Chapter 2

Loretta drove her back to town in the staff van with the windows down, because the van's air conditioning had been broken since June and nobody had gotten around to fixing it.

"Say it," Loretta said, at the Stono bridge.

"Nothing to say."

"Your apron was on the pantry door this morning," Loretta said. "Not on the hook in the laundry. I hung it on that hook myself last night at eight, after I washed the collards out of it. When I came in at five this morning, it was on the pantry door."

Willa watched the marsh go past.

"And Mrs. Prescott was in my kitchen at twenty to six," Loretta said. "In her robe. Hair not done. Standing by that pantry door like she was waiting on the water to boil."

They came up Church Street and in through the side gate. Willa crossed the hall toward the cottage at the back of the garden, and that was when she saw it - the pale rectangle on the wallpaper over the stairs, a clean shape the size and shape of a gilt frame, with the brass hook still in the wall.

The Prescott painting had hung there since before Willa was hired. It had hung there in April when they carried Adeline out. It was not hanging there now.

She stood in the hall for a long moment. Then she went to her cottage and shut the door.

The phone rang twice before two o'clock. The first call was Nadine Boykin, the museum's registrar, who apologized four times and said the acquisitions committee had frozen the bequest pending the investigation, and that she was terribly sorry, and that the announcement that evening was now in question. The second call was Curtis Amaker, the adjuster, who wanted to know whether Mrs. Gadsden would be available for a statement and whether she had an attorney.

"I don't have an attorney," Willa said.

"Then I'd get one," he said, not unkindly. "By one o'clock today there's an open claim on the Prescott collection. Once a claim opens, it doesn't close quietly."

Willa hung up. She stood in the middle of her two rooms and looked at the shoebox on the shelf above her bed - the shoebox of children's drawings she had kept for thirty years, Trip's boats and June's houses and one folded paper that June had pressed into her hand that morning at the tent, before any of it, saying, "For the shoebox, Miss Willa. Don't look yet, it's a surprise."

Willa had put it in her cardigan pocket and then, at home, on the shelf, unopened, because there had been no quiet minute to open it.

She was still standing there when someone knocked on the cottage door.

Through the glass she could see Cordelia Prescott on her step, alone, no car in the lane, holding nothing but her checkbook.