Chapter 1

The tray left my hands before I knew they had opened.

Crystal hit the limestone and burst. Champagne foamed into the wet grass; shards slid under the hem of my apron. Two hundred faces under the white auction tent swung toward the sound.

"That woman is Evelyn Harrow."

He came up the center aisle barefoot, mud to his ankles, in a torn canvas coat, holding a silver locket over his head like a man carrying a lantern through a flood. Silt crusted the chain. The clasp was bent the way it had bent the day I dropped it off the north dock when I was sixteen.

I knew that locket the way a body knows cold water.

Grant set his gavel down on the rostrum and smiled.

"Forgive the interruption, ladies and gentlemen. She's a confused servant. A sad case from the river village. We took her in out of Christian charity." He smoothed his lapels. "Security. Escort her out through the east wing."

I had been mute for two years. I had learned that the safest woman in a rich man's house is the one nobody looks at. I kept my eyes on the parquet. I drank the tea that appeared in my room every night and slept like a stone dropping into a well. Everyone in the valley believed Evelyn Harrow drowned when her runabout struck the bluffs. Grant had buried an empty casket. My sister Celia had moved into my house to grieve with him. I had curtsied to all of it in a gray dress and a white cap.

Then the river smell rose off that locket and split me open.

Gasoline. Silence where the engine had been. A shadow on the bluff, not running, just watching the boat drift toward the rocks. Grant's voice in a locked bedroom two nights later, low and patient: You don't exist anymore, Evie.

The sound that came out of my throat scraped like a door dragged across a floor.

"I am Evelyn Harrow. This is my house."

The tent went dead. A woman in the second row dropped her catalog. Warren Sills, who had drawn my father's will and taught me to fish for striped bass off that same dock, half rose from his folding chair and knocked his spectacles crooked.

The barefoot man took another step. "Ask him why her locket was in the boathouse drain."

Something crossed Grant's face - one white flash of it, quickly caged - and then his hand closed around my arm, his thumb grinding into the nerve above my wrist, his voice still gentle for the crowd. "Sweetheart. You're frightening people."

He was wrong about that. I was frightening him.

Two men in dark coats cut through the bidders. I pulled my right hand free and let the locket drop through the slit in my apron into the deep pocket against my hip. When Grant seized my wrist and turned my palm up, there was nothing in it.

"Search the tent," he said quietly. "Find the necklace."

They walked me across the terrace and into the house through the east doors, past my mother's portrait in the stair hall, past the piano room. I counted the turns the way I counted them every day with a tray in my hands.

In the east wing corridor, a man waited with a leather bag and rimless glasses. Dr. Pell. He had been coming to this house for eighteen months to adjust my tea.

"A quiet room," Grant said. "A sedative. She's been under a great deal of strain."

"Grant," I said. His name came out almost clean.

He looked at me then - really looked, the way you look at a bill you cannot pay.

"Nothing about you is real," he said softly. "And by morning you won't remember saying otherwise."

The needle slid into my arm. The last thing I saw was his face arranging itself back into grief for the cameras.