The lamp in the attic was a kindness.

And the hedge - I had walked that hedge twice that evening with my phone light and run my hands along it. Yew, boxwood, yew. Not a gap, not a break. Oliver was eight and had a good imagination and probably went around the end.

I decided to let it go. I decided that in an hour I would sit in the back row with a glass of wine and watch Verity sign a folder, and then I would put my son to bed, and that would be the end of my one question.

Then I went up to say goodnight.

Oliver was under the covers with his plastic dinosaur on the pillow beside him. He wanted to tell me about the hedge.

"She took me through the gap," he said.

"Buddy, there's no gap."

"There is. You have to know where." He rolled over. "I asked her if she was the lady who lives in Europe. She said, 'What did they tell you?' I said they said you moved away and didn't want to see anybody. And she said, 'That's right. That's what they say.'"

I sat on the edge of his bed until he fell asleep.

Then I took a flashlight and went back down the lawn, and I knelt in the wet grass at the place where he said the gap was, and I pushed my hand straight into the yew.

The hedge gave.

There was a gap. Two feet wide, hidden by a limb that had grown across it and been trained there on purpose, year after year, by somebody's hands.

On the other side, a path of packed dirt ran through the weeds to the east wing's service door.

The door was standing open. Warm light lay on the gravel.

And in the doorway, somebody was watching me.