Chapter 1

"Get your hands off my niece."

The shout crossed the garden before the water left Otis Bell's hands.

He was eleven, barefoot on wet gravel, in a flour-sack shirt with one frayed hem.

She was eight, in gray wool, her bare feet in the stone fountain basin.

Above them, the house rose in cold fog and old money.

The woman on the path wore charcoal silk and a ring of keys at her waist.

Her name was Margot Halloway, and every servant on the bluff answered to her.

Otis kept pouring.

He cupped the clear water and let it run warm over the girl's small, still feet.

He had watched the house three mornings from the service gate for exactly this.

Willa Halloway didn't flinch.

She gripped the fountain rim and looked at him the way a drowning person looks at land.

"You're frightening her," Margot said. "Step away."

"He isn't," Willa whispered.

It was the first thing she had said in two years.

Margot stopped walking.

Then a small thing happened under the water.

Willa's big toe curled hard against the basin floor.

She gasped.

Otis froze with his hands in the water.

"Her foot moved," he said.

"That isn't possible," Margot said.

"Her legs aren't hurt."

"You don't know a thing about her legs."

"I know what my mother wrote down."

Margot's hand went tight around her keys.

"Who is your mother?"

Otis didn't answer that.

His fingers found the small brass key on the cord at his throat.

He had worn it every day since the funeral.

Then he said it.

"Della Bell. She was your nurse."

The garden went quiet.

The guests on the terrace, the caterers, the birds - all of it stopped.

Margot's mouth opened and nothing came out of it.

"She was paid to leave," Otis said. "She never forgot that night."

"Get off this property."

"She said Willa stopped walking the night her mother drowned in the pool."