Chapter 2

Teo Marchetti came up the north lane at ten past nine that night with a bottle of red he couldn't afford and grass still in the treads of his boots.

The Tack Room was the estate's old stable flat, two rooms over a gravel bay, and the estate owned it, which meant Ward owned it, which Delia had managed not to think about for nineteen years.

"You didn't say anything," Teo said. He set the bottle on the counter and didn't open it. "Forty people in that room and you stood there like a coat rack."

"There was nothing to say."

"There was everything to say."

Delia took the envelope out of the run of 1928 plat books on the bottom shelf. Manila, soft at the corners, marked in her own handwriting: FRAME HARDWARE - 1974. She had made it in October.

Eleven photographs. She laid them on the kitchen table in order, the way she had laid them out for herself a hundred times since.

The backing board - plywood, machine-cut, with a clean rectangle of varnish where tape had been peeled and pressed back. The picture wire - bright, galvanized, a zinc shine that had no business on a frame hung in 1928. The key: brass, four inches, its bow stamped ASHWOOD 1928 - No. 4, taped behind the board, dark with ninety years of handling at the bow and bright as a new coin at the bitting.

Teo looked at the last one for a while. "You put it back."

"I put it back exactly the way I found it. Same tape, same corner, same pressure."

"Why?"

"Because if I'd carried it out of that room, it would be a curator's story. If it stays there, it's a fact."

Her phone had rung at 3:52 that afternoon. Gwen Ambrose, bequest chair of the Ashwood Valley Historical Society, wanting to know whether the society's two-million-dollar pledge was still "appropriate to a collection under examination." By four o'clock it wasn't. Keystone Heritage's letter came Monday morning, certified, one page: policy frozen pending examination.

By then Teo had already been called into the estate office twice. He didn't say what for. He didn't have to.

At 9:40 the phone rang again. Bunny Ashcombe, seventy-eight, who had known Delia for forty years and had switched her hearing aid off during the tour because she was bored.

"Thursday," Bunny said. "He's called the trustees. He wants you off the payroll and the collection closed until the audit."

"Let him."

"Delia."

"Thursday's fine. I'll sit in the back."

A pause. Bunny's stick clicked against something - a chair leg, the brass duck head, the floor.

"How long do I have to hold my tongue?"

"Until September."

Another pause, longer. "Does he still have the number one key on his ring?"

"He never takes it off."

"Good," Delia said.

"Why is that good?"

"Because there are four keys to that room, Bunny, and only three of them are in the case."

The line stayed quiet a long time. Long enough that Delia could hear the house behind her - the hall clock, the tick of it, the same clock she had wound every Monday for nineteen years.

"Thursday," Bunny said at last. "Sit in the back. Don't say anything." And she hung up.

At 11:40 the email arrived. Subject: Occupancy - the Tack Room. Sixty days, effective immediately.

Delia turned off the kitchen light and left the eleven photographs on the table, in order, where she could find them in the dark.