The rain had not stopped for three days, and the Pearl District's cobblestones glistened beneath the amber wash of antique streetlamps. Sasha Mireille stood outside the wrought-iron gate of the Cordova Building, watching the uniformed officer on the second-floor landing adjust his latex gloves for the third time. He was young, maybe twenty-five, and his hands would not stop trembling.
"Sasha."
She turned. The voice belonged to Detective Jonas Quill, his trench coat soaked through, the brim of his fedora channeling water onto the toe of each polished shoe. He had the look of a man who had been on duty since dawn and would remain so until well past midnight. He carried a paper evidence bag in one hand and a thermos in the other.
"You got here fast," he said.
"I was in the neighborhood." The lie came easily, the way they always did with Quill. He was not fooled, but he had the decency not to press.
They climbed the marble stairs together, their footsteps echoing off wainscoting that had probably been installed when the building was new, when the Pearl District was still home to textile merchants and ship chandlers rather than glass artists and trust fund sculptors. A photographer from the Portland Press Herald waited at the second-floor landing, his camera already clicking. Quill raised a hand and the man retreated a step, satisfied for the moment with the shot he had.
The door to apartment 4B stood ajar. Yellow tape crossed the threshold at waist height, sagging in the middle where someone had brushed past it too hastily. Sasha ducked beneath the tape and stopped.
The apartment had been torn apart with surgical precision. Every drawer in the mahogany escritoire had been pulled, emptied, and methodically replaced at a slight angle. The cushions of the Chippendale sofa lay scattered, their horsehair innards visible through pale linen tears. A glass display case, the kind a collector might use to exhibit a particularly fine specimen, had been lifted from its pedestal and set against the far wall. Its shelves were empty.
And there, in the center of the room, beside an overturned Sheraton side table, lay Philip Ordway.
He was on his back, his reading glasses still perched on his nose, one arm flung outward as though gesturing toward the window. The other hand clutched a folded piece of paper, which a CSU tech was already photographing in place. His skull had been crushed. A crystal decanter rested three feet from his outstretched fingers, its stopper still in place, its base dark with something that was not wine. The geometric cuts in the leaded glass caught the overhead light and threw fractured rainbows across the ceiling, across the body, across the polished hardwood floor.
"Decanter," Quill confirmed. "Lalique, if I'm any judge. Worth a small fortune."
"I thought he sold those years ago," Sasha murmured.
"Some he kept." Quill took a slow sip from his thermos. "The family will want to know. They've been calling the precinct since six."
Sasha did not move closer. She had learned, in the years since the courtroom and the verdict that had ended one career and begun another, that the first five minutes in any room determined whether you would ever see it clearly again. The trick was to let the scene speak before you spoke to it.
She spoke, instead, to the apartment.
The windows were tall, original to the building, their leaded panes fogged with age and condensation. A view of the working waterfront stretched beyond them: the masts of the schooner fleet, the yellow cranes of the container terminal, the slate ribbon of Casco Bay beyond. Philip Ordway had paid a premium for this view, or his father had. The Cordova did not come cheap.
The kitchen was untouched. She noted this with care: in a robbery, the kitchen was always a secondary target, the place where a hurried thief might grab a wallet or a ring left on the counter. This kitchen had not been touched. The copper pots hung in their exact alignment. The French press on the counter held the dregs of a single cup. The toaster was unplugged.
The bedroom was where the precision had turned violent. Mattress stripped to its ticking. Closet emptied onto the floor, suits arranged by color as though the intruder had been searching for something specific and had grown frustrated. A wall safe behind a Currier and Ives lithograph stood open and empty. The combination dial had not been spun; it had been left in the unlocked position. Someone had known the combination.
"Talk to me about the neighbors," Sasha said.
Quill consulted a small leather notebook. "Building has twelve units. Four occupied. Mrs. Calvert in 2A, seventy-eight, hard of hearing. The Hendricks boy in 3B, away at college. A Dr. Anand in 4A, but she's been in Bangalore for the past month on a fellowship. And the unit above, 5B, leased to a sculptor named Lila Ordway."
Sasha turned her head. "Ordway."
"The daughter." Quill flipped a page. "Middle child. Works at the family gallery, pursuing an MFA at Maine College of Art. She was out last night, according to the doorman. Didn't get back until past one. She says she heard nothing."
"She heard nothing," Sasha repeated.
"Through two floors and a closed door, with a man being beaten to death in her father's apartment."
"With a crystal decanter," Sasha said. "That's a quiet kill, Jonas. A hammer, a bat, even a heavy statue, those make noise. A decanter, swung once, twice, three times. It wouldn't carry."
Quill regarded her with the expression he always wore when she was thinking out loud. He had been a patrolman when she was still writing briefs for the district attorney's office. He had watched her rise, watched her fall, watched her reinvent herself as a private investigator working the cases the Portland PD preferred not to acknowledge. He respected her. He did not always agree with her.
"There's the cleaning woman," Quill offered. "Comes Tuesdays and Fridays. Tomorrow's Friday. She found him at nine this morning when she let herself in."
"Name?"
"Maria Estes. Forty-three. Brazilian. Ten years with the Ordway family. Clean record."
"And?"
"And she ran. Left the door open, ran down the stairs, flagged a patrol car on Fore Street. She's at the precinct now with a blanket around her shoulders, asking for a priest."
Sasha moved back into the parlor. The CSU tech had finished with the paper in Philip Ordway's hand and was sliding it into an evidence sleeve. She caught a glimpse of the document before it disappeared: a single page, dense typescript, heavily edited in pencil. A letter, perhaps, or the first draft of one. She filed the observation and moved on.
"You haven't touched the body," she observed.
"ME's on the stairs. I wanted you to see it first."
She nodded her thanks. Quill was not sentimental, but he had a ritual: when a victim had once been powerful, once been known, once had moved in circles where the wrong word could end a career, he gave the scene to whoever had known the victim best. Sasha had defended Philip Ordway once, eight years ago, on a fraud charge that had never gone to trial. He had been a client for six months. She had not spoken to him since.
But she had spoken about him.
The gallery. The collection. The family with its three children and its patriarch who had outlived his wife and would not, Sasha suspected, outlive his grief. She had read about his recent hospitalizations, his slow retreat from the gallery's day-to-day operations. She had not attended the seventieth birthday party. She had been invited.
"How did you get the call?" Sasha asked.
"Your name was on his fridge."
She blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"Magnet. 'Mireille Investigations, Confidential.' He'd had it for years, apparently. Told his housekeeper, told his children, told half the Pearl District that if anything ever happened, they were to call you before the police."
The admission settled over her like a change in barometric pressure. She looked at the body, at the outstretched arm, at the spectacles still balanced on the bridge of a nose that had been handsome once and was now merely distinguished. Philip Ordway had kept her card. He had planned, in some quiet corner of his mind, for a contingency that had arrived at last.
"Anything else?"
"The cleaning woman says he had a visitor Tuesday night. A man she didn't recognize. Tall. She thought he limped."
"A limping man," Sasha said.
"Distinctive. I put BOLO out this morning."
"Footage from the building?"
"Doorman's camera was offline for maintenance. The camera in the lobby caught a man in a raincoat entering at seven twelve Tuesday evening. Couldn't get a face."
"Exiting?"
"No exit on camera. Either he left through the service door or the camera missed him."
Sasha circled the room once more, slowly, the way one might walk a labyrinth. She stopped at the decanter. Its label was still legible, a single word etched in cursive: Courage . She thought of the man who had collected it, the man who had kept it on a shelf with others of its kind, and she thought of the single, clean swing that would have ended his life. A coward would have used a gun. A coward would have used a knife.
This had been an intimate killing. A deliberate one.
"Anything missing?" she asked.
"That's the thing," Quill said. "Nothing. The safe is empty, but it was supposed to be empty. The cash is gone, but the cash was supposed to be moved to a trust account yesterday. The jewelry is gone, but it was supposed to be sent to the cleaners. It's a ransacking that doesn't add up. Someone went through the motions."
"Misdirection."
"That's my read."
"Misdirection from what?"
Quill shook his head. "That's yours."
Sasha straightened. The photographer was still at the threshold, his camera now pointed at the floor. The CSU tech was bagging the decanter. The rain had intensified, drumming against the tall windows in sheets that caught the light and turned the apartment into a vessel of small, bright sounds.
"I want to see Lila Ordway," Sasha said.
"She's downstairs. Refused to come up."
"Then I'll go to her."
Quill nodded. He handed her the thermos. She took a sip. The coffee was black and bitter and exactly what she needed.
"One more thing," Quill said.
She waited.
"The letter in his hand. The CSU read the first line. It's addressed to her. To Lila."
Sasha looked at the body one last time. The fractured light from the decanter had shifted as the clouds moved, and now the rainbows lay across Philip Ordway's chest, across the place where his heart had been. She thought of the gallery she had visited eight years ago, the long gallery of glass, the pieces that caught the light and threw it back transformed. She thought of the man who had built it, who had walked through it every morning, who had called it his cathedral.
She thought of the daughter, somewhere below, waiting.
She took the stairs down.
The stairwell smelled of old stone and newer paint, the kind of renovation that tried to hide decades of damp. Sasha took the steps quickly, her shoes finding the worn centers where a thousand other shoes had passed, and by the third landing she could hear a television murmuring somewhere below. Not the news, not yet. A cooking show. Someone was watching a chef sear scallops while Philip Ordway lay in pieces three floors above.
The lobby of the Ordway building was the sort of place that pretended not to be a lobby. No reception desk, no doorman, just a long room paneled in walnut and lit by brass sconces shaped like open hands. The air carried the ghost of furniture polish and something floral, perhaps from the arrangement that sat on a low table near the elevator: white lilies, fresh, their stems wrapped in green florist paper. The arrangement looked like it had been delivered that morning. It looked like a last gift, timed wrong.
Lila Ordway sat on a bench against the far wall, her legs crossed at the ankle, a paper cup of something steaming balanced on her knee. She was watching the television mounted in the alcove behind the concierge's empty station, where a woman in a red apron was whisking something pale and gold. She did not look up when Sasha approached, but her hand tightened on the cup, the paper dimpling under her fingers.
"Ms. Ordway."
"He always said I should learn to make a proper beurre blanc." Her voice was light, conversational, as if she were discussing a recipe she had never intended to try. "He never did, himself. Burned water, burned everything. He had people for that."
Sasha sat beside her, leaving a careful distance. The bench was leather, cold through her slacks. The television chef laughed at something her own joke, the sound thin and bright in the hush of the lobby. From somewhere above, the elevator chimed. No one came out.
"I'm Sasha Mireille. Your father hired me."
"I know who you are." Lila still hadn't turned. "You're the one who got the Mallory boy off. The papers said you were a witch."
"That's not quite how I'd put it."
"It's how the papers put it." Now she turned, and Sasha got her first real look at the middle Ordway child. The resemblance to her father was in the bones, the wide-set eyes and the strong jaw, but where Philip Ordway had been soft with wealth and time, Lila had the leanness of someone who worked with her hands. There was clay under one fingernail, a faint grayish crescent at the cuticle. She had probably been in the studio when the call came. She had probably still smelled of clay.
"I'm sorry about your loss," Sasha said.
"You don't know him. You knew of him. He collected you." Lila took a sip from her cup. It smelled of chamomile. "He collected glass and he collected people and he collected problems he thought he could arrange on a shelf."
"Did he collect problems for me?"
"He hired you. That means he had a problem he thought you could arrange." A pause. The cooking show had cut to a commercial, a woman selling something expensive for hair. "He thought you could find his brother."
Sasha went still.
"His brother," she said carefully.
"Rollo." Lila said the name like it tasted of something she had bitten into too often. "Roland Dempsey. The black sheep. The one father stopped speaking of in ninety-one and started speaking of again last spring. He wanted him found."
"Found where?"
"He didn't say. He said he had been careless." Lila set her cup down on the bench between them. The liquid trembled. "He said there were things he had done that he wanted to make right before he died."
"He knew he was dying?"
"He knew he was old. He knew he was a careful man with an uncareful past." She picked up the cup again, then put it down. "I told him most people didn't have the luxury of a past they could arrange on a shelf. He laughed. He said that was precisely why he was hiring you."
Sasha studied her. The chamomile had gone cold. The paper cup was beginning to sag.
"You didn't want him found," Sasha said.
"I wanted him found." Lila's voice sharpened, the lightness gone. "I wanted to know what father did in sixty-eight that he had to apologize for in two thousand six. I wanted to know why mother cried in the kitchen some nights and pretended it was the onions."
"And your brother?"
"Garrett doesn't know anything. Garrett has never known anything that wasn't handed to him on a plate." She said it without malice, which was somehow worse. "Father gave him the building. Father gave him the gallery. Father gave him the good suits. Garrett thinks it's because Garrett earned it."
"And you?"
Lila looked at her then, really, and for the first time Sasha saw something under the wryness. Not grief, not yet. Something older, something with patience.
"I got the studio and the allowance and the invitation to every holiday if I behaved," Lila said. "I behaved."
She didn't say what she thought of the arrangement. She didn't need to.
"You said he was careless in the past," Sasha said. "Can you tell me what he told you?"
"He told me that in sixty-eight, when he and Rollo were young and stupid, they had made something together. A piece. Something valuable. Something that should have gone into the family archive but went into the world instead." She paused. "He told me there were people who had been hurt by it. He told me he had been trying to find them. He told me he had been trying to find Rollo to tell him he was sorry."
"And now he's dead."
"And now he's dead." Lila picked up the cup again, found it empty, set it down with a small, precise motion. "And the police think I'm a person of interest, which is funny because I'm the only person in this family who actually liked him."
"I'm not police."
"No. You're the witch." The word came out almost fond. "He thought you could find Rollo. Now you're going to try to find Rollo and instead you're going to find out who killed him."
"I am."
"Good." Lila stood. She was taller than Sasha had expected, long-limbed, the kind of build that made sense in front of an armature. "I want you to find my uncle. I want to know what happened. I want to know why my mother spent forty years pretending onions made her cry."
"And the piece? The one they made together?"
Lila looked toward the elevator. The doors were still closed. Above them, the man who had made that piece was lying on a rug that had cost more than most apartments, surrounded by glass that caught the light.
"Glass," she said. "They made glass. Something with refracted light. Father had a name for it but he wouldn't tell me. He said I'd know it when I saw it."
She turned toward the door.
"I'm going to the studio," she said. "I work better with my hands."
"I'll need to speak with you again."
"You know where to find me." She was already at the door, already pushing through it into the rain. "Find my uncle first. Then we'll talk about the glass."
The door closed behind her. The lobby was quiet. The cooking show had come back; the chef was plating something elaborate, a tower of pale and green.
Sasha sat for a moment in the hush. The lily arrangement on the low table caught the light from the brass sconces, each white petal edged in shadow. She thought of the apartment above, the broken decanter, the letter in the dead man's hand. She thought of a brother named Roland, of a piece made in sixty-eight, of apologies owed across forty years.
She thought of the glass itself, the way it caught the light and threw it back. The way a cathedral caught a sound and held it.
She stood.
The building's manager, a thin man with a face like a folded napkin, was suddenly at her elbow. He had a key ring in his hand and a look of contained anxiety that suggested he had been waiting for the daughter to leave.
"The family would like the apartment kept private," he said. His voice was the voice of a man who had been told what to say. "Mr. Briar specifically."
"Mr. Briar is a person of interest," Sasha said. "He doesn't get to keep the apartment private."
The manager's mouth thinned. "There is a study. Off the master suite. Mr. Ordway used it for his records. The family would like that room left alone until Garrett can review it."
"The family can review it after the police review it."
"The police have already reviewed it. They took some papers. Mr. Briar supervised."
Sasha turned to look at him. "Garrett was in the apartment while the police were there?"
"He arrived shortly after. He identified the body. He has been most cooperative."
"Most cooperative," Sasha said. "I'll bet he has."
The manager handed her the key ring. "The study is the second door on the left. I am instructed to inform you that you may take one hour. No more."
"And if I take more?"
"Then I am instructed to inform the police that you are trespassing."
Sasha took the key ring. The metal was cold against her fingers, the keys heavy.
"One hour," she said. "Plenty of time."
The study was smaller than the living room and twice as quiet. The carpet here was a deep burgundy, the color of old wine, and the walls were lined with shelves that held ledgers and folios and the occasional small piece of glass set on a stand. There was a desk, mahogany, the leather top worn to a pale gold at the places where his arms had rested. There was a chair, leather, the seat indented with the shape of him.
There was a smell. Old paper, faintly of the pipe smoke he had given up decades ago, and under it something else. Something sharper, something that didn't belong. Sasha stood very still and let her eyes adjust.
The shelves were not quite even. The left side of the third shelf, she saw, was a quarter inch deeper than the right. The books on that side were taller than they should have been, the spines uniform, the gilt fresh. She crossed the carpet, the wool thick and silent under her shoes.
She pulled the tallest book. It came out smoothly, too smoothly. Behind it was a panel, hinged, the wood stained to match the shelf. She pressed the edge with her thumb.
The panel swung inward on a small, almost silent hinge.
Behind it was a space the size of a shoebox. In it lay a ledger, half burned. The fire had caught the top right corner, had eaten through perhaps thirty pages, and then had stopped, as if the ledger itself had decided it had enough to say. The remaining pages were intact but blackened at the edges, the paper warped, the ink blurred where the heat had kissed it.
Sasha lifted it carefully. The leather cover was soft with age, cracked at the spine, the gilt lettering long gone. Inside, the handwriting was Philip's, she could tell. She had seen his signature on the contract. It was the same hand, the same elegant leftward slant.
The first readable line was a date. March 15, 1968.
The line below was a name. Roland Dempsey.
The line below that was a location. Providence, Rhode Island.
She turned the page, carefully, the paper crackling under her fingers. The next page was half gone. She could read fragments. A price, perhaps. A weight. A word that might have been "furnace" or "funeral." She turned again.
The third readable page was a list. Dates, down the left column. Initials down the right. Most were R.D. Some were P.O. Some were neither. She looked for the years. The dates ran from March of sixty-eight through October of seventy-two. After that, the pages were burned away.
She closed the ledger. She held it for a moment, feeling the weight of it, the warmth still in the leather from somewhere. The smell of smoke was stronger here, more recent. He had been here. He had tried to burn this.
He had been interrupted.
She put the ledger into her bag, gently, wrapped in the scarf she kept there for emergencies. She closed the panel. She put the tall book back. She looked at the desk. The leather top was clear except for a small glass paperweight, a cube of clear glass with a tiny air bubble at its heart, and a pen set in a silver holder. She did not touch the paperweight.
She left the study, locked the door, returned the key ring to the manager with a nod that was not a thank-you. She took the elevator up to the third floor, where the CSU had finished, where the body had been taken, where the rug was still dark with something she did not look at closely.
Quill was waiting for her in the hall.
"You were down there a while," he said.
"I found something."
He looked at her bag. She didn't open it.
"In the study," she said. "Behind a false panel. A ledger. Half burned."
"Burned by whom?"
"By him, I think. Or for him. The panel was closed. The fire had been put out. He didn't have time."
"To do what?"
"To finish it. To finish burning it. To finish the story." She paused. "He was interrupted."
Quill's face did something complicated.
"Interrupted by whom?"
"I don't know yet. But I think he knew who was coming. I think he was trying to protect someone."
"His daughter?"
"His brother." She looked down at her bag. "His brother, Roland Dempsey. The family calls him Rollo."
Quill frowned. "Dempsey. The name's familiar."
"It should be. He was an Ordway once. He stopped being one in seventy-two."
"What happened in seventy-two?"
"The ledger stops there." She looked toward the apartment, toward the place where the man had lain. "The police record probably doesn't say either. But I think I know who does."
"Who?"
"Garrett Briar. The dutiful son. The one who was there when the police arrived." She paused. "The one who got to the apartment before anyone else could have."
Quill was quiet for a long moment.
"You think the son did it," he said.
"I think the son had the opportunity and the patience and the kind of loyalty that gets mistaken for love." She looked down the hall toward the elevator. "And I think the man on the rug knew, and tried to burn the evidence before it burned him."
"And the daughter?"
"Lila was in her studio. She has clay under her nails. She left the building before the police did, and she didn't come back." She looked at him. "Either she's innocent or she's the best liar in New England."
"And the brother?"
"The brother is the question. Where is he? Why was Philip looking for him? What did they make together in sixty-eight that got someone killed in two thousand six?" She touched her bag, where the half-burned ledger lay wrapped in wool. "I'm going to find out."
Quill looked at her. The hallway was quiet. The rain had stopped. Somewhere in the building, a clock chimed the quarter hour.
"I'm going with you," he said.
"You don't have to."
"I want to."
She looked at him for a long moment.
"All right," she said.
They took the elevator down to the lobby, past the lily arrangement and the empty concierge's station, and into the street, where the late afternoon light lay across the wet pavement like a sheet of hammered gold. Sasha flagged a cab. She gave the driver an address in Providence, Rhode Island, and a name to look up when they got there.
The cab pulled into traffic. The city moved past them, glass and steel and stone, catching the light and throwing it back. Sasha thought of the piece in sixty-eight, of the two brothers at the furnace, of the glass they had made that had caught something in its heart and held it.
She thought of the man on the rug, trying to burn a story before it burned him.
She thought of the daughter in the studio, hands in clay, asking questions.
She opened her bag and looked at the half-burned ledger. The ink blurred. The pages warped. Somewhere in the middle, a name she did not yet know waited.
She closed the bag.
The cab moved south, toward the tunnel, toward the long road to Providence.
The address in Providence was a brick walk-up off Benefit Street, the kind of building that had been three things in a row and was now trying to be a fourth. A converted carriage house behind it had been made into live work studios, and a card in the window, sun-bleached almost beyond reading, said L. ORDWAY in a hand that looked like it had been carved more than written.
Sasha paid the cab. She and Quill stood for a moment on the sidewalk, looking up at the studio. The brick was old. The mortar had been repointed in places. A window box on the second story held something dry and silver, sage or lamb's ear, that moved when the wind moved and was otherwise still.
"She's expecting us," Sasha said.
Quill looked at her.
"I called from the cab."
He nodded. He did not ask how she had gotten the number. He had stopped asking, somewhere between Manhattan and the tunnel, how she got most of what she got.
They went through a gate, across a courtyard where someone had laid flagstones in a pattern that almost made sense, and up a flight of exterior stairs to a steel door with a deadbolt. Sasha knocked. The sound went into the building and did not come back.
Lila Ordway opened the door.
She was taller than Sasha had expected. She had her father's jaw and her mother's eyes, or what Sasha imagined her mother's eyes to have been, given the photograph on the mantel at the house in the Berkshires, the one she had not been allowed to see but had seen anyway, in the half-second the door had been open. Her hands were clay to the wrists. She wore a long apron over paint-stained jeans, and her feet were bare, and she looked at Sasha the way her father had looked at her, with the quick, measuring intelligence of someone who had been taught to assess before being gracious.
"You found me," Lila Ordway said.
"You weren't hiding."
"I wasn't trying to be found."
She stepped back. The studio opened behind her, all raw brick and wide windows, a long worktable, a kick wheel in the corner, a half-finished armature in chicken wire that suggested a figure or a torso or a memory of one. The light was good. The light was the kind of light that made you want to work, or to stay, or to confess.
Sasha introduced herself. Introduced Quill. Lila Ordway shook hands with both of them, briefly, with the correct pressure, and then she went to a kettle that was already warm on a hotplate and poured three cups of tea that smelled of something smoky and far away.
"Sit," she said. "If you can find a place."
Quill found a stool. Sasha took a chair that had been recovered in some kind of striped ticking. Lila Ordway leaned against the worktable and held her cup in both hands and waited.
"Your father is dead, Miss Ordway," Sasha said. "I am sorry."
Lila Ordway looked into her tea.
"I know," she said. "I saw it on the news, before anyone called me. That was considerate of them. The news, I mean. Not my family."
"When did you last speak to him?"
"Three years." She said it without hesitation. "Maybe three and a half. I stopped counting exactly because I didn't want to be able to."
"Why?"
Lila Ordway looked up. Her eyes were the color of the tea, dark and a little bitter.
"Because he was impossible," she said. "Because he had been impossible for longer than I had been alive, and I had finally run out of ways to make it work. Because every time I went back, I left feeling like I had been peeled."
"Did he support your work?"
"He pretended to." She set the cup on the table. "He pretended he thought it was important. He told my brother I was wasting my time, but he told me I was an artist, and he bought me a wheel for my birthday, and the wheel was the wrong wheel, the kind he would have wanted, not the kind I needed, and I used it anyway because it was a gift, and I hated it, and I hated him a little, and then I hated myself for hating him because he was my father and he was old and he was alone and he was the only father I was ever going to have."
She stopped. She breathed. She picked the cup up again.
"I didn't come to the house," she said. "I should have. I knew something was wrong. He sounded wrong on the phone the last time, the time three years ago. He sounded like he was waiting for something. I didn't ask what."
"Did he ever talk about the piece in sixty-eight?"
Lila Ordway looked at her.
"The glass," Sasha said. "The two brothers."
"He talked about the glass the way other people talk about God," Lila Ordway said. "With reverence and a little bit of fear. He said it was the best thing he ever owned. He said he would never sell it. He said it had a soul."
"Did he say whose soul?"
"No." She paused. "He said once, just once, that he had earned it. He didn't say how. I didn't ask. I was twenty-two and I thought the past was something other people had."
"Do you know what happened to the piece?"
"It's in the vault at the house. It has been since my mother died. He sealed the vault the week of the funeral and he never opened it again. He said he would open it when one of us was ready to take it. None of us ever was."
Sasha was quiet for a beat.
"What about the man who was found in the house last night?" she said.
Lila Ordway looked at her.
"The cleaner," Sasha said. "Marcus Whitfield. Did you know him?"
"No."
"Did your father?"
"I don't know." She set the cup down. "My father knew a lot of people. He knew the people who knew the people. He collected people the way he collected glass. He kept them in cases. He took them out when he wanted to admire them."
"Was he afraid of any of them?"
"He was afraid of all of them," Lila Ordway said. "He was afraid of being seen. He was afraid of being known. He was afraid of the thing in the vault, and of the man who made it, and of the man who bought it, and of the brother who sold it. He was afraid that someone would come back for it. He talked about it the way you talk about a storm you've survived. You keep watching the sky."
"Did he ever mention the name Briar?"
Lila Ordway went very still.
"Yes," she said.
"When?"
"A long time ago. When I was a girl. He and my mother had an argument about it. I was supposed to be in bed. I was at the top of the stairs. He said the name and she said a name back and then he said, 'He made his choice.' And then it was quiet, and then she cried, and then it was morning."
"What was the other name?"
"I don't remember," Lila Ordway said. "I have tried. It is gone. Like a word in a dream. You know it was there. You can't get it back."
Sasha looked at her. She thought of the half-burned ledger in her bag, of the name she had not yet read, of the brother who had walked away and the brother who had not, of the man on the rug who had tried to burn a story that was older than he was.
"Miss Ordway," Sasha said, "I think your father was killed because of that piece. I think someone came back for it. I think the man in the house was sent to find it, or to destroy it, or to make sure it never surfaced. I think the piece in sixty-eight is not just a piece. I think it is a record. I think it was made to hold something, and I think your father spent fifty years trying to keep it from being opened."
Lila Ordway looked at her for a long moment. The light in the studio shifted. A cloud moved. The figure in the armature threw a shadow on the brick that looked, for a second, like a man with his hands up.
"My father was a hermit," Lila Ordway said, "for the last fifteen years of his life. He saw no one. He answered no mail. He let the gallery go. He let the garden go. He let the family go, one by one, the way you let a fire go out when you don't want to watch it die. He sat in that house and he waited. I always thought he was waiting for death. Now I think he was waiting for someone to come and finish it."
She looked at Sasha.
"Are you going to open it?" she said.
"I think it has to be opened," Sasha said.
"Not by you."
"No," Sasha said. "By you. If you want to."
Lila Ordway looked at the figure in the armature. She looked at the tea in her cup. She looked at the window, where the light had come back and was lying on the floor like a sheet of hammered gold.
"I have to think about it," she said.
"Take your time," Sasha said. "But not too much. There are people who are already moving."
"Who?"
"I don't know yet. I will."
Lila Ordway set her cup on the table.
"The vault is sealed with a key and a code," she said. "The key is in a safe deposit box at a bank in Pittsfield. The code is something my father made me memorize when I was twelve and then told me to forget. I have not forgotten it. I have been carrying it for twenty years."
She looked at Sasha.
"You can have the key by tomorrow," she said. "You can have the code when I decide I trust you."
Sasha looked at her.
"I understand," she said.
"I don't think you do," Lila Ordway said. "But that's all right. I didn't understand my father for fifty years. I'm not going to understand you in an afternoon."
She stood. She walked to the window. She stood with her back to them, looking out at the courtyard, at the flagstones, at the city.
"Go," she said. "I have work to do. I have a piece to finish before I can think about anything else. I have to put my hands in the clay. That is the only way I know how to decide anything."
Sasha stood. Quill stood. They left their cups on the table. They walked to the door.
"Miss Mireille," Lila Ordway said, without turning.
"Yes."
"The man in the house. The cleaner. Did he suffer?"
Sasha stopped. She thought of the rug. The smell. The neat folds.
"I don't think so," she said. "I think it was quick."
"Good," Lila Ordway said. "That is something."
She did not turn. Sasha and Quill went down the stairs, across the courtyard, out to the street. The light was going. The city was turning on its lamps.
Sasha flagged a cab. She gave the driver the name of a hotel. She got in. Quill got in beside her. The cab pulled into traffic.
Sasha opened her bag. She took out the ledger. She opened it to the page she had been avoiding, the one with the name she had not yet read.
The ink blurred. The paper warped. But the name was there, in a hand she did not recognize, written in a date she had already marked.
It was the name of the brother who had walked away.
It was the name of the man who had come back.
Sasha looked at Quill.
"I know who did it," she said.
Quill looked at her.
"Who?"
She told him.
The cab moved through the city. The lamps came on, one by one, down the long street. The city kept its secrets, but fewer of them, now, than it had that morning.
Sasha closed the ledger. She put it back in the bag. She leaned her head against the glass and watched the city pass, glass and steel and stone, catching the light and throwing it back.
Somewhere ahead of her, in a vault in the Berkshires, a piece of glass sat in the dark, holding a story in its heart.