Chapter 4

By four o'clock the family had a story, and by five o'clock it was a good one.

Willa learned the shape of it in the pantry of the Church Street house, where she had been permitted to come and collect her things with an escort - a paralegal from the family attorney's office named Mr. Ashby, who stood in the doorway with his hands folded and did not once look at her face.

Mrs. Prescott had been generous, he explained. Mrs. Prescott had decided not to press charges, provided Mrs. Gadsden signed the statement and the release. The garnets were recovered. The matter was a private family sadness. But if Mrs. Gadsden preferred to make it public, the family was prepared to explain to the solicitor's office that the household had been losing small things for years, that a pawnbroker on King Street had identified her photograph, and that the only other key to the deceased's room had been in her apron.

"That isn't true," Willa said.

"That will be the account," Mr. Ashby said.

She packed two cartons. On the shelf above the pantry counter, where it had sat since 1998, was the household ledger - the delivery book Willa had kept in her own hand for twenty-six years, because Adeline Prescott had wanted to know who came and went and what left the house and when.

Willa opened it. Conservator, Atlanta, three items, September. Florist, October. Photographer, October. Rugs, October. Nothing. No entry for a gilt-framed painting leaving the house in October, because nothing had left the house in October with her signature under it, and nothing left that house without her signature.

She stood in the pantry and remembered Tuesday morning, in the hall, the appraiser's card in her hand. She had asked Mrs. Prescott about the painting over the stairs, whether it was at the conservator's, because the appraiser had asked her directly. And Cordelia had said, without stopping, "It's at the conservator's." And Willa had said, "There's no pickup in the ledger." And Cordelia's throat had gone pink above her collar, and she had walked into the library and closed the door.

Tuesday. The parure had gone missing from Adeline's room on Tuesday.

Willa was still holding the ledger when Curtis Amaker found her. He had set up in the morning room with a laptop and a folder of inventory pages, and he asked her to sit, and she sat, and he went through it slowly, because adjusters are not in a hurry.

Then he turned a page and looked up.

"Mrs. Gadsden, the collection inventory lists a Prescott landscape in a gilt frame, appraised at two hundred and forty thousand. It isn't in the house." He tapped the page. "Do you know where it is?"

Willa looked at him. Behind her, in the hall, the pale rectangle on the wallpaper was doing what rectangles do.

"It's been off the stair wall since the first week of October," she said.

In the doorway, Mr. Ashby's pen stopped moving.