Chapter 3

The fuse box is in the old butler's pantry, past the nursery, and I know the route in the dark.

I got the breakers up. The hall lights came on one bank at a time, and in the sudden yellow I saw the nursery door sitting in its frame with a new brass lock on it, shiny, three weeks old at most.

That door had stood open my whole childhood. My mother kept the crib in there. Vanessa kept nothing in there and said so whenever anyone asked.

I tried the handle. Locked.

So I did what any man does when a door won't open. I looked at the wall beside it.

The wardrobe was wrong. It's a big Victorian piece, mahogany, six feet wide, and it had stood against the north wall since I was a boy. Now it sat two feet to the left, jammed up against the corner where the wall turns.

I put my shoulder to it. It slid on the boards with a groan.

Behind it, where there should have been lath and plaster, was a seam. A narrow door, painted the same cream as the wall, with a brass hook latch and no handle on my side.

I got it open with my pocketknife.

The room inside was maybe eight feet by ten. A bed with a gray blanket. A kettle on a hot plate. A lamp on a crate, still warm, the way a lamp is when someone turned it off an hour ago and the bulb hasn't finished cooling.

Vanessa's perfume. I know it because she's worn it since she was twenty, and because it was in the air so thick I could taste it.

On a hook by the door hung a key on a leather loop. I tried it in the nursery lock. It turned.

There was a shoebox under the bed, and inside the shoebox, tied with ribbon, a stack of paper.

My mother's handwriting. The slant of it, the way she crossed her sevens. Letters dated after she died.

Under the letters: a will. Not the will I'd read at the lawyer's office in Poughkeepsie. A different one, leaving Wrenfield Hall and everything in it to Vanessa Wren outright, signed with a signature that made my stomach turn over.

Under the will: a copy of an insurance schedule. Nineteen pieces of jewelry, valued at one point three million dollars, all of them listed as still owned.

Under that, one page, typed. A letter to Elise Marchand, dated the week before our engagement ended. It said I'd met someone else and wished her well.

I took out my phone and photographed every page, hands shaking so badly I had to do two of them twice.

Then I heard it. Downstairs, at the east door, a key turning in a lock.

I was holding the only other copy of that key in my fist.