Chapter 4

I went down the service stairs two at a time with the flashlight off.

It was Cora. She had a coat over her nightgown and rain in her hair, and she'd come around the outside of the house because she'd seen my light moving through the east windows and thought someone was in the wing.

"You left the door to the library open," she said. "I waited an hour."

I put the box on the library table and we read it together by lamplight until four in the morning.

At seven, Vanessa came down to breakfast in a navy dress and told the family what had happened.

She did it beautifully. That's the thing I want on the record. She stood at the sideboard with coffee in her hand and explained, gently, that Cora had been walking the house at night, that Mrs. Ostrander had seen her on the nursery stairs on Thursday, and that a woman who authenticates documents for a living would know exactly how to fake one.

"The letters are tracings," Vanessa said. "Anyone can see it. And who benefits? She's been here three days and she's already moved into the east wing."

Two of my aunts nodded. My cousin Marcus asked whether the wedding should be postponed, and looked at me when he said it.

For one hour that morning, I believed my sister.

Not because the evidence was good. Because it was easier. Because if Vanessa was telling the truth, then I wasn't the man who had let his sister run this house for six years while he signed whatever she put in front of him.

Cora found me in the study at nine. She didn't argue. She asked one question.

"Whose handwriting is on the letter to Elise?"

"Mine," I said. "Typed."

"And who in this house had a key to your study, your mother's drawer, and the east wing?"

I didn't answer, because the answer had been living in a bedroom upstairs for a decade, telling all of us she was in Boston.

At ten past nine Becker knocked and closed the door behind him.

"I need to correct something," he said. "The main server's been down since September. That's true. But the east door camera doesn't write to the main server. It writes to a local drive in the mudroom closet, and nobody's touched that closet since the painters were here."

He set a thumb drive on my desk.

"Eleven forty-two p.m. Wednesday," he said. "The night she says she was in Boston."

I opened the file.