Chapter 2

By ten forty the guests had gone up, the deputy had taken a statement, and the dining room smelled of cold candle smoke.

I found Cora in the library with her shoes off and her phone face-down on the arm of the chair. She wasn't crying. She was working.

"Tell me about the pin again," I said.

She held up her hands like she was framing a painting. "I spent six years cataloguing nineteenth-century jewelry before I moved to paintings. Brooches from that era have long pins and no safety catch. When a woman wears one, the pin goes through wool or silk, and the fabric pushes it. Over an evening, it bows inward. Every worn brooch in every collection I've ever handled bows inward." She dropped her hands. "That one bows out. Somebody opened it, held it, and closed it again on air."

"Or it was never worn."

"Or it was never worn," she agreed, "which is a strange thing to say about a piece your mother wore to every family Christmas."

I stood at the window with my hands in my pockets, where the wedding band was, and looked at the rain.

"Where is the case?" she asked.

My mother's sitting room is at the end of the west hall. Nobody uses it. Vanessa keeps it dusted and locked and calls it the archive. Cora waited while I found the key on the ring in my study, and neither of us said anything about the fact that I had to look for it.

The velvet case was in the second drawer, exactly where it had always been. Cora opened it under the lamp.

Two indentations in the silk. One held the brooch's shape. The other was empty, and the velvet inside it was as clean as the first.

"Sapphire earrings," I said. "She had a set."

"Do you have them?"

"They were sold. Years ago, before she died. Vanessa handled it."

Cora touched the rim of the empty groove with one finger. "Both grooves are clean, Daniel. If the earrings had been gone for years, that hollow would be dusty. It isn't. Somebody took them out recently and closed the lid."

I put my hand flat on the drawer and didn't answer.

Downstairs, Becker was locking the east doors. I asked him for the camera logs.

He shifted his weight. "The system's been down since September, Mr. Wren. Your sister arranged the service contract."

"All of it?"

"All of it," he said, and didn't meet my eyes either.

At eleven twenty the storm took the power. The house went black around us, all ninety rooms of it, and I took a flashlight down the east wing to find the fuse box.

The nursery door at the end of that hall was locked. It had never once been locked in my life.