Chapter 1
The Man in the Fog
The fog came down off the Green Mountains before dawn and settled over Briarwood like a held breath. It silvered the hedges along Halden Road, it blurred the steeple of the white church, and it wrapped itself thick around the black iron gate of Windermere House, where a man sat with his back against the stone pillar as if he had grown there overnight like a mushroom.
The cold came up through the gravel and into his bones by degrees. He folded his hands tighter and thought, absurdly, of his study: the fire laid but unlit, the whiskey untouched. In the inside pocket of the gray coat, against his ribs, the brass watch ticked β steady, patient, Eleanor's watch. When was the last time someone was kind to you and there was nothing in it for them? Five days, he told the fog. Give it five days.
He was old, or looked old. His coat was gray and too big, its hem dark with damp. A wool cap, full of holes, sat low over his forehead. His boots were split at the toes and tied with twine. Beside him on the gravel lay a tin cup, dented, empty, and a bundle wrapped in a flour sack. His beard was white and untrimmed. His hands, folded in his lap, were red with cold.
He had been there since first light. Nobody knew where he had come from. The milk truck driver saw him at half past five and slowed. He thought about stopping. He thought about the schedule, and the cold. He drove on, and told himself someone else would stop. A woman walking her spaniel crossed to the other side of the road and drew the little dog in close, and hurried past with her eyes fixed on the hedges.
The fog thinned a little, and the gate emerged β twelve feet of black iron, scrollwork curling like frozen vines, the brass plaque beside it reading WINDERMERE HOUSE in letters gone green with age.
At seven o'clock the gate bell rang from inside, and the great gate swung inward on silent hinges, and a black SUV rolled out toward the service road. It stopped. The rear window came down, and Cole Danner leaned out.
Danner was forty-four, broad through the shoulders, with a shaved head and a scar that split his left eyebrow. He had run estate security at Windermere for eleven years, and he regarded the world the way a dog regards a fence: everything on one side belonged, everything on the other side did not.
"You," Danner said. "Up. Off."
The old man looked up slowly, as if surfacing from deep water. "Morning," he said. His voice was rough, unused. "Cold one."
"I said off. This is private property. You can't sit here."
"I'm on the road's edge, friend. Public edge." The old man gestured with one red hand at the gravel shoulder. "Not blocking your gate."
Danner's jaw worked. He got out of the SUV. He was a head taller than the seated man and twice as wide, and he used it. "Listen, grandfather. The people in that house don't like surprises on their doorstep. There's a shelter in town, St. Bridget's, three miles that way." He jerked his thumb east. "Walk."
The old man studied him for a long moment. Then, with visible effort, he pushed himself upright, gathered his flour-sack bundle, picked up the tin cup, and began to walk east into the fog, his split boots whispering on the gravel. Danner watched until the gray coat dissolved into the white, then got back in the SUV and drove on.
He walked east until the engine sound died, then doubled back through the birch stand and waited out the morning out of sight, and came back to the pillar when the rain started.
From an upstairs window of Windermere House, June Calloway watched the whole thing with a dust cloth in her hand and a strange tightness in her throat. She had been polishing the landing banister when the SUV stopped, and she had seen the old man rise like something surfacing, and she had seen the set of Danner's shoulders, and she had felt β absurdly, unprofessionally β like crying. Her father sat by a window all day on Mill Street; she knew what it was to watch the world go past and not be part of it.
"Who was that?" she asked the empty landing. Nobody answered. The house was vast and ticked like a clock.
She finished the banister. She did the picture frames in the long gallery. She beat the rugs in the morning room until her arms ached. But all morning, through the tall windows, she kept glancing toward the gate, and every time she half expected to see the gray coat still sitting there, and every time the fog had only the iron scrollwork to show her.
At noon she carried the staff lunch tray down to the kitchen, and Nadia the cook took one look at her face and said, "You've seen a ghost, little one."
"There was a man at the gate. Old. Danner sent him off."
Nadia snorted and slid a plate of cold chicken across the counter. "Danner would send off his own mother if she stood in the wrong place. Eat, little one. The world's hard enough on an empty stomach."
June ate. The chicken was good. The tightness in her throat did not go away.
That afternoon it rained β thin, cold, slanting rain that turned the gravel to soup. June was sent to close the shutters on the garden side, and from the terrace doors she looked down the long drive toward the gate, and there, through the rain, she saw a gray shape sitting once more against the stone pillar, the tin cup set out on the gravel before him like an offering.
He had come back.
June stood with her hand on the wet shutter and watched the rain darken his coat, and she did not know why her eyes stung. Something in her chest made a small, decisive sound, like a latch lifting.
Chapter 2
The Girl with the Sketchbook