Chapter 2

The kitchen smelled like coffee and lemon polish and the wet wool of everybody's coats.

Winnie Adair had kept Bellhaven for thirty-one years. She was at the sink with her sleeves pushed up, and she didn't turn around when I came in.

I poured a cup and pulled the second drawer for a spoon. The home-care binder was lying right there on top of the takeout menus, blue cover, agency logo, LILA ASHBY on the tab.

I flipped it open while I drank.

The last entry was January 12. A night shift, initialed, timed in and out. Every page after that was blank. Not torn out - blank. The agency's own ruled form, printed and waiting, for fourteen months of nothing.

"Winnie."

"Mm."

"Who's been coming at night?"

She dried her hands on the towel, folded it, and hung it on the oven rail. "Miss Lila had who she wanted."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the answer I have." She looked at the binder in my hand, and something moved behind her glasses and then didn't. "That book's been empty since January."

"Since January."

"Miss Lila didn't care for strangers at the end."

"Then who-"

"You should ask your sister," Winnie said. "I keep the house. I don't keep the books."

She took the towel back off the rail and started on the breakfast dishes like I'd left the room.

Upstairs, water was running. Then it stopped. I stood in the hall and listened to my bride move around in the blue room at the top of the back stairs - the room with the sloped ceiling and the single window over the lake, the room she'd slept in since the February she came to rebuild the porch and never quite left.

I didn't go up. I've thought about that a lot.

Through the front windows I could see the first cars at the gate. Aunt Corinne's Volvo. Two more behind it. People who'd driven up from Rutland and Middlebury for a four o'clock ceremony were arriving at nine in the morning, because in this family nobody wanted to miss anything.

I walked out onto the terrace for air.

Margot was down at the end of it, near the steps, phone pressed to her ear, cardigan over one arm, standing the way she stood when she was winning.

"Yes," she said. "A complaint. Financial exploitation of a vulnerable adult. Ninety-one years old. Yes, I have the statements. No, I'd rather it came from you than from us."

She turned and saw me and didn't change her voice at all.

"Monday's fine," she said. "Thank you."

She hung up and smiled at me the way she smiled at caterers.

"There's coffee," she said. "Corinne's here."

Above us, in the blue room, a window came down hard enough to rattle the frame.