Jane, Unlimited by Kristin Cashore (1)

The house on the cliff looks like a ship disappearing into fog. The spire a mast, the trees whipping against its base, the waves of a ravening sea.

Or maybe Jane just has ships on the brain, seeing as she’s inside one that’s doing all it can to consume her attention. A wave rolls the yacht, catches her off balance, and she sits down, triumphantly landing in the general vicinity of where she aimed. Another wave propels her, in slow motion, against the yacht’s lounge window.

“I haven’t spent a lot of time in boats. I guess you get used to it,” she says.

Jane’s traveling companion, Kiran, lies on her back in the lounge’s long window seat, her eyes closed. Kiran isn’t seasick. She’s bored. She gives no indication of having heard.

“I guess my aunt Magnolia must have gotten used to it,” says Jane.

“My family makes me want to die,” Kiran says. “I hope we drown.” This yacht is named The Kiran.

Through the lounge window, Jane can see Patrick, who captains the yacht, on deck in the rain, drenched, trying to catch a cleat with a rope. He’s young, maybe early twenties, a white guy with short dark hair, a deep winter tan, and blue eyes so bright that Jane had noticed them immediately. Someone was apparently supposed to be waiting on the dock to help him but didn’t show up.

“Kiran?” says Jane. “Should we maybe help Patrick?”

“Help him with what?”

“I don’t know. Docking the boat?”

“Are you kidding?” says Kiran. “Patrick can do everything by himself.”

“Everything?”

“Patrick doesn’t need anybody,” Kiran says. “Ever.”

“Okay,” Jane says, wondering if this is an expression of Kiran’s general, equal-opportunity sarcasm, or if she’s got some specific problem with Patrick. It can be hard to tell with someone like Kiran.

Outside, Patrick catches the cleat successfully, then, his body taut, pulls on the rope, arm over arm, bringing the yacht up against the dock. It’s kind of impressive. Maybe he can do everything.

“Who is Patrick, anyway?”

“Patrick Yellan,” Kiran says. “Ravi and I grew up with him. He works for my father. So does his little sister, Ivy. So did his parents, until a couple years ago. They died in a car accident, in France. Sorry,” she adds, with a glance at Jane. “I don’t mean to remind you of travel accidents.”

“It’s okay,” Jane says automatically, filing these names and facts away with the other information she’s collected. Kiran is British American on her father’s side and British Indian on her mother’s, though her parents are divorced and her father’s now remarried. Also, she’s revoltingly wealthy. Jane’s never had a friend before who grew up with her own servants. Is Kiran my friend? thinks Jane. Acquaintance? Maybe my mentor? Not now, maybe, but in the past. Kiran, four years older than Jane, went to college in Jane’s hometown and tutored Jane in writing while she was in high school.

Ravi is Kiran’s twin brother, Jane remembers. Jane’s never met Ravi, but he visited Kiran sometimes in college. Her tutoring sessions had been different when Ravi was in town. Kiran would arrive late, her face alight, her manner less strict, less intense.

“Is Patrick in charge of transportation to and from the island?” asks Jane.

“I guess,” Kiran says. “Partly, anyway. A couple other people chip in too.”

“Do Patrick and his sister live at the house?”

“Everyone lives at the house.”

“So, is it nice to come home?” asks Jane. “Because you get to see the friends you grew up with?”

Jane is fishing, because she’s trying to figure out how these servant relationships work, when one person is so rich.

Kiran doesn’t answer right away, just stares straight ahead, her mouth tight, until Jane begins to wonder if her question was rude.

Then Kiran says, “I guess there was a time when seeing Patrick again, after a long absence, made me feel like I was coming home.”

“Oh,” says Jane. “But . . . not anymore?”

“Eh, it’s complicated,” Kiran says, with a short sigh. “Let’s not talk about it now. He could hear us.”

Patrick would have to have superpowers to hear a word of this conversation, but Jane recognizes a dismissal when she hears one. Peering through the window, she can make out the shapes of other boats, big ones, little ones, vaguely, through the downpour, docked in this tiny bay. Kiran’s father, Octavian Thrash IV, owns those boats, this bay, this island off the eastern seaboard, those waving trees, that massive house far above. “How will we get to the house?” she asks. She can see no road. “Will we ascend through the rain, like scuba divers?”

Kiran snorts, then surprises Jane by shooting her a small, approving smile. “By car,” she says, not elaborating. “I’ve missed the funny way you talk. Your clothes too.”

Jane’s gold zigzag shirt and wine-colored corduroys make her look like one of Aunt Magnolia’s sea creatures. A maroon clownfish, a coral grouper. Jane supposes she never dresses without thinking of Aunt Magnolia. “Okay,” she says. “And when’s the spring gala?”

“I don’t remember,” Kiran says. “The day after tomorrow? The day after that? It’s probably on the weekend.”

There’s a gala for every season at Octavian Thrash IV’s house on the sea. That’s the reason for Kiran’s trip. She’s come home for the spring gala.

And this time, for some inexplicable reason, she’s invited Jane along, even though, until last week, Jane hadn’t seen Kiran since Kiran’s graduation almost a year ago. Kiran had stumbled upon Jane at her job in the campus bookshop, because, like many visiting alumni, Kiran had remembered it had a public restroom. Trapped behind the information desk, Jane had seen her coming, an enormous handbag on her arm and a harassed expression on her face. With any other ghost from her past, Jane’s first instinct would have been to turn her shoulder, hide behind her dark curls, and make herself into a statue. But the sight of Kiran Thrash brought Jane instantly to the strange promise Aunt Magnolia had extracted from her before she’d gone away on that last photography expedition.

Aunt Magnolia had made Jane promise never to turn down an invitation to Kiran’s family estate.

“Hey,” Kiran had said that day, stopping at the desk. “Janie. It’s you.” She’d glanced at Jane’s arm, where tattooed jellyfish tentacles peeked out from under her shirtsleeve.

“Kiran,” said Jane, instinctively touching her arm. The tattoo was new. “Hi.”

“Do you go to school here now?”

“No,” Jane said. “I dropped out. I’m taking some time. I work here. In the bookstore,” she added, which was obvious, and not something she wanted to talk about. But she’d learned to chat, to fill the silence with false enthusiasm, and to offer her failures as conversational bait, because sometimes it enabled her to head off the very next question Kiran asked.

“How’s your aunt?”

It was like muscle memory now, this steeling herself. “She died.”

“Oh,” Kiran said, narrowing her eyes. “No wonder you dropped out.”

It was less friendly, but easier to bear up against, than the usual reaction, because it brought a flare of annoyance into Jane’s throat. “I might have dropped out anyway. I hated it. The other students were snobs and I was failing biology.”

“Professor Greenhut?” Kiran asked, ignoring the dig about snobs.

“Yeah.”

“Known school-wide as a pretentious douche,” said Kiran.

Against her better instincts, Jane smiled. Greenhut assumed his students already knew a lot about biology, and maybe the assumption was just, because no one else in the class had seemed to struggle like Jane had. Aunt Magnolia, who’d been an adjunct marine biology teacher, had spluttered over the syllabus. “Greenhut’s a superior, self-righteous donkey,” she’d said in disgust, then added, “No offense to Eeyore. Greenhut is trying to weed out students who didn’t go to fancy high schools.”

“It’s working,” Jane had said.

“Maybe you’ll go to school somewhere else,” Kiran said. “Somewhere far away. It’s healthy to get away from home.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” Jane had always lived in that small, upstate university town, surrounded by students whenever she’d stepped outside. Tuition was free for faculty kids. But maybe Kiran was right, maybe Jane should have chosen a different school. A state school, where the other students wouldn’t have made her feel so . . . provincial. These students came from all over the world and they had so much money. Jane’s roommate had spent her summer in the French countryside and, once she’d learned that Jane had taken high school French, wanted to have conversations in French about towns Jane had never heard of and cheeses she’d never eaten.

How disorienting it had been to attend the classes she’d watched enviously through the windows her whole life, and wind up miserable. In the end, she’d spent most nights with Aunt Magnolia instead of in her dorm room, feeling like she was living a parallel version of her own life, one that didn’t fit her skin. Like she was a puzzle piece from the wrong puzzle.

“You could be an art major somewhere,” Kiran said then. “Didn’t you used to make cool umbrellas?”

“They’re not art,” said Jane. “They’re umbrellas. Messy ones.”

“Okay,” said Kiran, “whatever. Where do you live now?”

“In an apartment in town.”

“The same apartment you lived in with your aunt?”

“No,” Jane said, injecting it with a touch of sarcasm that was probably wasted on Kiran. Of course she hadn’t been able to afford that same apartment. “I live with three grad students.”

“How do you like it?”

“It’s fine,” Jane lied. Her apartment-mates were a lot older than she and too pompously focused on their abstruse intellectual pursuits to bother with cooking, or cleaning, or showering. It was like living with self-important Owl from Winnie-the-Pooh, except that their hygiene was worse and there were three of them. Jane was hardly ever alone there. Her bedroom was a glorified closet, not conducive to umbrella-making, which required space. It was hard to move around without poking herself on ribs. Sometimes she slept with a work in progress at the end of her bed.

“I liked your aunt,” Kiran said. “I liked you too,” she added, which was when Jane stopped thinking about herself and began to study Kiran, who had changed somehow since she’d last seen her. Kiran had used to move as if she were being pushed by at least four different urgent purposes at once.

“What’s brought you to town?” Jane asked Kiran.

Kiran shrugged, listless. “I was out driving.”

“Where are you living?”

“In the city apartment.”

The Thrashes’ city apartment was the top two floors of a Manhattan mansion overlooking Central Park, quite a distance away for someone who was just “out driving.”

“Though I’ve been called home to the island for the spring gala,” Kiran added. “And I may stay awhile. Octavian is probably in a mood.”

“Okay,” said Jane, trying to imagine having a gazillionaire father, on a private island, in a mood. “I hope you have a nice time.”

“What is that tattoo?” asked Kiran. “Is it a squid?”

“It’s a jellyfish.”

“Can I see it?”

The jellyfish sat on Jane’s upper arm, blue and gold, with thin blue tentacles and spiral arms in white and black reaching all the way down below her elbow. Jane often wore her shirtsleeves rolled up to show a glimpse of the tentacles because, secretly, she liked people to ask to see it. She pushed her sleeve up to the shoulder for Kiran.

Kiran gazed at the jellyfish with an unchanging expression. “Huh,” she said. “Did it hurt?”

“Yes,” said Jane. And she’d taken on an extra job as a waitress at a diner in town for three months to pay for it.

“It’s delicate,” said Kiran. “It’s beautiful, actually. Who designed it?”

“It’s based on a photo my aunt took,” said Jane through a flush of pleasure, “of a Pacific sea nettle jellyfish.”

“Did your aunt ever get to see your tattoo?”

“No.”

“Timing can be an asshole,” Kiran said. “Come get drinks.”

“What?” said Jane, startled. “Me?”

“After you get off work.”

“I’m underage.”

“So I’ll buy you a milkshake.”

*   *   *

That night, at the bar, Jane had explained to Kiran what it was like to budget for rent, food, and health insurance on a part-time bookstore salary; how she’d sometimes believe in absentminded moments that Aunt Magnolia was just away on another of her photography trips; about the detours she found herself taking to avoid the apartment building where they’d lived together. Jane didn’t mean to explain it all, but Kiran was from the time when life had made sense. Her presence was confusing. It just came out.

“Quit your job,” Kiran said.

“And live how?” Jane said, irritated. “Not everyone has Daddy’s bottomless credit card, you know.”

Kiran absorbed the dig with disinterest. “You just don’t seem very happy.”

“Happy!” said Jane, incredulous, then, as Kiran continued to sip her whiskey, seriously annoyed. “What’s your job, anyway?” she snapped.

“I don’t have a job.”

“Well, you don’t exactly seem happy either.”

Kiran surprised Jane by shouting a laugh. “I’ll drink to that,” she said, then threw back her drink, leaned over the bar, reached into a container of paper umbrellas, and selected one, blue and black to match Jane’s shirt and her tattoo tentacles. Opening it carefully, she twirled it between her fingers, then presented it to Jane.

“Protection,” Kiran announced.

“From what?” Jane asked, examining the umbrella’s delicate working interior.

“From bullshit,” said Kiran.

“Wow,” Jane said. “All this time, I could’ve been stopping bullshit with a cocktail umbrella?”

“It might only work for really small bullshit.”

“Thanks,” said Jane, starting to smile.

“Yeah, so, I don’t have a job,” Kiran said again, holding Jane’s eyes briefly, then looking away. “I apply for things now and then, but it never comes through, and I’ll be honest, I’m always kind of relieved.”

“What’s the problem? You have a degree. You had really good grades, didn’t you? Don’t you speak, like, seven languages?”

“You sound like my mother,” said Kiran, her voice more weary than annoyed. “And my father, and my brother, and my boyfriend, and every damn person I talk to, ever.”

“I was only asking.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m a spoiled rich girl who has the privilege to mope around, feeling sorry for herself for being unemployed. I get it.”

It was funny, because those were Jane’s thoughts exactly. But now, because Kiran had said it, she resented it less. “Hello, don’t put bullshit in my mouth. I’m armed,” Jane said, brandishing her cocktail umbrella.

“You know what I liked about your aunt?” Kiran said. “She always seemed like she knew exactly what she was going to do next. She made you feel like that was possible, to know the right choice.”

Yes. Jane tried to respond, but the truth of it caught in her throat. Aunt Magnolia, she thought, choking on it.

Kiran observed Jane’s grief with dispassion.

“Quit your job and come home with me to Tu Reviens,” she said. “Stay awhile, as long as you like. Octavian won’t mind. Hell, he’ll buy your umbrella supplies. My boyfriend is there; you can meet him. My brother, Ravi, too. Come on. What’s keeping you here?”

Some people are so rich, they don’t even notice when they shame others. What value was there in all the deliberate, scrabbling care Jane put into her subsistence now, if a near-stranger’s indifferent invitation, born of boredom and a need to pee, made Jane more financially comfortable than she could make herself?

But it wasn’t possible to say no, because of Aunt Magnolia. The promise.

“Janie, sweetheart,” Aunt Magnolia had said when Jane had woken extra early one morning and found her aunt on the stool at the kitchen counter. “You’re awake.”

“You’re awake,” Jane had responded, because Jane was the insomniac in the family.

She’d balanced her hip on the edge of Aunt Magnolia’s stool so she could lean against her aunt’s side, close her eyes, and pretend she was still asleep. Aunt Magnolia had been tall, like Jane, and Jane had always fit well against her. Aunt Magnolia had put her cup of tea into Jane’s hands, closing both of Jane’s palms around its warmth.

“You remember your old writing tutor?” Aunt Magnolia had said. “Kiran Thrash?”

“Of course,” Jane had responded, taking a noisy slurp.

“Did she ever talk about her house?”

“The house with the French name? On the island her dad owns?”

“Tu Reviens,” Aunt Magnolia had said.

Jane had known enough French to translate this. “‘You return.’”

“Exactly, darling,” Aunt Magnolia had said. “I want you to make me a promise.”

“Okay.”

“If anyone ever invites you to Tu Reviens,” she’d said, “promise me that you’ll go.”

“Okay,” Jane had said. “Um, why?”

“I’ve heard it’s a place of opportunity.”

“Aunt Magnolia,” Jane had said with a snort, putting her cup down to look into her aunt’s eyes. Her aunt had had a funny blue blotch staining the otherwise brown iris in one of her eyes, like a nebula, or a muddy star, with little spikes, spokes.

“Aunt Magnolia,” Jane had repeated. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Her aunt had chuckled, deep in her throat, then had given Jane a one-armed hug. “You know I get wild ideas sometimes.”

Aunt Magnolia had been one for sudden trips, like camping in some remote part of the Finger Lakes where overnights weren’t exactly permitted and where cell phones didn’t work. They would read books together by lantern light, listen to the moths throw themselves against the canvas of the tiny, glowing tent, then finally fall asleep to the sound of loons. And then a week later Aunt Magnolia might go off to Japan to photograph sharks. The images she brought back amazed Jane. It might be a photo of a shark, but what Jane saw was Aunt Magnolia and her camera, pressed in by water, silence, and cold, breathing compressed air, waiting for a visit from a creature that might as well be an alien, so strange were the inhabitants of the underwater world.

“You’re wild, Aunt Magnolia,” Jane had said. “And wonderful.”

“But I don’t ask you for many promises, do I?”

“No.”

“So promise me this one thing. Won’t you?”

“All right,” Jane had said, “fine. For you, I promise I won’t ever turn down an invitation to Tu Reviens. Why are you awake anyway?”

“Strange dreams,” she’d said. Then, a few days later, she’d left on an expedition to Antarctica, gotten caught too far from camp during a polar blizzard, and frozen to death.

Kiran’s invitation brought Aunt Magnolia near in a way that nothing else had in the four months since.

*   *   *

Tu Reviens. You return.

It’s unsettling, to be so far from home—all her usual anxieties lifted, only to be replaced with new ones. Does Kiran’s father even know Jane is coming? What if she’s just a third wheel once Kiran meets up with her boyfriend? How does a person act around people who own yachts and private islands?

Standing in the lounge of The Kiran, the rain falling in sheets outside, Jane tells herself to breathe, slow, deep, and even, the way Aunt Magnolia taught her. “It’ll help you when you learn to scuba dive,” Aunt Magnolia had used to say when Jane was tiny—five, six, seven—though somehow, those scuba lessons had never materialized.

In, Jane thinks, focusing on her expanding belly. Out, feeling her torso flatten. Jane glances at the house, floating above them in the storm. Aunt Magnolia never worried. She just went.

Jane suddenly feels like a character in a novel by Edith Wharton or the Brontës. I’m a young woman of reduced circumstances, with no family and no prospects, invited by a wealthy family to their glamorous estate. Could this be my heroic journey?

She’ll need to choose an umbrella appropriate for a heroic journey. Will Kiran think it’s weird? Can she find one that isn’t embarrassing? Teetering across the lounge floor, opening one of her crates, Jane lights upon the right choice instantly. The petite umbrella’s satin canopy alternates deep brown with a coppery rose. The brass fittings are made of antique parts, but strong. She could impale someone on the ferrule.

Jane opens it. The runners squeak and the curve of the ribs is warped, the fabric unevenly stretched.

It’s just a stupid, lopsided umbrella, Jane thinks to herself, suddenly blinking back tears. Aunt Magnolia? Why am I here?

Patrick sticks his head into the lounge. His bright eyes flash at Jane, then touch Kiran. “We’re docked, Kir,” he says, “and the car is here.”

Kiran sits up, not looking at him. Then, when he returns to the deck, she watches him through the window as he lifts wooden crates onto his shoulder and carries them onto the dock. His eyes catch hers and she looks away. “Leave your stuff,” she says to Jane dismissively. “Patrick will bring it up later.”

“Okay,” Jane says. Something is definitely up with Patrick and Kiran. “Who’s your boyfriend, anyway?”

“His name is Colin. He works with my brother. You’ll meet him. Why?”

“Just wondering.”

“Did you make that umbrella?” asks Kiran.

“Yes.”

“I thought so. It makes me think of you.”

Of course it does. It’s homemade and funny-looking.

Kiran and Jane step into the rain. Patrick holds a steadying hand out to Jane and she grabs his forearm by accident. He is soaked to the skin. Patrick Yellan, Jane notices, has beautiful forearms.

“Watch your step,” he says in her ear.

*   *   *

Once on land, Kiran and Jane scurry toward an enormous black car on the dock. “Patrick’s the one who asked me to come home for the gala,” Kiran shouts through the rain.

“What?” says Jane, flustered. She’s trying to shield Kiran with her umbrella, which sends a rivulet of icy water down the canopy straight into the neck of her own shirt. “Really? Why?”

“Who the hell knows? He told me he has a confession to make. He’s always announcing shit like that, then he has nothing to say.”

“Are you . . . good friends?”

“Stop trying to keep me dry,” Kiran says, reaching for the car door. “It’s only making both of us more wet.”

There is, it turns out, a road that starts at the bay, continues clockwise around the base of the island, then enters a series of hairpin turns that climb the sheer cliffs gradually.

It’s not a soothing drive in a Rolls-Royce in the rain; the car seems too big to take the turns without plummeting off the edge. The driver has the facial expression of a bulldog and she’s driving like she’s got a train to catch. Steel-haired and steel-eyed, pale-skinned with high cheekbones, she’s wearing black yoga clothes and an apron with cooking stains. She stares at Jane in the rearview mirror. Jane shivers, tilting her head so her boisterous curls obscure her face.

“Are we short-staffed again, Mrs. Vanders?” Kiran asks. “You’re wearing an apron.”

“A handful of guests just arrived unannounced,” says Mrs. Vanders. “The spring gala is the day after tomorrow. Cook is having hysterics.”

Kiran throws her head against the back of the seat and closes her eyes. “What guests?”

“Phoebe and Philip Okada,” Mrs. Vanders says. “Lucy St. George—”

“My brother makes me want to die,” Kiran says, interrupting.

“Your brother himself has made no appearance,” says Mrs. Vanders significantly.

“Shocking,” says Kiran. “Any bank robbers expected?”

Mrs. Vanders grunts at this peculiar question and says, “I imagine not.”

“Bank robbers?” says Jane.

“Well,” Kiran says, ignoring Jane, “I announced my friend ahead of time. I hope you’ve set aside space; Janie needs space.”

“We’ve set aside the Red Suite in the east wing for Jane. It has its own morning room,” Mrs. Vanders says. “Though regrettably it has no view of the sea.”

“It’s nowhere near me,” Kiran grumbles. “It’s near Ravi.”

“Well,” says Mrs. Vanders with a sudden softening of expression, “we still have sleeping bags if you want to have sleepovers. You and Ravi and Patrick liked to do that when you were young and Ivy was just a baby, remember? She used to beg to be included.”

“We used to toast marshmallows in Ravi’s fireplace,” Kiran tells Jane, “while Mr. Vanders and Octavian hovered over us, certain we were going to burn ourselves.”

“Or set the house on fire,” says Mrs. Vanders.

“Ivy would make herself sick and fall asleep in a sugar coma,” Kiran says wistfully. “And I would sleep between Patrick and Ravi on the hearth, like a melting s’more.”

Memory comes on sharply; memory has its own will. Sitting with Aunt Magnolia in the red armchair, beside the radiator that clanked and hissed. Reading Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. “Sing Ho! for the life of a Bear!” Aunt Magnolia would say as Christopher Robin led an expotition to the North Pole. Sometimes, if Aunt Magnolia was tired, she and Jane would read silently, wedged together. Jane was five, six, seven, eight. If Aunt Magnolia was drying socks on the radiator, the room would smell of wool.

The car approaches the house from behind, roars around to the front, and pulls into the drive. It’s not a ship anymore, this house, now that Jane sees it up close. It’s a palace.

*   *   *

Mrs. Vanders opens a small, person-sized door set within the great, elephant-sized door. There is no welcoming committee.

Jane and Kiran enter a stone receiving hall with a high ceiling and a checkerboard floor on which Jane creates small puddles everywhere she steps. The air whooshes as Mrs. Vanders closes the door, sucking at Jane’s eardrums and almost making her feel as if she’s missed a whispered word. Absently, she rubs her ear.

“Welcome to Tu Reviens,” says Mrs. Vanders gruffly. “Stay out of the servants’ quarters. We don’t have room for visitors in the kitchen, either, and the west attics are cluttered and dangerous. You should be content with your bedroom, Jane, and the common rooms of the ground floor.”

“Vanny,” says Kiran calmly, “stop being an ogre.”

“I merely wish to prevent your friend from skewering her foot on a nail in the attic,” says Mrs. Vanders, then stalks across the floor and disappears through a doorway. Jane, unsure if she’s meant to follow, takes a step, but Kiran puts a hand out to stop her.

“I think she’s going to the forbidden kitchen,” she says, with half a smile. “I’ll show you around. This is the receiving hall. Is it ostentatious enough for you?”

Matching staircases climb the walls to left and right, reaching to a second story, then a third. The impossibly tall wall before Jane almost makes her dizzy. Long balconies stretch across it at the second and third levels, archways along them puncturing the tall wall at intervals. The balconies might serve as minstrels’ galleries, but they also serve as bridges connecting the east and west sides of the house. The archways glow softly with natural light, as if the wall is a face with glowing teeth. Straight ahead, on the ground level, is another archway through which greenery is visible and the soft glow of more natural light. Jane hears the sound of rain on glass. Her mind can’t make sense of it, in what should be the house’s center.

“It’s the Venetian courtyard,” Kiran says, noticing Jane’s expression, leading her toward the archway. She sounds defeated. “It’s the house’s nicest feature.”

“Oh,” says Jane, trying to read Kiran’s face. “Is it, like, your favorite room?”

“Whatever,” Kiran says. “It makes it harder for me to hate this place.”

Jane studies Kiran instead of the courtyard. Kiran’s pale brown face is turned up to the glass ceiling, the pounding rain. She is not beautiful. She’s the kind of plain-looking that a good deal of money can disguise as beautiful. But Jane realizes now that she likes Kiran’s snub nose, her open face, her wispy black hair.

If she hates this place, Jane wonders, why does she consent to come when Patrick calls? Or does Kiran dislike every place equally?

Jane turns to see what Kiran sees.

Well. What an excellent space to stick in the middle of a house; every house should have one stuck in its middle. It’s a glass-ceilinged atrium, stretching fully up the building’s three stories, with walls of pale pink stone and, in the center, a forest of slender white trees; tiny terraced flower gardens; and a small waterfall shooting from the mouth of a fish. At the second and third levels, long cascades of golden-orange nasturtiums hang from balconies.

“Come on,” Kiran says. “I’ll show you to your room.”

“You don’t have to,” says Jane. “You can just tell me where to go.”

“It’ll give me an excuse not to go looking for Octavian yet,” Kiran says. Laughter erupts from a room not too distant. She winces. “Or the guests, or Colin,” she adds, grabbing Jane’s wrist and pulling her back into the receiving hall.

It’s strange to be touched by someone as prickly as Kiran. Jane can’t tell if it’s comforting or if she feels a bit trapped. “What’s Colin like?”

“He’s an art dealer,” Kiran says, not directly answering Jane’s question. “He works for his uncle who owns a gallery. Colin has a master’s in art history. He taught one of Ravi’s classes when Ravi was an undergrad; that’s how they met. But even if he’d studied, like, astrophysics, he’d probably have ended up working for his uncle Buckley. Everyone in that family does. Still, at least he’s using his degree.”

Kiran has a degree in religion and languages she’s apparently not using. Once, Jane remembers, Kiran wrote a paper on religious groups working with governments to encourage environmental conservation that fascinated Aunt Magnolia. She and Kiran had talked and talked. Aunt Magnolia had turned out to know a lot more about politics than Jane had realized.

Kiran backtracks through the receiving hall and takes the east staircase on their left. The walls going up are covered with a bizarre collection of paintings from all different periods, all different styles. On every landing is a complete suit of armor.

Dominating the second-story landing is a particularly tall realistic painting done in thick oils, depicting a room with a checkerboard floor and an umbrella propped open as if left to dry. Jane feels she could almost step into the scene.

A basset hound, coming down the steps toward them, stops and stares at Jane. Then he begins to hop and pant with increasing interest. When Jane passes him, he turns himself around and follows eagerly, but his long radius makes for slow turning, and basset hounds aren’t designed for steps. He treads on his own ear and yelps. He’s soon left behind. He barks.

“Ignore Jasper,” Kiran says. “That dog has a personality disorder.”

“What’s wrong with him?” asks Jane.

“He grew up in this house,” Kiran says.

*   *   *

Jane has never had a suite of rooms to herself.

Kiran’s phone rings as they step through the door. She glances at it, then scowls. “Fucking Patrick. Bet you anything he has nothing to say. I’ll leave you to explore,” she says, wandering back out into the corridor.

Jane is free now to examine her rooms without needing to hide her amazement. Her gold-tiled bathroom, complete with hot tub, is as big as her bedroom used to be, and the bedroom is a vast expanse, the king-sized bed a mountain she supposes she’ll scale later, to sleep in the clouds. The walls are an unusually pale shade of red, like one of the brief, early colors of the sky at sunrise. Fat leather armchairs sit around a giant fireplace. Jane opens her umbrella and sets it to dry on the cold hearth, noticing logs stacked beside the fireplace and wondering how one goes about lighting a fire.

The morning room, through an adjoining door, has eastern walls made of glass, presumably to catch the morning sun. The glass brings her very near the storm, which is nice. A storm can be a cozy thing when one isn’t in it.

Outside, formal gardens stretch to meet a long lawn, then a forest beyond, disappearing into fog, as if maybe this house and this small patch of land have floated out of normal existence, with Jane as their passenger. Well, Jane and the mud-soaked child digging holes with a trowel in the garden below, short hair dripping with rain. She’s maybe seven, or eight. She raises her face to glance up at the house.

Is there something familiar about the look of that kid? Does Jane recognize her?

The little girl shifts her position and the sensation fades.

After surveying her morning room (rolltop desk, striped sofa, floral armchair, yellow shag rug, and a random assortment of paintings), she returns to her bedroom, wrapping herself in a soft dark blanket from the foot of the bed.

A small scratching noise brings her to the hallway door, which she opens a crack. “You made it,” she says as the dog barrels in. “I admire your persevering spirit.”

Jasper is a classic basset hound in brown, black, and white; his nose is long, his ears are longer, his legs are short, his eyes sag, his mouth droops, his ears flop. He is a creature beset by gravity. When Jane kneels and offers a hand, he sniffs it. Licks it, shyly. Then he leans his weight against her damp corduroys. “You,” Jane says, scratching his head in a place she suspects he can’t reach, “are perfect.”

“Oh,” says a voice at the door, sounding surprised. “Are you Janie?”

Jane looks up into the face of a tall girl who must be Patrick Yellan’s little sister, for she’s got his looks, his coloring, his brilliant blue eyes. Her long, dark hair is pulled back in a messy knot.

“Yes,” says Jane. “Ivy?”

“Yeah,” says the girl. “But, how old are you?”

“Eighteen,” says Jane. “You?”

“Nineteen,” she says. “Kiran told me she was bringing a friend but she didn’t tell me you were my age.” She leans against the door frame, wearing skintight gray jeans and a red hoodie so comfortably that she might have slept in them. She reaches into her hoodie pocket, pulls out a pair of dark-rimmed glasses, and sticks them on her face.

In her gold zigzag shirt and wine-colored cords covered with dog hair, Jane feels awkward suddenly, like some sort of evolutionary anomaly. A blue-footed booby, next to a graceful heron.

“I love your outfit,” Ivy says.

Jane is astonished. “Are you a mind reader?”

“No,” says Ivy, with a quick, wicked grin. “Why?”

“You just read my mind.”

“That sounds disconcerting,” says Ivy. “Hmmm, how about zeppelins?”

“What?”

“Were you thinking about zeppelins?”

“No.”

“Then that should make you more comfortable.”

“What?” says Jane again, so confused that she’s laughing a little.

“Unless you were just thinking about zeppelins.”

“It’s possible I’ve never thought about zeppelins,” says Jane.

“It’s an acceptable Scrabble word,” says Ivy, “even though it’s often a proper name, which isn’t allowed.”

“Zeppelins?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Well, zeppelin, singular, anyway. I put it down once on two triple-word scores. Kiran challenged me, because zeppelins are named after a person, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin or somebody, but it’s in the Scrabble dictionary anyway. It earned me two hundred fifty-seven points. Oh god. I’m sorry. Listen to me.”

“Don’t—”

“No, really,” she says. “I swear I’m not usually afflicted with verbal diarrhea. I also don’t usually brag about my Scrabble scores two minutes after meeting someone.”

“It’s okay,” says Jane, because people who talk so easily make her comfortable, they’re less work, she knows where she stands. “I don’t play much Scrabble, so I don’t know what it means to earn two hundred fifty-seven points. That could be average, for all I know.”

“It’s an amazing fucking score for one word,” Ivy says, then closes her eyes. “Seriously. What is wrong with me.”

“I like it,” says Jane. “I want to hear more of your Scrabble words.”

Ivy shoots her a grateful grin. “I did actually have a reason for coming by,” she says. “I’m the one who got your room ready. I wanted to check if everything’s okay.”

“More than okay,” says Jane. “I mean, there’s a fireplace and hot tub.”

“Not what you’re used to?”

“My last bedroom was about the size of that bed,” Jane says, pointing to it.

“The ‘cupboard under the stairs’?”

“I guess not that bad,” says Jane, smiling at the Harry Potter reference.

“I’m glad,” says Ivy. “You’re sure you don’t need anything?”

“I don’t want you to feel like you have to take care of me.”

“Hey, it’s my job,” says Ivy. “Tell me what you need.”

“Well,” says Jane. “There are a couple things I could use, but I don’t really need them, and they’re not normal things I would ask you for.”

“Such as?”

“A rotary saw,” says Jane. “A lathe.”

“Uh-huh,” says Ivy, grinning again. “Come with me.”

“You’re going to bring me to a rotary saw and a lathe?” says Jane, tossing the blanket back onto the bed.

“This house has one of everything.”

“Do you know where everything is?”

Ivy considers this thoughtfully as the dog follows them out into the corridor. “I probably know where almost everything is. I’m sure the house is keeping some secrets from me.”

Jane is tall, but Ivy is taller, with legs that go on forever. Their strides are well-matched. The dog clings close to her feet. “Is it true Jasper has a personality disorder?” she asks. “Kiran said so.”

“He can be quirky,” Ivy says. “He won’t do his business if you’re watching him—he glares at you as if you’re being unforgivably rude. And there’s a painting in the blue sitting room he’s obsessed with.”

“What do you mean?”

“He sits there gazing at it, blowing big sighs through his nose.”

“Is it a painting of a dog or something?”

“No, it’s a boring old city by the water, except for the fact that it’s got two moons. And sometimes he disappears for days and we can’t find him. Cook calls him our earthbound misfit. He’s our house mystery too—he appeared one day after one of the galas, a puppy, as if a guest had brought him and left him behind. But no one ever claimed him. So we kept him. Is he bothering you?”

“Nah,” says Jane. “This house,” she adds as Ivy walks her down the hallway toward the atrium at the house’s center. A polar bear rug, complete with head and glassy eyes, sits in the middle of the passageway. It looks like real fur. Wrinkling her nose, Jane makes a path around it, then rubs her ears again, trying to dislodge a noise. The house is humming, or singing, a faint, high-pitched whine of air streaming through pipes somewhere, though really, Jane’s not totally conscious of it. There’s a way in which background noises can enter one’s unconscious self, settle in—even make changes—without tripping any of one’s conscious alarms.

Ivy slows as she nears the center of the house. They are on the highest level, the third, and Ivy takes the branch of the hallway that goes to the left. Jane follows, finding herself on one of the bridgelike balconies she saw from the receiving hall. The bridge overlooks the receiving hall on one side and the courtyard on the other.

Ivy stops at one of the archways overlooking the courtyard. Someone’s left a camera here, perched on the wide balustrade, a fancy one with a big lens. Picking it up, Ivy hangs it around her neck. When Jane steps beside her, breathing through the heady feeling of vertigo, Jasper does too, shoving his head between two balusters.

“Jasper,” Jane says in alarm, reaching for his collar, then realizing he’s not wearing one. “Jasper! Be careful!”

Jasper demonstrates that he cannot possibly fall, by straining with all his strength to push himself through the balusters, failing, then looking up at Jane with an “I told you so” expression. It’s not a comforting demonstration.

“Don’t worry,” Ivy says. “He won’t fall. He’s too big.”

“Yeah,” Jane says, “I see that, but I still wish he’d stay back. Respect the heights, you long-eared bozo!”

At this, Ivy lets out a single, small laugh. “Quixotic,” she says.

“What?”

She shakes her head at herself. “Sorry. It just occurred to me that if I’d been able to play the word quixotic in that spot instead of the word zeppelin, I’d have scored even more points. Because of the combined power of the x and the q. They’re valuable letters,” she adds apologetically, “because they’re rare. You make me want to talk. It’s like a compulsion. I could go get a muzzle.”

“I told you, I like it,” says Jane, then notices, suddenly, the words on Ivy’s camera strap: I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself.

It’s a reference to the TV show Doctor Who. “Are you a sci-fi fan?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” says Ivy. “I like sci-fi and fantasy generally.”

“Who’s your favorite Doctor?”

“Eh, I like the companions better,” says Ivy. “The Doctor’s all tragic and broody and last of his kind, and I get the appeal of that, but I like Donna Noble and Rose Tyler. And Amy and Rory, and Clara Oswald, and Martha Jones. No one ever likes Martha Jones but I like Martha Jones. She’s an asskicker.”

Jane nods. “I get that.”

“Were you going to say something about the house?” says Ivy. “Before?”

“The decorative stuff,” Jane says. “The art. Isn’t it kind of . . . random?”

Ivy leans an elbow on the balustrade. “Yeah, it’s definitely random,” she says. “Officially random, really. A hundred-some years ago, when the very first Octavian Thrash was building this house, he, um, how should I put it, he . . . acquired parts of other houses, from all over the world.”

“Acquired?” says Jane. “What do you mean? Like, the way Russia acquired Crimea?”

Ivy flashes a grin. “Yeah, basically. Some of the houses were being remodeled, or torn down. Octavian bought parts. But in other cases, it’s hard to say how he got his hands on them.”

“Are you saying he stole?”

“Yes,” Ivy says. “Or bought stuff that was stolen. That’s why the pillars don’t match, or the tiles, or anything really. He collected the art the same way, and the furniture. Apparently ships would arrive full of random crap, maybe a door from Turkey, a banister from China. A stained-glass window from Italy, a column from Egypt, a pile of floorboards from some manor kitchen in Scotland. Even the skeleton is made of the miscellaneous crap he collected.”

“So . . . the house is like Frankenstein’s monster?”

“Yup,” she says, “speaking of sci-fi. Or like some kind of cannibal.”

“Will it eat us?”

Her smile again. “It hasn’t eaten anyone yet.”

“Then I’ll stay.”

“Good,” she says.

“Some of the art seems newer.”

“Mrs. Vanders and Ravi do the buying these days. Octavian gives them permission to spend his money.”

“What things do they buy?”

“Valuable stuff. Tasteful stuff. Nothing stolen. Ravi works as an art dealer in New York now, actually, with Kiran’s boyfriend, Colin. It’s like his dream job. I think he cries with happiness every morning on his way to work. Ravi is bananas about art,” she adds, noticing Jane’s puzzled expression. “He’s been known to sleep under the Vermeer. Like, in the corridor, in a sleeping bag.”

Jane is trying to imagine a grown man sleeping on a floor beneath a painting. “I’ll try to remember that, in case I’m ever walking around in the dark.”

“Ha!” says Ivy. “I meant when he was a little kid. He doesn’t do it now. We used to play with some of the art too, like, pretend-play around it. The sculptures, the Brancusi fish. The suits of armor.”

While Jane tries to file all this information away, rainwater pounds on the glass ceiling of the courtyard. “What about the courtyard?” she says, taking in the pink stone, the measured terraces, the hanging nasturtiums. “It isn’t unmatching. It feels balanced.”

“Mm-hm,” says Ivy with a small, crooked smile. “The first Octavian rescued the entire thing from a Venetian palace that was being torn down, and brought it over on a boat in one piece.”

There’s something preposterous about a ship carrying three stories of empty space around the Italian peninsula, through the Mediterranean, and across the Atlantic.

“This house kind of gives me the creeps,” Jane says.

“We’re about to go into the servants’ quarters,” Ivy says. “It’s nice and simple in there, with no dead polar bears.”

“Does that bother you too?”

Ivy gives a rueful shrug. “To me, he’s just Captain Polepants.”

“Huh?”

“That’s what Kiran and Patrick called him when we were little. They thought it was hilarious, because Kiran’s half British, and in the U.K., pants means underpants. Mr. Vanders had a name for him too,” Ivy says, screwing her face up thoughtfully. “Bipolar Bear, I think it was. Because he likes psychology. Funny, right?”

“I guess,” Jane says. “My aunt was a conservationist. She took pictures of polar bears instead of making rugs out of them.”

“Speak of the devil,” Ivy says, looking down to the courtyard below. An elderly man darts across the floor. He’s a tall, dark-skinned black man in black clothing, with a ring of white hair. He carries a small child on one hip, maybe two or three years old. All Jane can see of the child from above is wavy dark hair, tanned skin, flopping arms and legs. “Why?” the toddler yells, squirming. “Why? Why!”

“Kiran never mentioned there’d be so many kids here,” Jane says, remembering the little girl digging in the rain outside her window.

Ivy pauses. “That was Mr. Vanders,” she says. “He’s the butler, and Mrs. Vanders is the housekeeper. They manage a pretty big staff. He’s always in a hurry.”

“Okay,” Jane says, noticing that Ivy’s said nothing about the child, and that her face has gone measured, her voice carefully nonchalant. It’s weird. “You said we’re going into the servants’ quarters?” she adds. “Mrs. Vanders actually told me I’m not allowed there.”

“Mrs. Vanders can bite me,” says Ivy with sudden sharpness.

“What?”

“Sorry.” Ivy looks sheepish. “But she’s not in charge of the house. She just acts like she is. You do whatever you want.”

“Okay.” Jane wants to see the house, every part of it. She also wants to not get yelled at.

“Come on,” Ivy says, pushing away. “If we see her, you can just pretend you don’t know which part of the house we’re in. You can blame me.”

She’s backing away across the bridge while facing Jane, willing Jane to follow her. Then she shoots Jane her wicked grin again, and Jane can’t say no.

*   *   *

“Every time I step into a new section, I feel like I’m in a different house.”

Jane spins on her heels, examining the unexpectedly serene, unadorned, pale green walls of the forbidden servants’ quarters, in the west wing of the third story. All the doors are set into small, side hallways that branch off the main corridor.

“Wait till you see the bowling alley downstairs,” Ivy says, “and the indoor swimming pool.”

Jane realizes she’s been breathing the faint, rather pleasant scent of chlorine ever since Ivy joined her. “Are you a swimmer?”

“Yeah, when I have time. You can use the pool whenever you want. Tell me if you want me to show you the changing rooms and stuff. That’s my room,” she adds, pointing down a short hallway to a closed door. “Hang on, let me put my camera down.”

“What are you taking pictures of?”

“The art,” she says. “Be right back.” She leaves Jane in the main corridor, where Jasper leans against her legs, sighing. Jane’s clothing has dried, mostly; at any rate, she no longer feels like a soggy, cold stray. She’s exposed out here, though; she imagines Mrs. Vanders peering at her disapprovingly around corners, and she also wishes she could see Ivy’s room. Do the servants have hot tubs and fireplaces too? Is Ivy always on the clock? Does she get to travel to New York like Kiran does? If she’s nineteen, will she go to college? How did she go to high school? For that matter, how did Kiran go to high school?

Ivy emerges.

“Do you have a hot tub in there?”

“I wish,” says Ivy, grinning. “Want to see?”

“Sure.”

Jane and Jasper follow Ivy into a long room with two distinct realms: the bed realm, near the door, and the computer realm, which takes up most of the rest of the space. Jane never knew one person could need so many computers. A jumble of ropes is propped beside one of her keyboards, along with two of the longest flashlights Jane’s ever seen. Large, precise drawings—blueprints, sort of—cover the walls. Jane realizes, looking closer, that they’re interior maps of a house that are so detailed that they show wallpaper, furniture, carpets, art.

“Did you make these?” asks Jane.

“I guess,” says Ivy. “They’re the house.”

“Wow.” Jane sees familiar things now: the Venetian courtyard, the checkered floor of the receiving hall, the polar bear rug.

Ivy seems embarrassed. “Patrick and I share a bathroom in the hall,” she says. “Mr. and Mrs. Vanders have their own suite, though, and it has a hot tub.”

“You could use my hot tub.”

“Thanks,” says Ivy, pulling the tie out of her messy bun, shaking her hair out, and winding it back up again. The air is touched with the scent of chlorine, and jasmine.

“Marzipan,” Ivy says randomly, giving her hair a final tug.

Jane is used to this by now. “Yeah?”

“Another great word to play in that same spot, because of the position of the z.”

“Are you always thinking up good eight-letter Scrabble words?”

“Nope. Only since you came along.”

“Maybe I’ll be good for your Scrabble game.”

“It’s looking that way. Brains are bizarre,” says Ivy, going back into the corridor and leading Jane and Jasper past more hallways and doors.

“If you grew up here,” says Jane, “how did you go to school?”

“We were all homeschooled,” says Ivy, “by Octavian, and Mr. Vanders, and the first Mrs. Thrash.”

“Was it strange? To be homeschooled, on an isolated island?”

“Probably,” says Ivy with a grin, “but it seemed normal when I was a kid.”

“Will you go to college?”

“I’ve been thinking about it lately,” Ivy says, “a lot. I’ve been saving up, and I took the SATs last time I was in the city. But I haven’t started applying.”

“What will you study?”

“No clue,” she says. “Is that bad? Should I have my whole life plotted out?”

“You’re asking a college dropout,” says Jane, then isn’t sure what affect to adopt when Ivy looks at her curiously. I’m okay? I’m not okay? I feel stupid? Back off, my aunt died?

“I didn’t mean to put you on the spot,” says Ivy. “There’s nothing wrong with being a college dropout.”

“It doesn’t feel very good, though,” says Jane.

“That doesn’t mean it’s wrong,” says Ivy thoughtfully.

That sounds like something Aunt Magnolia would say, though she’d say it in ringing tones of wisdom, whereas Ivy says it as if it’s a new possibility she’s considering for the first time. They’ve come to a door at the end of the corridor, made of unfinished planks, with a heavy iron latch instead of a knob. Ivy pulls it open to reveal a landing with elevator doors straight ahead and stairs leading up and down. She flicks a switch on the landing and the room above brightens. “West attics,” she says before Jane can ask. “The workshop is up there.”

“Mrs. Vanders said I wasn’t allowed in the west attics, either,” says Jane. “She said it’s dangerous.”

Ivy snorts, then starts up the steps. “Come see for yourself. If it looks dangerous, we won’t go in.”

“Okay,” says Jane, pretending to be the rule-breaker she isn’t, because she doesn’t want to lose Ivy’s respect. “Wow,” she adds as her climb brings an enormous room into view. It’s filled with neat rows of worktables, almost like a shop class. With tall windows and high, wooden rafters, it’s as big as the entire west wing, rich with the smells of oil and sawdust. Rain drums against the roof. Through the windows Jane can just barely make out the spire on the house’s east side, puncturing the storm clouds.

It’s a tidy, open, barn-like space, with no loose nails or shaky beams. Jane wanders, Ivy following. An unfinished chest draws her attention. It’s walnut—Jane knows her woods. It has a carved top depicting an undersea scene of sperm whales (Jane also knows her whales). Above the whales, a girl floats in a rowboat, oblivious to the creatures below.

“Who made this?” Jane asks.

“Oh,” says Ivy, looking embarrassed but pleased. “That’s mine.”

“Really? You make furniture too? It’s beautiful!”

“Thanks. I haven’t touched it in forever. I don’t get time for the big projects. Though my brother and I did finish a boat recently.”

“You and Patrick made a boat up here?”

“Yeah. A rowboat. We had to lower it to the ground on ropes through a window. There’s a freight elevator to the outside, and a dumbwaiter,” Ivy says, waving a hand back toward the stairs, “but it was a boat, after all.”

A DIY rowboat. Jane tries to make her umbrellas watertight, but it’s not like anyone’s going to drown if she screws something up. “Do you take the boat out?”

“Sure,” says Ivy. “It’s a great little boat.”

Who builds a boat, in her spare time, with her own hands, then slaps it onto the ocean and rows around in it successfully? Probably while announcing winning Scrabble words and being bold and daring.

“There’s a rotary saw in the back somewhere,” Ivy says, “and we have a few different lathes.”

“Thanks,” says Jane, feeling a bit desolate.

“You should help yourself to whatever you need.”

“Thanks,” Jane says again, hoping Ivy won’t ask her what she needs them for.

The house moans and grumbles, almost as if in sympathy with Jane’s feelings. As old houses do, Jane thinks to herself. She imagines this house curled up with its back to the sky, shivering around the center it must keep warm, holding its skin against the driving rain.

A tiny, self-contained glass room sits near the stairs. There’s a table inside, on which is propped a large painting of a white man with sloping shoulders, wearing a beret with a great, curling feather. Brushes, bottles, and light fixtures surround the painting.

“Is someone a painter?” Jane asks, pointing.

“Rembrandt’s a painter,” Ivy says, grinning. “That’s a Rembrandt self-portrait. It’s one of the house’s pictures. Mrs. Vanders is cleaning it. She has a degree in conservation, among other things. Maybe you can smell the acetone—sort of a sharp smell? She uses it sometimes.”

“Oh,” Jane says, feeling silly for not recognizing a Rembrandt. “Right.”

“That room is her conservation studio,” Ivy says. “It’s sealed, so the art is protected from sawdust, and the glass is a fancy kind that shields it from outside light.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah,” says Ivy, understanding. “This is a house of serious art lovers. And Octavian has more money than God.”

A door at the back end of the attic opens with a scraping sound, startling Jane. Spinning around, she sees a flash of yellow wallpaper in a bright room beyond. A man with a pert mouth steps from the room, notices Jane, and clicks the door shut quickly. He has dark hair and East Asian features and wears a navy blue suit and orange Chuck Taylors.

Pulling latex gloves from his hands and shoving them into his pockets, he walks across the room toward them both. “Hello,” he says.

“Hi,” says Ivy, her voice carefully nonchalant again. “This is Philip Okada,” she tells Jane. “He’s visiting for the gala. Philip, this is Kiran’s friend Janie.”

“Nice to meet you,” says Philip, speaking with what sounds like an English accent.

“You too,” says Jane, glancing at the gloves dangling from his coat pocket.

“Forgive me,” he says. “I’m something of a germophobe and I often wear them. How do you know Kiran?”

“She went to college in my hometown.”

“Ah.” He smiles a polite smile, his face creasing into lines that make Jane think he must be at least thirty. Thirty-five? Even older? When do old people get laugh lines?

“How do you know the Thrash family?” asks Jane, deciding to be nosy.

“The New York party scene,” says Philip, his expression pleasantly bland.

“I see,” says Jane, wondering what that means, exactly, and how a germophobe manages a crowded party “scene.” Is there more here than meets the eye?

“Well,” he says, “see you later, no doubt.” He bends down to give Jasper a vigorous rub behind the ears. Then he descends the stairs, sliding his hand along the metal railing.

“You’d think a germophobe would avoid dogs and railings,” says Jane.

Ivy’s face is expressionless. “Take whatever you need,” she says, turning away. “Our attic is your attic.”

Definitely more here than meets the eye.

*   *   *

In the end, Jane borrows a rotary saw, a small lathe, a tarp, some beautiful birch rods, a can of stain, a can of varnish, and a worktable that’s a good height for her sewing machine. The workshop contains a thousand other things she could use, but she’s already embarrassed enough by her riches, especially when she needs to take two trips to get them downstairs.

While Jane is balancing her first armload, Ivy’s phone makes a noise like one of the horns in Lord of the Rings. “Sorry,” she says, glancing at it. “That’s Cook. You’ll be okay? Leave the worktable. Someone’ll bring it to you later.”

“Okay,” Jane says, “thanks,” wondering when she’ll see Ivy again, but too shy to ask.

Jasper follows Jane back and forth from the attics to her rooms, stumping along cheerfully behind her, waiting patiently at the base of the attic steps each time. “I like you, Jasper,” says Jane.

Her suitcase and crates arrived while she was gone. Dinner is hours away and the storm is still raging on the other side of the glass. At her morning room windows, Jasper beside her, Jane gazes out at the drenched world. She supposes it’s an appropriate day, an appropriate setting, to consider the making of umbrellas.

It wasn’t the colors that had first drawn Jane to umbrellas, it wasn’t the mechanics.

It was Aunt Magnolia.

On rainy days, when Jane was a child and Aunt Magnolia was away on a deep-sea photography trip, Jane would build an umbrella fort on the campus green and hide inside. The sound of rain thudding against a taut piece of fabric stretched above her was like being underwater. Jane could crawl into her umbrella fort and imagine herself where Aunt Magnolia was.

The elderly neighbors, who cared for Jane when Aunt Magnolia was gone, were warm and attentive and kind, but they were old, and Jane was generally left to play alone. Aunt Magnolia had given her an old scuba helmet to wear inside her umbrella fort, so that her own breathing sounded strange. Sometimes, depending on the weather, a chorus of tiny frogs joined the other noises. Jane would lie on her back in the wet grass, breathing through the nozzle, listening, pretending the umbrellas were giant jellyfish.

And once when she was in high school, when Aunt Magnolia had been taking pictures in the oceans of New Zealand for what felt like an eon and Jane had been staying in the apartment alone, she’d found herself in art class building an umbrella sculpture. Her art teacher had opened a closet full of miscellaneous junk and told everyone to go scrounging and make something. The closet had contained birch rods, various wires and metal fixings, and a huge piece of dark fabric spread across with fireflies. It had been raining that day, water coursing down the art room windows. It wasn’t really what the art teacher had meant by “art,” but it had somehow found Jane, this lopsided, water-absorbent thing with an open canopy like a real umbrella. It had been a mess, really. Made of lucky discoveries and countless mistakes. But tears stung her eyes when she looked at it.

Who can say how we choose our loves? After that first attempt, she’d rifled through the coat closet, snatched up the two bedraggled umbrellas she’d found, then applied herself to taking them apart.

Their tension came from branches that reached away from a central trunk and from each other—as far from each other, in fact, as they could get. The reaching away was what held the domed canopy taut and stretched in place. Why had Jane loved this, that the reaching away held it together? Who knows. But she had, and she’d taken apart every umbrella she could find, and experimented with waterproofing, and built rickety frames Aunt Magnolia would stumble over, or find piled in corners. She became particular about small variations in color and shape. She worked on them a little bit every day back then, almost compulsively.

“There is nothing wrong with impractical loves,” Aunt Magnolia had responded whenever Jane had apologized for spending so much time on them.

And then college had started up and she’d had no time for anything, except schoolwork that had felt like a hill of sliding rock.

“Janie-love,” Aunt Magnolia would say sometimes. “When did you last work on an umbrella?”

Jane’s grades had been passing when Aunt Magnolia had been around to help, but her aunt had had a lot of travel that fall and Jane found herself failing biology. And then Aunt Magnolia had died. Jane had dropped out of school. And umbrellas were all she could face, almost as if one perfect umbrella might make Aunt Magnolia come back.

Jane sits on the striped sofa in her morning room, holding her stomach. Jasper comes and leans against her legs.

Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh set out to sea once in an umbrella, Jane remembers. During a flood, to save Piglet.

Maybe, she thinks to herself, she should take her umbrellas down to the water, turn them upside down like boats, and send them off on the waves, carrying nothing. Maybe if they carried away all the nothing, she’d be left with something.

“Ocean pollution, hm?” Aunt Magnolia would say to that. “That’s your big solution, is it?” Or, “All right, allow yourself a good wallow, then get up from that sofa, stop feeling sorry for yourself, and do something useful.”

All right, fine, Aunt Magnolia, Jane thinks. For you, I’m getting up. With a great breath, she pushes herself to her feet and surveys the morning room.

She lays the tarp down to protect the middle of the shag carpet, where she plans to do the most heavy-duty work, then begins pulling umbrellas out of her crates and opening them. There isn’t room for them all, so she stacks some unopened on the floor and leans some in corners while Jasper watches appreciatively. She’s brought every one. She has no other place to store them; Jane brought everything she owns to this house. She has thirty-seven completed umbrellas. Some of them aren’t even so bad. They transform the room into an odd landscape of colorful, spiky hills.

Opening the rolltop desk, she finds it has small docketed drawers. “Letters Unanswered,” “Letters to Keep,” “Postage,” “Photographs,” “Addresses” and so on. She removes the tickets one by one, turns them over, and creates her own labels: “Glues,” “Nickel Silver Wire,” “Tying Wire,” “Pins,” “Ferrules,” “Brass Runners,” “Wire Cutters,” “Hinges,” “Tips.” It’s satisfying to drop each item into its proper drawer. Jane piles an assortment of steel ribs and canopy fabric atop the desk chair and the side tables nearby. She leaves her sewing machine on the floor for the time being, then washes her hands in the gigantic gold-tiled bathroom.

The last things Jane removes from her crates are five large framed photographs, four of them taken by Aunt Magnolia and one by a colleague. A rose-colored anglerfish in Indonesia with skin filaments that make it look like it’s carrying a forest on its back. The big, dark eyes of a Humboldt squid in Peru. An underwater photo of falling frogs in Belize, their arms and legs grasping at the water for purchase, their eyes panicked. A Canadian polar bear, happily suspended underwater, resting, untroubled by the cold.

These photos had required great patience and serendipity. Aunt Magnolia had never done anything that would scare the animals; she hadn’t pursued them or tried to manipulate them. Mostly, she’d waited. She’d been a spy of the underwater world, where things are silent and slow.

She’d loved the freezing, polar underwater landscapes best. The strangeness, the harshness, the sense of isolation. She’d written under the polar bear photo in scratchy pencil, “Sing Ho! for the life of a Bear!”

Finally, there was a photograph of Aunt Magnolia herself, standing, in scuba gear, on a New Zealand seafloor, touching the nose of an enormous southern right whale who peered at her with quiet dignity. Aunt Magnolia had been so encouraged by her visit to New Zealand, where the sea life is fiercely protected by law. “It gives me hope for the world,” she’d said. She’d been that way. Hopeful. Aunt Magnolia had believed there was a point.

Jane takes a few paintings off the walls to make room for Aunt Magnolia. Once she’s hung the final photograph, she hears the radiator clang in a lonely, “pay attention to me” way. It’s a sad sound, but cozy too. Jane is content with what she’s made of this room. Maybe, she thinks, good things will come of this odd adventure after all.

She has one work in progress. It’s almost done, only needs the appropriate ferrule to crown it and a tie and button to hold it closed. It’s an alternating blue and violet pagoda umbrella with a red shaft and handle. The pagoda-shaped canopy had presented a satisfying challenge, but the result feels fussy and over-the-top.

“Honestly, I kind of hate it,” she tells Jasper, opening it for him. “And the colors don’t suit you,” she says as he walks under the canopy. “The red in your brown clashes with its reds. Oh dear. Dreadful.”

Jasper seems depressed.

“It’s not you, Jasper,” says Jane. “There are reds that suit you dazzlingly. Here.” She wades through umbrellas to fetch the brown-rose-copper satin that’s still drying from its earlier use. “Sit under this one. Beautiful,” she says with a rush of pleasure as she appraises the effect. “I could have made that one just for you.” She reaches for her phone. “Should I take a picture?”

Jane’s afternoon is contentedly spent photographing Jasper under every umbrella that suits him, finishing up the pagoda piece, and allowing ideas for the next umbrella to bump against her thoughts.

*   *   *

Jane is lying on her back on the rug in the morning room, thinking about umbrella-shaped things for inspiration, when Ivy comes to collect her for dinner. Mushrooms, lampshades, jellyfish. Bells? Mixing bowls. Tulips. The tapping on her outer door finally reaches her consciousness. “Come in!” she yells.

Ivy enters the morning room, a warm, tall rush of red that pushes itself into Jane’s umbrella thoughts. What would an Ivy umbrella look like?

Ivy stops in astonishment, surveying the room. “Holy crap,” she says. “Why do you have so many umbrellas?”

“I make them,” Jane says from the floor. “Don’t ask me why.”

“Maybe because they’re awesome?” she says, stepping into the umbrella landscape, moving among them, looking closer.

Jane sits up, straightens her shirt, and peers around the room, trying to imagine it through Ivy’s eyes.

Ivy crouches down and reaches a finger to touch Jane’s bird’s egg umbrella, which is oblong and pale blue, with irregular brown spots. The oblong shaping of it had been a nightmarish task, because the ribs had needed to differ in length and shape while it was open, but lie flat and neat while closed. There’d been a moment when Jane had wanted to break the whole damn thing over her knee. She’s glad she didn’t. This is one of her better umbrellas.

Ivy is running a finger along the open edge of the canopy, with a touch so gentle and tentative that Jane can feel it, like a hum under her skin.

“Can you tell what it is?” Jane asks.

“Of course,” says Ivy. “It’s a bird’s egg.”

Jane’s happiness is complete.

“It’s dinnertime for the family and guests,” Ivy adds. “That means you.”

*   *   *

“Aye aye, Captain Polepants,” Ivy says as she leads Jane down the corridor, past the polar bear.

“Is he military, then?”

“I don’t really remember,” says Ivy, “but I think we pretended he was a polar explorer who would bring his discoveries back to the queen.”

“Who was the queen?”

“Not me,” says Ivy.

She leads Jane down the stairs to the receiving hall, then into the single most enormous room Jane has ever seen inside a private house. “What is this?” Jane asks, trying not to squeak. “The throne room?”

Ivy makes a little heh sound and says, “The ballroom. But now you’ve got me trying to decide which room Octavian would choose as his throne room. Probably the library.”

Jane is barely listening. Deep and high-ceilinged, the ballroom shines with burnished dark mahogany wood. “The Thrashes have balls?”

“The galas are basically balls,” Ivy says. “People dressing up and dancing waltzes in fancy rooms, et cetera.” Then she leads Jane through a doorway into another long room, bright with chandeliers and containing a table that could seat thirty. Four people, two men and two women, are assembled at the far end, their voices sharp, cutting across one another. Kiran isn’t there.

As Ivy leads Jane toward them, Jane asks, “Will you eat with us?”

“No,” says Ivy. “I eat in the kitchen.” But she seems to interpret something in Jane’s expression, something Jane herself probably couldn’t articulate, for she takes Jane’s arm above the elbow and squeezes it, then touches one of the empty chairs so Jane will know the right place to sit. Then, flashing her another small, wicked grin, she pushes through a swinging door beyond the table.

Jane sits down. No one seems to notice her. She tries to blend in and absorb the rapid-fire conversation, which appears to be an argument about a family they all know personally.

“You don’t seriously think they did something bad to their own kids?” says an English-sounding black woman who has a heart-shaped face and short, curly dark hair. A shimmering star sits in each of her earlobes, maybe made of tiny, sparkling diamonds? She’s next to Philip Okada, the germophobe from the attic. She’s wearing a lot of foundation and eye shadow.

“No, I’m only saying they’ve clearly flipped out,” says the other woman, white, rosy-cheeked, with honey-brown hair and two rows of pearls at her throat. She’s got an American accent and a deep voice. “People do unpredictable, bad things when they flip out, so how can we know what they’ve done, really?”

“Is that a medical term?” Philip Okada asks her, teasing. “To ‘flip out’?”

“Philip,” says the pearl-necklace lady forcefully. “The Panzavecchias are our friends. They left their lab one day and held up a bank. Why would they choose to do that?”

“Well,” says the star-earring lady beside Philip, “you’ve heard the rumors about Giuseppe’s gambling problem and the Mafia.”

“Okay, but have any of you ever known Giuseppe Panzavecchia to so much as bet on a dog race?” says pearl necklace.

“But people hide habits when they become problems,” says star earrings. “We might not know what Giuseppe’s really like.”

“But we do know what he’s like,” says pearl necklace. “Don’t we? All Giuseppe ever does is brag about his kids. I mean, have you heard him talk about Grace and her amazing mnemonic memory devices? Grace is a little eight-year-old computer. Giuseppe could just die of pride. Maybe I’ll believe he’s got a touch of a gambling problem somewhere that he’s hiding from everyone. But to choose to get mixed up with the Sicilian Mafia when his life revolves around those three little kids? Why should we believe that? Just because he has an Italian name? It’s offensive.”

“Do you have another theory, then?” asks star earrings.

“No,” says pearl necklace. “I only reject that the Panzavecchias chose an affiliation with organized crime. Either something else we haven’t thought of is going on, or they both inhaled some toxic gas in that lab of theirs and flipped out.”

Mrs. Vanders pushes through the swinging door, making Jane jump. Laden with serving plates and bowls and followed by Ivy, she glares at Jane in a way that makes Jane feel guilty, instantly, before she’s even had time to consider what she might be guilty of. As she delivers to the table what looks like a giant pot roast, roasted vegetables, and an enormous pear salad, then exits abruptly through the swinging door, Jane struggles to assimilate all that’s happening—for she knows the name Panzavecchia. Not personally, like these people, but from the news.

It’s been headline news for a few days, in fact, maybe a week. Victoria and Giuseppe Panzavecchia, married microbiologists from two wealthy New York families, left their university lab in Manhattan at lunch one day; made a bank robbery attempt that failed when a particularly courageous bank teller challenged them to produce weapons they didn’t have; ran from the bank; rounded the corner; and promptly vanished into the ether. At practically the same moment, their daughter, Grace, went missing from her private school, and their sons, little Christopher and Baby Leo, were snatched from the arms of their nanny in Central Park. Baby Leo was ill. The nanny had only just noticed spots forming on his skin when he’d been taken.

The news has also reported that Giuseppe had been warned by the Mafia that if he didn’t pay his gambling debts, his family would be made to disappear. And now they have.

All these people at this table know the Panzavecchias? Do all rich New Yorkers know one another? The whole story seems suddenly absurd, in the very moment it becomes real. It sounds like some silly mobster movie. But if these people know the Panzavecchias, then Grace and little Christopher are real. Baby Leo is a real baby. Their lives changed suddenly, crazily, in one day. Just like Jane’s did the day her parents died in a plane crash when she was a baby. And the day she got the call about Aunt Magnolia.

Jane realizes now that Kiran and Mrs. Vanders’s comment about bank robbers, in the car on the way up to the house, had been a Panzavecchia joke.

“You all know the Panzavecchias?” she says aloud, then immediately regrets it, because now everyone is looking at her and she can hear the naïve wonder in her own voice.

“We do,” says the pearl-necklace lady crisply. “I’m Lucy,” she says, holding out a hand. “Lucy St. George. Ravi’s girlfriend, so to speak.”

“I’m Janie,” she says, shaking Lucy’s hand awkwardly, and adding, unsure that it’s even true, “Kiran’s friend.”

“I met Janie earlier,” Philip Okada announces to the table. “Upstairs. Janie, this is my wife, Phoebe.”

Star-earring lady holds out a perfectly manicured hand, nails turquoise. “Nice to meet you,” she says.

“And I’m Colin,” says the fourth person, reaching a long arm toward Jane. Kiran’s boyfriend. Jane supposes she was expecting someone boring, or bland, or generically rich-looking. But he’s a skinny, pale guy with sandy hair, gentle eyes, and a soft scattering of freckles that make him look young, sweet.

Heels strike on the wooden floor and Kiran strides into the room. At the sight of her familiar, irritable face, something in Jane’s chest loosens.

She slumps into the chair between Jane and Lucy. “Sorry,” she says shortly. “Phone call with bad reception. It’s raining frogs. What are we talking about? Janie, did you meet everyone?”

“We were very polite and introduced ourselves, sweetheart,” says Colin.

Kiran doesn’t look at Colin or indicate that she’s heard. “Do you have everything you need?” she asks Jane. “Is everyone being nice to you?”

“I’m fine,” says Jane.

“And how are you, Kiran?” asks Phoebe Okada. “What are you doing these days?”

“Is that code for ‘Do you have a job yet?’” asks Kiran.

Phoebe raises one perfectly groomed eyebrow. “Why? Do you have a job?”

“I think you know the answer to that.”

“Don’t you speak a lot of languages, Kiran?” says Philip Okada. “You could help Colin when his work takes him abroad. Don’t you sell to a lot of foreigners, Colin?”

Kiran speaks distinctly to the salt shaker she holds in her hand. “You want me to join my boyfriend on his work trips. So I can make it my life’s purpose to help him with his work.”

“He didn’t mean it that way, Kiran,” says Phoebe. “It would just be nice for you to have something to do.”

“Everyone wants to tell me what to do,” says Kiran.

Philip’s wife smoothes her expression, looking carefully neutral. Her makeup seems hard, masklike; Jane gets the feeling that tapping on her face would sound like hail hitting a window. Beside her, Philip seems limited to a small range of friendly expressions. The more belligerent Kiran becomes, the more unoffended he looks. They’re false, Jane realizes. They’re pretending at something.

“Kiran will be ready for the right work, when it presents itself,” Colin says firmly. “And she’ll be brilliant at it.”

Kiran doesn’t look at Colin. Her shoulders remain hard and straight. “Does anyone know when Ravi’s coming?” she asks.

“Tonight, late,” says Lucy St. George. “He texted me this afternoon. He had an auction in Providence, then headed to the Hamptons on his bike. He said someone was picking him up there.”

“Someone? Patrick?” says Kiran.

“I think so.”

Jane is boggled at the notion of Ravi bicycling from Providence to the Hamptons. It must be a hundred miles at the least.

“And where are you from, Janie?” Phoebe asks. “What kind of people are your parents?”

Jane is caught unawares. What kind of people are my parents? “Dead,” she says. “Yours?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” says Phoebe. “My parents run a refrigeration corporation in Portsmouth, in the south of England. Did you grow up in an orphanage?”

“Did you grow up in a refrigerator?”

This surprises a choked laugh out of Kiran. Jane flushes, shocked at herself, but Phoebe merely focuses imperturbably on her salad. When she drops a slice of pear onto the table, Philip says “Oops,” picks it up with his fingers, and feeds it to her, in plain view of everyone. It’s slightly embarrassing. Not to mention that he’s a very strange germophobe.

“My mother’s sister adopted me,” Jane tells Lucy St. George and Colin, since they seem more . . . genuine. “My parents died when I was too young to remember them. My aunt taught marine biology at the college where Kiran went. She was also an underwater photographer and a conservationist.”

“Is your aunt retired?” asks Colin.

“Colin!” says Kiran with sudden indignation.

“What?”

“You’re being intrusive! Leave her alone!”

“I’m sorry,” says Colin, honestly confused. “Did I say something bad?”

“It’s okay,” Jane says, embarrassed by Kiran’s burst of protectiveness. “She died, in December, in an expedition to Antarctica. She was going to photograph humpback whales.”

“Oh,” Colin says. “That’s awful. I’m sorry.”

“I tutored Janie in writing,” Kiran says, “when she was in high school and I was in college.”

“Christ,” Colin says. “You’re a child.”

If only, Jane thinks. If I were still a child, I’d be having dinner with Aunt Magnolia right now, instead of with these people. On special nights, they would eat at the diner in town. Aunt Magnolia had owned a beautiful long coat, a dark, iridescent purple with a lining that shifted from silver to gold depending on the light. She’d often left it unbuttoned, knowing that Jane loved the glimpses of the secret shimmer inside. It had made Aunt Magnolia look like some of her own photographs of squids in the deep. It had made her look like outer space.

“Has anyone spoken to my mother?” Kiran asks, which strikes Jane as a strange question for her to ask this group. Kiran’s mother divorced Octavian Thrash IV a long time ago.

“You mean your mother, or your stepmother?” Colin asks her. “Charlotte,” he explains, looking at Jane.

“My own mother, of course,” Kiran says. “Why? Have you seen Charlotte?”

“Of course not, sweetie. I would’ve told you if I’d seen her,” Colin responds, which makes no sense to Jane. The wedding was recent and Charlotte, Octavian’s new wife, lives in this house. Where is she, anyway? Where is Octavian? Don’t they eat dinner? The air is moving against Jane’s eardrums. Whispering a word? Has someone at the table whispered “Charlotte”? Kiran absently rubs one of her ears and Jane does the same, then notices herself mirroring Kiran. She wonders, Isn’t that kind of peculiar?

Then she forgets.

“My mother is a scientist too, like Janie’s aunt,” Kiran says to Phoebe, “as I think you know. A theoretical physicist. She could tell you things about the universe that would show you how small you are. And my stepmother is an interior designer who always worked for a living before she married my father, and she’s damn good at it. Remember whose house you’re in, if you’re going to be snotty to my friends.”

There is a pause. “Kiran,” Colin says, “would you please pass me the salt?”

It’s the first time Jane has seen Kiran and Colin look into each other’s faces since the dinner began. Colin wears the expression of a man determined not to frighten a trapped creature. Kiran looks as if she might throw the salt at his face. She hands it to him silently.

Jane feels a bump against her leg and spends the rest of the meal passing tidbits down to Jasper.

*   *   *

Later that night, a sound wakes Jane, pulls her out of a dream about Baby Leo Panzavecchia. He’s wailing, he’s feverish. His angelic face is covered with angry welts and pustules; he’s dying. “Silly Baby Leo,” Jane mutters. “Everyone gets chicken pox. You’re not going to die.”

Through her bedroom window, the moon gleams low in the sky, a slice of orange. The storm is over. What woke her? The house has made a noise, like an annoyed grumble at being pulled out of its repose. Or did that noise come from Jane herself? It’s hard to tell.

It’s past four, which is unfortunate, because Jane can never fall asleep again once she’s awake. When she was little, Aunt Magnolia would stroke her hair, telling her to pretend that her lungs were a jellyfish, slowly swelling and emptying as they moved through underwater space. “Your body is a microcosm of the ocean,” she’d used to say. Jane would fall asleep with Aunt Magnolia’s hand in her hair, imagining herself the entire ocean, vast and quiet.

Now Jane sleeps with a blue wool hat of Aunt Magnolia’s that she’d unfailingly packed on her polar expeditions but left behind on that last Antarctic trip. This hat has only ever known Aunt Magnolia alive and well. It’s scratchy and springy. Jane reaches around under the covers for it, finds it, balls it up, pulls it close to her face, and breathes. Jellyfish are ancient creatures. Jane can be ancient and silent too.

No. Sleep is impossible. Pushing out of bed, Jane finds a hoodie to wear over her Doctor Who pajamas. What is this house like, she wonders, in the middle of the night?

Her curiosity outweighs her trepidation.

As she steps out of her rooms, she decides that the house is making protesting noises. Rumbles and groans, and something unplaceable, like the underwater echo of the laughter of children. But after all, a large old house would make strange noises, so she dismisses it. And she doesn’t notice herself cringing as the sound hurts the back of her teeth. She doesn’t feel her breath catching.

Motion-sensor spotlights hit each painting, one by one, as Jane progresses down the corridor toward the atrium, then turn off again once she’s passed. Forgetting about Captain Polepants, she trips over his head. Softly swearing, she continues on.

The house’s grumbles give way to actual human voices, distant and angry. Someone is having an argument in the courtyard. Jane begins to notice the scent of a pipe. Cautiously, she moves into one of the balustered archways and peers down.

A young man in black leather gesticulates with a motorcycle helmet at an older man, maybe in his fifties, who wears a silk, paisley bathrobe and bites down on the pipe Jane smelled. Their coloring is different, the elder man is white and the younger is brown, but Jane can see the father-son resemblance in the way their faces flash with anger. She can hear it in their voices. This is Octavian Thrash IV and Kiran’s twin brother, Ravi, who, Jane now realizes, did not ride a bicycle today from Providence to the Hamptons.

“Silly boy,” Octavian is saying. “Of course I didn’t sell your fishy.”

“Why do you do that?” Ravi says in disgust. “Why do you make a point of talking to me like I’m a child?”

“Stop behaving like a pollywog and I’ll stop treating you like one,” Octavian says. “Waking Patrick up in the middle of the morning to fetch you. Waking me up with your indignation when you get here and a sculpture’s not where you’ve left it.”

“Excuse me for being concerned about a missing Brancusi. And I didn’t wake Patrick up,” Ravi says. “He met me for a drink on the mainland and it got late, as it always does with Patrick. I didn’t wake you up either. You’re a creature of the night.”

“Not an excuse for you to stumble in drunk and raving.”

“I’m not drunk,” Ravi says distinctly. “And I merely want to know why the Brancusi fish isn’t in the receiving hall. No, forget that—I want to know why you don’t care it’s not in the receiving hall. You understand the piece I’m talking about? The one Ivy used to build an underwater kingdom for out of Play-Doh? You let her keep it in her bedroom for weeks, surrounded by Loch Ness Monster LEGOs.”

“I know the piece,” says Octavian wearily.

“Jesus, Dad, it’s worth millions. It was your own acquisition! Where the hell is it?”

“I expect Mrs. Vanders thought it would look better somewhere else,” Octavian says. “Or maybe she’s studying it for provenance. Between you and Vanny, it’s a wonder there’s any art left in the house. She made me return a seventeenth-century tapestry to some old geezer in Fort Lauderdale.”

“Right,” says Ravi testily. “Because she figured out it was Nazi plunder, acquired by your esteemed grandfather during the Holocaust. How dare she.”

“It’s damned amusing, you getting all huffy about provenance,” says Octavian. “I know what you’re up to with your mother. How do you explain the provenance of the art she supplies you with?”

Ravi peers at Octavian without expression. Crosses his arms. “There’s no reason to do a provenance study on the Brancusi,” he says coolly. “Vanny and I know everywhere it’s been since Brancusi created it.”

“Well, surely you don’t think someone stole it?”

“I don’t know what to think,” Ravi says, swiping a hand through wet hair and turning away from his father. “It’s not like you not to care. You used to be a normal person, who slept normal hours, and had normal conversations, and loved the art as much as I do, and gave a shit.”

“Watch your language,” says Octavian sharply.

“Whatever,” says Ravi. “At least you give a shit about something. I’m tired and cold. I’m going to bed.”

The courtyard has its own matching interior staircases, on the east and west sides, that rise to the top floor. Ravi chooses one and begins to climb.

After a moment, his father takes the pipe from his mouth and says, “Welcome home, son.”

Ravi stops climbing. He doesn’t turn around to face his father, but he says, “How’s Mum?”

“Your mother is tiptop, of course,” says Octavian. “She always is. What did Patrick need that kept you out so late? Brooding again? Affairs of the heart?”

Ravi breathes a laugh and doesn’t answer. “He’s a silent brooder, you know that. How’s Kiran?”

“Your sister has not yet deigned to visit me.”

“Well, you don’t make it easy, you know, with your vampiric hours. And Charlotte?”

A draft touches Jane’s throat, making her shiver. “Your stepmother is still away,” Octavian says sadly, glancing up at the glass ceiling and showing Jane, suddenly, where Kiran gets her snub nose, her broad face. Then Octavian turns and wanders through the north arches into a part of the house Jane hasn’t seen yet.

Ravi continues to climb, his footsteps echoing. The house seems to settle into a sigh around the aloneness of the two men. A long, deep breath.

Jane knows Ravi’s rooms are near hers on the third floor, but he stops at the second floor and disappears into the bowels of the house. Interesting, thinks Jane, remembering that Lucy St. George introduced herself as Ravi’s girlfriend, “so to speak.” Whatever that means.

She’s trying to decide where to go next when Jasper appears, making small whining noises at her and hopping.

“Shush,” Jane whispers to him, bending down to soothe him.

He moves closer to the main staircase that leads down to the receiving hall, and whimpers again. He seems to be trying to lure her to those stairs. “Do you need to go outside, Jasper?” she whispers, going with him, beginning to follow him down the stairs.

The spotlights are no longer turning on as Jane moves. It’s quite dark. She follows Jasper’s low, black, descending shadow, clings to the banister, and wishes she’d paid more attention to the location of light switches earlier.

Jasper stops on the second-story landing so suddenly that she walks into him and loses her balance, tumbling against the banister, grabbing on to it with a gasp. When she pushes herself back toward the nice, solid wall, Jasper trots around behind her and begins to head-butt her calves over and over.

Everyone is bonkers, Jane thinks. “Jasper,” she whispers, swatting at him. “What the hell are you doing?”

Before her, dimly, Jane recognizes the huge oil painting she was admiring earlier, the painting of the house interior with the umbrella left open to dry on the checkered floor. Jasper is still head-butting her. “Enough!” she whispers. “Knock it off, screwball!” She starts down the next flight of steps, but he makes an urgent yipping noise behind her. She turns back. “What? What is it?” but she can barely see him, and when she climbs back up to the landing, he’s gone.

Jane turns up the steps, wondering if maybe he’s returned to the third floor. But she doesn’t find him again. She’s just decided to return to her rooms when a figure appears across the way, gliding past the opposite archways, then out of sight.

Ravi again? Or maybe Octavian the Fourth?

No. It looked like Philip Okada, Phoebe’s germophobic, Chuck Taylors–wearing husband. Jane hears a door swing open and closed and recognizes it as the door to the servants’ wing.

What business does Philip Okada have going into the servants’ quarters at four-something in the morning?

On impulse, she rounds the perimeter of the courtyard and slips silently into the servants’ wing. There’s no sign of Philip. She’ll be spotted if anyone comes out of a room, unless she manages to dive into one of the small side hallways in time. Holding her breath, she tiptoes along and sets herself to the lunatic task of resting her ear against doors.

Nothing. Door after door after door, the only thing she hears is nothing. The servants of Tu Reviens are enviable sleepers. She puts her ear to the door she knows is Ivy’s. Also nothing. She’s as relieved as she is ashamed of herself. I hardly know her. It’s none of my business what she does or whom she does it with and I shouldn’t be sneaking around spying on her. What is wrong with me? She moves back into the main corridor, determined to return to bed.

Suddenly, a door opens and light spills out from a small hallway near the end of the main corridor. Jane freezes, then jumps into a nearby side hallway and flattens herself against the wall where she can’t be seen.

“You’ll have to stay there until the final phase,” says a deep voice Jane recognizes. Patrick Yellan.

“While not knowing where I am?” says the English-accented voice of Philip Okada, dryly. “Won’t that be lovely.”

“Be grateful for it,” says Patrick. “The less information you have, the safer you are.”

“Yes, yes,” says Philip. “Who doesn’t like a mystery holiday in a room with no windows?”

“Not everyone is swallowing the story you’re putting out,” says a third voice, female, brusque, English-accented. Phoebe Okada.

“Don’t worry about it,” says Patrick.

“When it involves the safety of my husband?” says Phoebe sharply. “Go to hell, Patrick.”

“We’ll handle it,” says Patrick roughly.

The voices are receding. Jane, not entirely in her right mind, can’t help herself: She edges out of her hiding place and directs one eye into the corridor. The three conspirators are at the far end, passing through the big wooden door that leads to the west attics. Patrick is in front. Phoebe is next, wrapped in a pale green, silky robe. Philip Okada brings up the rear, still wearing his blue suit, carrying a plush white bag with orange ducks on it, and holding a gun.

The door closes behind them. Jane turns and dashes out of the servants’ quarters, heart racing. While she was in the west attics earlier, she saw a spire through the big windows, somewhere in the east wing. She wonders now if she might be able to see into the west attics from that spire.

Starting around the atrium, Jane barrels headlong into the dog, then falls over him, trying not to cry out or crush him. Scrambling to her feet, she tries to get around him, push him away, but he’s head-butting her again and his low center of gravity makes him stick in place like a tree stump.

“Jasper! Move!” Jane whispers, then accidentally steps on one of his toes. He squeals.

“Sorry!” Jane whispers. “Sorry!”

He barks.

“Jasper-Bear?” rises a voice from below. “You okay? Come here, boy.”

It’s Ravi, climbing the courtyard steps from the second level. “Yes,” Jane whispers to Jasper, “go bark at someone who’s not trying to be stealthy. Hey!” she cries as the dog takes her pajama leg in his mouth and starts pulling. Jane grabs her waistband as it slides down her hip. “What are you trying to do, pants me?”

“Who the hell are you?” says Ravi, behind Jane, out of breath from running the rest of the way up the stairs. “And what are you doing to my dog?”

“Your precious dog is mauling my pajamas,” Jane retorts, not even looking around. “Jasper! Stop it, or I won’t take any more pictures of you with the umbrellas!”

“Oh, hell,” Ravi says, “a weirdo. My mother didn’t bring you here, did she? Oh, god, I don’t even want to know where you’re from.”

“Your sister brought me here,” Jane says, “and your dog is the weirdo.”

Jasper, who’s finally released Jane, now stares at her reproachfully. Then he turns and marches away.

“That dog may be weird,” says Ravi, “but he’s still my dog.”

Turning to Ravi, Jane finds that shadowy, predawn light suits him. Spectacularly. Ravi is tall and solid, electric, with scowly eyebrows and a face that flashes with feeling. He’s got dramatic white streaks in his hair too, surely premature, since he’s Kiran’s twin.

“You’re sure my mother didn’t bring you here?” Ravi says. “You look like you’d be one of her projects, not Kiran’s.”

“I’m my own project, thank you very much,” Jane says coldly.

This startles a smile onto his face. “Ravi,” he says, holding out a hand. He’s shivering, but his hand is warm.

“Janie,” she says. She decides not to tell him about Patrick and the Okadas and the gun. She has no idea where anyone fits in here.

She falls into step with him, walking down the east corridor. He has a grin that’s never more than a few words away and eyes that are careful to catch hers frequently. He carries his motorcycle helmet under one arm. He smells like wet leather.

“You haven’t seen a fish sculpture anywhere, have you?” he says. “Looks a little like a squashed bean, on a mirrored pedestal?”

“Doesn’t sound familiar,” Jane says.

“I like your Doctor Who pajamas,” he says. “Which Doctor do you favor?”

“I like the companions,” says Jane automatically.

“Sure,” says Ravi, “who doesn’t? But I think I’d go for Ten. Ten is yummy. And youthful.”

“The Tenth Doctor was nine hundred and three years old,” says Jane loftily.

“Well, yeah, but Ten was youthful in spirit,” Ravi says. “Yeesh. Do you let anything past?”

Before they get to their rooms, he stops at an unusual door Jane hasn’t yet noticed. It’s wooden and arched, with a doormat that reads WELCOME TO MY WORLDS. It has a mail slot and a bellpull and it occurs to Jane that it may be the entrance to the east spire.

“I feel like I’m in a Winnie-the-Pooh story,” Jane says.

Ravi grins again and says, “Those are favorites of mine. Someday, somewhere, I’ll meet a Heffalump.” Then he slips his hand inside his coat and pulls out one perfect nasturtium blossom. He pushes it through the mail slot and lets it fall through.

Together, Jane and Ravi walk on. “G’night then,” he says, retreating into the room right before hers, yawning mightily.

“G’night,” she responds, as much to Captain Polepants as to Ravi, who’s already gone.

*   *   *

There’s no point trying to get any more sleep now that she’s seen what she’s seen. Philip with a gun. Patrick, who’s Ivy’s brother. Patrick, who keeps telling Kiran he has something to confess, but never confesses. Ivy, who clammed up yesterday whenever Philip was around, or whenever Jane asked her what should have been innocuous questions.

Jane finds a clear wedge of yellow shag carpet near the morning room windows and lies down. She needs to think. The moon is smaller now, higher, paler than it was before, a slice of apple. Slowly it slides out of her view. The sky lightens and dissolves the stars.

No matter how many times she goes over the conversation, she can’t make sense of it. Philip is going somewhere and it’s dangerous. Philip is going somewhere, but he doesn’t know where? Patrick and someone else have put out a story that not everyone’s buying. Okay. A story about what?

Phoebe and Philip had been playacting at dinner; Jane had suspected it, and now she’s sure of it. Pretending to care about Kiran and her job. Pretending to care about the Panzavecchias. Pretending to be snobbish about Jane and her aunt.

Is the Panzavecchia story the one that not everyone’s buying? It’s true that Lucy St. George isn’t buying it. But what could Patrick and the Okadas have to do with a bank robbery, the Mafia, and a pair of missing socialites?

There’s the missing Brancusi too. How does that fit in?

Jane wonders, suddenly, if she’s being naïve; if it’s normal for rich people in fancy houses to walk around with guns. This is the USA, after all; judging by the news, doesn’t every third person have a gun? Maybe what’s remarkable is that she’s never seen anyone casually carrying a gun before this.

Then again, aren’t the Okadas British? Do Brits wander around with guns?

Why would Patrick, who’s a servant, be in charge of whatever’s going on? And if Patrick is in charge of something underhanded . . . does Kiran know? And what does it mean about Ivy? About all her strange moments of deliberate nonchalance?

It depresses Jane to think about that. She doesn’t want reasons not to trust Ivy.

Breathe, Aunt Magnolia would say. Wait. Let it settle. The pieces will start to fit together in a way that makes sense. And be careful, my darling.

What would an umbrella look like if it were a mystery? Jane wonders suddenly. Even better, what if it were a weapon of self-defense?

The ferrule, the tips, and the rod would be sharp. The springs would be tightly wound so that the canopy opened hard and fast like a blow from a shield.

“And I’ll choose shades of brown and gold that suit Jasper,” Jane mutters as she rolls up onto her feet.

An hour later, she’s trimming down the diameter of a birch rod using the lathe, wearing goggles and a heavy canvas apron, when she hears someone explode through her outer door. She pushes her goggles up into her dark curls.

Ravi looms in the morning room doorway, wearing black silk pajama bottoms and nothing else. It’s impossible not to stare.

“What the hell are you doing?” he yells, wincing at the light. “Do you know what time it is? Do you appreciate that I’m sleeping on the other side of the wall? My mother brought you here from a hell dimension!”

“You seem obsessed with your mother,” says Jane. “Have you considered therapy?”

He moans, rubbing his face. “No one would believe the truth about my mother.”

“Mm-hm,” says Jane. “Is that because it’s your own special truth?”

“What the hell are you building?”

“An umbrella,” says Jane.

“Are you kidding me?” he says, then sweeps his hand out in a gesture that encompasses the entire room. “You aren’t satisfied that there are enough umbrellas?”

“I make umbrellas,” Jane says, shortly. “It’s . . . what I do.”

Wearily, he rubs his head. His white-streaked hair must’ve been wet when he lay down, for it’s dried in a funny orientation, flat and sticking out to the right, like it’s secretly trying to point Jane in that direction without him knowing. “You know, I think Patrick mentioned you last night,” he says.

“Patrick talks about a lot of things,” says Jane significantly.

Ravi scrunches his nose. “Maybe to you,” he says. “He’s the strong, silent type to me.”

“He’s never . . . confessed anything to you?”

“That’s a really odd question,” says Ravi. “Why, did he confess something to you? Didn’t you literally just meet him, like, yesterday?”

“Yeah. Never mind.”

“I think Kiran mentioned you too.”

“Wow, you must know everything about me,” Jane says, with a touch of sarcasm that alarms her. Ravi is a college graduate, an heir to the Thrash fortune, but he doesn’t make her feel like a child. He makes her feel like she might be about to do something unwise.

“Do you hate me or something?” he says, grinning.

“I’m working,” says Jane.

“Yes,” he says. “On umbrellas, at five thirty in the morning.”

“You’re interrupting.”

He’s looking around the room now with curiosity. “You made all these umbrellas?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“What do you mean, how?”

“Well, how does one build an umbrella? What’s the first step?”

“I don’t know,” says Jane. “You could start a few different ways. I’m not, like, an expert.”

“As an art appreciator,” he says, “I’m curious.”

“Well,” Jane says in confusion, “I mean, you can watch if you want.”

He sighs, then yawns, then marches out, then marches back in again, wrapping the blanket from Jane’s bed around himself. He weaves his way through the saws, umbrella parts, and umbrellas to the striped sofa Jane has pushed against the back wall, then settles himself down. For the next couple of hours, he alternates sleeping on her sofa with waking grouchily to the noises of her saws and asking intelligent questions about umbrella-making. “How do you keep the ribs from rubbing through the canopy after repeated openings?” he mumbles, then grasps his hair. “Christ. I keep dreaming about that damn Panzavecchia baby. Little Leo, you know?”

“I insert a small piece of fabric between the joints and the canopy as a buffer,” Jane says, focusing hard on the work of her fingers. “It’s called a prevent.”

He’s already half-asleep again. Jane notices, through her absorption, that his cleverness fades from his face when he’s sleeping. She wonders if she’s wrong to believe that he’s ignorant of the Patrick stuff.

“And yeah,” she says, speaking to herself. Speaking to the house, which groans back at her. “I dreamt about him too.”

*   *   *

Ravi is still asleep on Jane’s sofa when her stomach informs her that it’s time for breakfast.

Not knowing the breakfast routine in this house, and not really wanting to come face-to-face with someone alarming like Patrick or Philip, she texts Kiran, who’s likely to be protective. “Breakfast?”

Kiran texts back. “Be there soon. Go to banquet hall.”

Jane closes Ravi into the morning room so she can get changed. Aunt Magnolia? What do I wear on a day like this?

She pulls on a ruffled dress shirt the red-orange color of a weedy sea dragon, black-and-white-striped jeans like a zebra seahorse, and her big black boots. She rolls her sleeves up to the elbows so her tattoo tentacles are visible. Feeling a bit more courageous, but with fists clenched tight, she heads down to the banquet hall.

Colin, Lucy St. George, and Phoebe Okada sit at the far end of the long table, silently drinking coffee and eating poached eggs and toast. Jane slides into an open seat, studying Phoebe, who’s heavily made-up again, her eyes rimmed with smoky grays and her lips a deep purple. Phoebe stares back at Jane with an aggressively pleasant expression, until, losing her nerve, Jane’s eyes drop to her plate.

Colin reads a newspaper, an actual, physical newspaper that makes Jane wonder how newspapers are delivered to this house. Behind the smooth curtain of her honey-brown hair, Lucy reads a book, The House of Mirth, with occasional glances at her phone whenever it vibrates. Various strangers keep stomping through the banquet hall, shouting to each other, carrying cleaning supplies, buckets and vases, stringed lights, a ladder, dropping things. The gala is tomorrow. She’s surprised that the houseguests seem limited to this small group.

“Who comes to these parties?” Jane asks. “Rich New Yorkers?”

Colin looks up from his newspaper. “Yes,” he says with a sympathetic smile. “But not just from New York. Up and down the eastern seaboard, and always people from abroad too.”

“How do they get here?”

“In their own boats, mostly, though Octavian also charters a couple of boats for any of the guests who need it. There’s a seasonal staff too, as you can see.”

“Where’s Octavian, anyway?” Phoebe asks, turning her implacable gaze on Colin. “We haven’t seen him once since we arrived. He wouldn’t go away on a gala weekend, would he?”

“I think he’s lurking around,” says Colin. “Ravi said something about him being depressed.”

“Ah,” says Phoebe. “That’s too bad, though not surprising, with Charlotte missing.”

“Charlotte’s missing?” says Jane, startled.

“I thought you were Kiran’s friend?” says Phoebe, raising one eyebrow. “She didn’t tell you her stepmother is missing?”

“We talk about other things,” Jane says defensively.

“Kiran can be very closemouthed,” says Colin, “even with those she’s closest to. Charlotte went away unexpectedly about a month ago. She left a cryptic note for Octavian, but then she never wrote again, and no one’s heard from her.”

“But, where was she going?” asks Jane. “Hasn’t anyone searched for her?”

“She didn’t say,” says Colin. “Octavian hired investigators and everything, once a few days had gone by and it started to seem like she’d truly vanished. But they didn’t turn up much, just some discrepancies about her background and the suggestion that her mother might have been a crook.”

Jane’s ears are uncomfortable. “What kind of crook?” she asks, swallowing hard.

“Some sort of con artist,” says Colin.

Jane, rubbing her ears, is trying to figure out how this might connect to the weirdness from last night. A missing stepmother and Philip going on a mystery journey. The Panzavecchias, also missing, and the sculpture missing too. And a con artist in the family?

“How did you sleep?” Jane asks Phoebe abruptly, willing her to say something about nighttime parlays, and guns.

“Badly,” Phoebe says as a flash of some feeling—unhappiness, or worry—crosses her face. Very suddenly it makes her softer, accessible, and Jane sees that her makeup is a camouflage so she’ll seem bright and awake. In fact, her eyes are lined, her face heavy with exhaustion.

“I slept badly too,” says Lucy St. George, looking up from her book. “This house wakes me up. I hear it moaning and sighing, as if it’s lonely here on this island, far away from other houses.”

Yes, Jane thinks. Someone else here has an imagination.

“My Lucy is ever a poet,” says Colin.

“Your Lucy?” Jane says. “I thought you had a Kiran, not a Lucy.”

“I’m pleased to report that I have one of each,” says Colin, smiling. “Kiran is my girlfriend and Lucy is my cousin.”

“Oh! Are you a St. George, then, too?”

“Alas,” says Colin, “I’m a Mack. The poor Irish relation.”

“Oh, Colin,” says Lucy St. George. “Please don’t start talking about the potato famine.”

“And why shouldn’t I talk about the potato famine?”

“It’s tacky,” says Lucy. “You went to all the most expensive boarding schools and universities.”

“My education was financed by Lucy’s father, my uncle Buckley,” Colin says to Jane with a smirk. “He was training me up to be useful.”

“Oh, here we go.” Lucy rolls her eyes.

“I see,” says Jane. “Are you useful?”

“Very,” Colin responds. “At least to Uncle Buckley. He’s a fine art dealer. I find him art to buy, and then I find him rich people to sell it to. It’s Ravi’s job too.”

Jane wonders how much training is needed for a job like that, if it’s something any person could do, if they learned enough. “I think I’d like a job that relates to art,” she says cautiously, “someday.”

“Would you?” says Colin. “Do you have an eye for art, or for design?”

“I guess.”

“Are you artistic?”

“I guess,” Jane says again.

“You could focus it in some practical direction, like architecture,” says Colin. “Have you ever taken a drafting class? I hope you’re thinking about ways to differentiate yourself from everyone else. Are you being strategic about it? Do you have any unique interests or skills? What’s your brand?”

Jane feels a sudden compulsion to shield the existence of her homemade umbrellas from Colin’s questions. “I’m not that artistic,” she lies.

“Too bad. No new news about the Panzavecchias,” Colin says, turning another page in his newspaper.

“Nothing online either,” says Lucy. “I wonder if any of my contacts know anything.”

“Contacts?” Jane says.

“Lucy’s a private art investigator,” says Colin.

“What’s private art?”

“She’s a private investigator,” Colin says with a small smile. “Collectors hire her to find their stolen art when the cops come up empty. She’s very good, despite anything you might hear about a recent mishap with a Rubens.”

“Oh, Colin,” says Lucy calmly. “Do I have to listen to stories of my own mishaps at breakfast? Besides, Jane doesn’t want to hear about chasing art thieves.”

“I kind of do,” says Jane, thinking of the missing Brancusi sculpture, and wondering if this might elucidate anything.

Lucy looks at Colin with a weary indulgence, then returns to The House of Mirth. It’s a clear dismissal.

“In the movies,” says Colin, turning back to Jane, “it’s always some rich collector who wants to steal the Mona Lisa or something. Right?”

“Or a famous Monet,” says Jane, “or a Van Gogh or Michelangelo’s David. Maybe they even steal it for fun.”

“Exactly,” he says. “But in real life, the smart, professional art thief steals a lesser work, less famous, by a lesser master. Preferably a piece nobody’s ever heard of, by an artist nobody knows, worth forty thousand dollars instead of forty million dollars. Something that doesn’t have a well-documented past, so that it can be reintroduced back into the market without raising suspicions, and sold to someone who has no idea it’s stolen.”

“Oh. I guess that makes sense.”

“When a famous masterpiece is stolen,” Colin says, “like the Van Dyke or the Vermeer that makes front-page news, there’s little hope of finding a collector who’ll buy it. That picture usually ends up being passed from one criminal to another as collateral in the drug trade.”

“Really?” says Jane, startled.

“Really.”

“But, do drug traffickers care about art?”

“They care about cash alternatives,” Colin says matter-of-factly.

“I don’t understand what that means,” she says.

Colin smiles. Jane senses he’s enjoying being the one in the know. “Money laundering is a tricky business,” he says. “It’s harder and harder for criminals to move cash around without getting caught. But art is easy to move, and when it’s stolen, it’s all over the news how much it’s worth. Very convenient for me, if I’ve got a famous, stolen Rubens and want to trade it for a lot of drugs. Or if I need a loan to buy the drugs, but my lender requires collateral. A famous picture makes great collateral.”

“Do you think you’ve explained it in enough detail, Colin?” says Lucy sweetly, her nose still buried in her book. “Perhaps you’d like to take Jane on a field trip?”

“You’re the one who should do that, cuz,” says Colin. “It’s your world, not mine.” He cocks a significant eyebrow at Jane. “Don’t tell anyone,” he says, “but sometimes Lucy has to go undercover into the drug world.”

“Voluntarily?” Jane says, staring at Lucy, who calmly reads her book, looking, for all the world, like someone who belongs in an armchair crocheting doilies and eating crumpets. She’s wearing pearls again this morning, around her neck and in her ears.

“Mm-hm,” says Colin. “Often, the only way to recover a masterpiece is to set up a sting.”

“You do that?” Jane says to Lucy. “What do you pose as? A drug dealer? What do you wear?”

“Colin,” says Lucy, putting her book down and fixing her cousin with quiet eyes. “I’m going to invoke my position as family badass and tell you it’s time to shut up now.”

“But, Lucy,” Jane says, “does this mean that last night at dinner, when you said you couldn’t picture the Panzavecchias getting involved in organized crime, you knew what you were talking about? Like, from experience?”

“Yes,” says Colin, looking upon his cousin with amusement. “Lucy knows what she’s talking about. She’s met some of those people.”

“Colin,” says Lucy. Her voice is a warning.

“Well, I don’t see any reason not to believe it,” Phoebe puts in. “If Lucy poses as drug dealers and executes undercover stings, why shouldn’t Giuseppe owe money to mobsters?”

“Sure,” says Lucy, frustrated and sarcastic. “Why not.”

“Lucy recently managed to intercept a stolen Rubens,” Colin says pleasantly, “in the Poconos. She traded a big pile of heroin for it and, once she had the Rubens in hand, called in the FBI, who arrested all the bad guys. It was a great triumph. Then some random carjacker stopped her and stole the Rubens before she could pass it on to the FBI. Very embarrassing. It’s made her a bit touchy. Has Ravi met you yet?” Colin asks Jane, transitioning subjects abruptly. “He’s going to like you.”

“What? Why should Ravi like me?” Jane responds, confused, then suddenly mortified, remembering that Lucy is Ravi’s girlfriend and Ravi is sleeping, shirtless, on her sofa.

“Oh, he likes variety,” says Colin.

“Variety!” says Jane as Lucy claps her mouth shut and sits there looking startled and stung. Why is Colin taking digs at Lucy?

“I’m sure Ravi will barely notice me,” says Jane. “I’m nobody.”

“We’ll see,” says Colin.

Lucy rises to her feet, closes one hand around her book and the other around her phone, and stalks from the room.

“Why did you do that?” asks Jane.

“Do what?” asks Colin.

“Try to make your cousin jealous of me.”

“It’s family stuff,” he says with a benevolent expression. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay, but don’t use me as one of your weapons.”

“Good girl,” says Phoebe crisply, nodding at Jane, surprising Jane so much that she can only stare back.

“I can see I’m being ganged up on,” says Colin. “Where’s Philip this morning, Phoebe?”

“Philip was called out in the night,” says Phoebe, a crease of worry appearing in the center of her forehead.

Jane’s eyes are riveted to Phoebe’s face. “Out?” she says. “Out where?”

“For his work,” Phoebe says.

“What did he do, swim to the mainland?” Jane asks.

“Philip knows how to operate a boat. The Thrashes have lots of boats. It happens. He’s a medical doctor.”

“Oh,” says Jane, picturing Philip Okada again with latex gloves on his hands. “His germophobia must make his job difficult,” she adds, fishing.

Phoebe blinks. “His germophobia,” she repeats.

“Yes,” Jane says. “He mentioned his germophobia.”

“It’s a recent development,” says Phoebe.

“Since when?” says Colin. “I didn’t know he was germophobic.”

“It’s not unusual for medical doctors,” says Phoebe. “He doesn’t like to talk about it.”

“What kind of doctor is he?” asks Jane.

“A GP,” says Phoebe.

“I see,” says Jane. “Doesn’t that mean general practitioner?”

“Yes. Why?”

“No reason,” says Jane. “I’m just sorry there isn’t another doctor who can fill in for him while he’s on vacation. I mean, it’d be one thing if he were the only doctor in the world who could attach someone’s brain back to their spinal cord, but lots of people are GPs.”

“My husband is very devoted to his patients,” says Phoebe. “Are you belittling his work?”

“Oh, Phoebe,” says Colin. “I’m sure she wasn’t. Have you eaten enough? Here. Have some fruit.”

“I’m sorry,” says a new voice, speaking with a mild accent Jane can’t particularly place.

They all turn to stare at the East Asian man with salt-and-pepper hair who’s stepped in from the kitchen and stopped just inside the doors. “I forget the way to the receiving hall,” he says, clutching a bucket to his chest. Jane assumes he’s one of the seasonal staff, cleaning for the gala.

“It’s that way,” says Colin, pointing to an exit at the other end of the room. “Pass into the ballroom, then choose the second doorway on the left.”

“Thank you,” says the man. He disappears through the exit.

At that moment, the door to the kitchen swings open to reveal Mrs. Vanders, who pointedly locks eyes with Phoebe.

“Well then,” says Phoebe. “I’ve finished my breakfast.”

She crosses the room with loud claps from her high-heeled boots and takes the same exit the cleaner took.

Mrs. Vanders stays in the kitchen doorway and directs another impenetrable expression at Jane. Then she swings away.

Kiran never showed up for breakfast at all. Colin is being insensitive to Lucy. Phoebe is lying about her husband and almost seemed as if she intentionally followed that cleaner. Jasper’s got nothing on these people.

Jane finishes her breakfast. Then she goes straight through the adjoining door into the kitchen. It’s time to ask Mrs. Vanders what’s behind that stare.

*   *   *

But Mrs. Vanders is gone.

Mr. Vanders is there, sitting in the enormous kitchen, his back to Jane, bent over messy piles of blueprints at a long table. Regular blueprints, not Ivy’s detailed ones. He’s muttering angrily.

Patrick mans a mountain of eggs and a pot of boiling water at an oversized stove with about a dozen burners. He’s rubbing his eyes and yawning, no doubt because first he and Ravi had a late night together—brooding, wasn’t it?—on the mainland, then he snuck around the house with the Okadas until dawn, being mysterious. Patrick’s jaw, Jane notices, is strong and elegant. He probably looks like a Brontë hero when he broods.

“Out until four in the morning with Ravi, two nights before the gala,” grumbles Mr. Vanders, “and all of us scurrying to find that damn thing. You owe Cook, young man.”

“How about I pay him back by cooking breakfast this morning,” says Patrick sourly. Then he notices Jane near the door. “Janie. Are you looking for Kiran?”

When Mr. Vanders hears Patrick’s words, he turns, pushes up from the table, and stares at Jane exactly the way his wife does, except that he does it from a dark face and under shaggy white eyebrows. Jane can just imagine their wedding photo, the two of them glaring out of it with withering expressions. Next, his gaze takes in Jane’s eclectic outfit.

“I’m looking for Mrs. Vanders,” says Jane.

“You might have some of your aunt Magnolia’s style,” Mr. Vanders announces gruffly, “but she had a subtlety you lack.”

Jane is thunderstruck. “You knew my aunt Magnolia?”

He waves a pen in an impatient gesture. “My wife wishes to explain it herself,” he says. “I think she went up to our rooms. Fourth door on the right. Either that or she’s on the third floor, east wing, beginning her daily inventory of the art. Or she’s dealing with the day staff, which would place her anywhere in the house.”

“How helpful,” says Jane.

“Hmph,” he says. “Your aunt was not sarcastic.”

Distantly, a noise begins, like a shrilling teakettle. It stutters, fluctuates so that it’s hard to tell where it’s coming from—the vents in the walls? The burners of the stove? In the very moment Jane recognizes it as a wailing child, it turns to a wild sort of laughter and she clenches her teeth. “What is that?”

“I should think it’s obvious that it’s a child,” says Mr. Vanders.

“Are there many children here?”

“It’s a large staff,” he responds. “Most people in life have children.”

“I saw a little girl digging in the garden yesterday,” says Jane.

Mr. Vanders freezes. Astonishment lights his face, then vanishes so quickly that Jane wonders if she imagined it. What could possibly be so significant about a little girl digging in the garden?

Pointing his pen at the exit, he practically commands, “Talk to Mrs. Vanders!”

“Well, geez. I hope she’s a better conversationalist than everyone else in this house,” Jane mutters as she turns away, amazed with the way some of the people she’s encountered here—Mr. Vanders, Ravi, Phoebe, Colin—provoke her most sardonic but also her most honest self. Jane may not be comfortable in this house, but she wonders if maybe this house makes her comfortable in herself. She feels almost as if she’s meeting herself again after a long absence. Aunt Magnolia?

“By the way,” Jane says louder as she reaches the door, “I’m the sultan of subtle.”

“I don’t think there’s a sultan of subtle,” Patrick remarks absently behind her. “It’s more an office for ministers and spies.”

*   *   *

In the receiving hall, a team of women drag lilac branches around, cutting and arranging them in pots. Jane climbs the steps quickly, trying to reach an altitude where the scent is less overwhelming. Every spring her campus town is choked with the smell of lilacs. It’s impossible to separate that smell from Aunt Magnolia.

She stops on the second level, noticing that someone’s given the suits of armor big bouquets of daffodils to hold in their arms. Jasper is on the opposite landing again. He stands in front of that tall painting of the room with the umbrella, watching Jane, whimpering. Thinking to give him a scratch, she moves onto the bridge above the receiving hall, but then the sound of a camera shutter echoes somewhere above.

Jane knows who it is. Leaning out, she cranes her neck to find Ivy on the bridge above. Her stomach is propped against the railing and she seems to be photographing the receiving hall.

For a split second, Jane considers pretending not to see her. If she doesn’t talk to Ivy, she won’t have to think about whether Ivy’s mixed up in something bad.

Then Ivy lowers her camera and sees Jane. She leans over the railing, smiling. “Hi,” she says.

“Hi,” says Jane cautiously. “What are you doing?”

“Taking pictures.”

“Of what?”

“Wait there,” Ivy says, then straightens and walks out of Jane’s sight.

A moment later, she steps onto Jane’s bridge. She’s wearing a ratty blue sweater and black leggings and she smells like chlorine again, or maybe like the sea. She looks like the sea. Beautiful, and unconcerned, and full of secrets.

“What are you up to?” she asks Jane.

“I’m looking for Mrs. Vanders,” Jane answers. “Why are you taking pictures of the receiving hall?”

“Didn’t I tell you? I’m photographing the art,” Ivy says, then opens her mouth to say more, then closes it, looking carefully casual, and Jane knows, immediately, through some instinct that touches the skin of her throat, that whatever’s going on, Ivy is involved.

“Ivy?” she says, with a sinking heart. “What is it?”

“What’s what?” says Ivy. “Look.” She shows the camera to Jane, scrolling through the last dozen or so shots. Every picture contains one or another piece of art in the house, though much of the art is obscured by members of the gala cleaning staff. Jane sees the women arranging lilacs, and the bucket-carrying man who walked through breakfast this morning. Several of the pictures feature this man, the art fading into the background.

“It must be hard to focus on the art when the house is so full of people,” Jane says, fishing again.

“Yeah.”

“Why are you taking pictures of the art?”

“For Mrs. Vanders,” Ivy says in that fake, nonchalant voice. “To help her catalog it.”

“Ivy?” says Jane, dying to ask her if she’s really taking pictures of the art, or if she might, for some reason, be taking pictures of the people.

“Yeah?”

“Nothing,” says Jane, biting back frustration. “It just seems to me like some of the people in this house are acting weird.”

“Really? Like who?”

Like you, with that fake innocent voice, Jane wants to reply. She wonders, what if she told Ivy about seeing Patrick and the Okadas? “Mrs. Vanders, for one,” she says. “She keeps giving me weird looks.”

“She does that to everyone,” says Ivy.

“Right,” says Jane with a touch of sarcasm she can’t hide. “I’m sure everything’s completely normal.”

Now Ivy’s studying Jane with wide-eyed surprise. “Janie?” she says. “Did something happen?”

“Morning, you two,” says a voice behind Jane.

Kiran’s on the landing, about to descend the steps to the receiving hall. “Sorry, Janie,” she says. “Did you get breakfast?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, hon,” Kiran says, flashing a quick smile at Ivy. “How are you this morning?”

“Good,” says Ivy distractedly, still watching Jane with puzzlement. “Patrick’s back. He’s probably looking for you.”

“Mm?” says Kiran, inflecting the monosyllable with disinterest. She starts down the steps. Just as her feet touch the hall’s checkerboard floor, Ravi appears at the very top of the stairs.

One after another, the servants in the receiving hall turn to look up at him, then smile. He’s showered, shaved, barefoot, and dressed in black, and up there on his stage, with those white streaks in his hair that make him look older than he is, sophisticated. He’s hard not to smile at. Kiran cranes her neck to him, her face suffused with light. When he sees her, he starts down the steps, singing her name, skipping, rushing. Reaching her, he enfolds her in a hug that makes Jane wish she had a twin brother.

Then Ravi’s eyes take in the entire hall, find Jane and Ivy standing on the bridge.

“I like your friend,” he says to Kiran, loudly enough for Jane to hear.

“Behave yourself, Ravi,” Kiran chides him.

“Hey, Ivy-bean,” Ravi calls up to Ivy, flashing her a grin.

“Hey, Ravi,” Ivy calls down, her smile big and real. She adds, in a tone of mischief, “How’s your girlfriend?”

“Perfectly aware that I’m a sexual magnet,” he says.

Ivy snorts. “Just don’t forget about my powers.” She adds sideways to Jane, “Ravi and I have a joke that I’m a witch.”

“I thought you only used your powers for good,” says Ravi.

“Good is such an enigmatic word,” says Ivy.

“Oh my god!” Ravi says. “Someone’s corrupted you! Hide the grimoires!”

“Let’s take a vote of the house and see who people think is more corruptible, me or you.”

“Oh, hell,” Ravi says. “You know, just because the majority believes it doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“Majority? Pah. It’s going to be unanimous.”

“That doesn’t make it true, either.”

“Listen, all I’m saying is, Lucy seems like a nice lady. So don’t forget about my powers.”

“Got it. When my testicles dry up and drop off, I’ll know who—”

“Oh, god,” Kiran interrupts. “Please don’t make me picture your testicles, Ravi.”

“Come see Mum,” says Ravi to Kiran.

“Oh god! You switch from your testicles to our mother?”

“She’s the other woman most likely to threaten my testicles,” says Ravi. “Come have breakfast, then come visit Mum with me.”

“I’m not in the mood for her various realities,” says Kiran. “She makes my head spin.”

“You can’t avoid her forever,” says Ravi. “or Dad either. From the sound of things, you’re avoiding him too.”

“Well,” says Kiran sweetly. “Then you should consider yourself flattered that I’m not avoiding you.”

“I was born irresistible,” says Ravi. “I can’t take credit for it.” Then his eyes slide to a place under the bridge Jane and Ivy are standing on. His face grows quiet. “Hey, man,” he says to someone Jane can’t see. He kisses his sister on the cheek, then passes through one of the doors that lead, among other places, to the banquet hall.

The person Ravi has greeted has fine shoulders Jane recognizes from above. As Patrick walks into the receiving hall toward Kiran, his broad, T-shirted back is to Jane, so she can’t see his expression, but she can see Kiran’s. It’s one with which Jane is becoming well-acquainted: a measured hardness. Kiran’s wall. And she’s right to protect herself, Jane thinks. Patrick lies.

Patrick stops before Kiran. “Hey,” he says. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” Kiran says, then flicks her eyes toward Jane and Ivy as a signal to Patrick. Patrick glances over his shoulder and sees them on the bridge.

Jane studiously pretends to look elsewhere for a moment, then, as soon as Patrick looks away, returns to watching them.

“So,” Patrick says, turning back to Kiran. “On your way to breakfast?”

“Yes,” says Kiran.

“Say hi to your fancy boyfriend for me,” he says.

“Patrick,” Kiran says. “Stop it.”

“Imagine if I could say that to you,” Patrick says, “and you did what I asked. ‘Kiran, stop it.’”

“I’m not having this conversation here.”

“All right,” Patrick says sharply, then spins around and strides away into the east wing.

Kiran looks after him, fists closed hard. Her brittle mask is slipping. Suddenly she bursts across the checkerboard floor after him, her heels slapping on marble, like gunshots. She passes out of sight.

Jasper, still on the second-story landing, starts hopping and yipping in front of that tall painting. It’s like he’s channeling a rabid kangaroo.

“What is going on in this weirdo house?” Jane ask Ivy.

“Why, whatever do you mean?” says Ivy. Her tone is tongue-in-cheek.

“Do Kiran and Patrick have some sort of history?” says Jane.

“Sort of,” Ivy says. “I mean, they love each other. But it’s messy. At the moment, I’d say they have fundamental incompatibilities.”

“You mean, like, that Kiran has a boyfriend?”

“No,” says Ivy, her voice inflected with a kind of certainty. “I think the issues are mainly on Patrick’s side.”

“You mean because he sneaks around and lies,” says Jane.

Ivy’s alarm is physical, her body tensing and her eyes rushing to Jane’s. Then she starts talking, filling the silence, as if to keep Jane from saying anything else. “I think Kiran’s with Colin because she’s trying to move on, actually. He’s kind to her—he looks out for her. Like, once, before Colin and Kiran started dating, Octavian was criticizing Kiran at dinner for being sad and mopey and unemployed. Colin looked right at him and told Octavian there was no shame in being sad or mopey or unemployed, if that’s what you happened to be. He said it in this completely reasonable voice that sort of made you feel like you’d be an asshole to argue. Octavian shoved his pipe in his mouth and left the table.”

“Huh,” says Jane, trying to focus on the conversation, rather than on her misery. “I take it most people don’t talk to Octavian like that?”

“Octavian can be hard on Kiran and Ravi,” says Ivy. “Colin found the way to put him in his place without actually being rude. Kiran’s never been able to do that for herself.”

“And what about Ravi and Lucy? How did they ever end up together?”

“They’ve sort of had a thing since they met, maybe two or three years ago,” says Ivy. “They’re really close, then they fight, then they’re close again. It’s hard to tell how serious it is.”

“He doesn’t seem like a guy who’s serious about anyone.”

“Oh, he always puts on that act.”

“Is it an act?”

“I guess I can’t be sure,” says Ivy. “But I don’t think he’d actually cheat. Ravi is pretty loyal.”

“Isn’t he young for her?”

“Yeah,” says Ivy. “He’s twenty-two, and emotionally he’s about twelve. She’s thirty.”

“Does Ravi like older women?”

“Ravi is attracted to everyone,” Ivy says, “panoptically.”

Jane doesn’t know that word. “Panoptically?”

“All-inclusively,” Ivy says with a grin.

Jane gets being attracted to different kinds of people. To men and women, to people of different shapes and sizes, looks, personalities; she gets not having one type. But there are certainly qualities she prefers. Like, for example, the knowledge of big words she doesn’t know; that’s an attractive quality. “Really, everyone?” Jane says. “Everyone alive?”

“Well. He’s not a pedophile. And he’s not into incest,” Ivy says. “And he knows I’d castrate him if he ever came near me. But he has this way of seeing what’s beautiful about everyone.”

“Is he even attracted to, like, Mrs. Vanders?”

“I’m hoping his feeling for her is more of a mother-son thing,” Ivy says with a chuckle. “Beyond that, I’m not going to think about it.”

“Well, what about your brother?”

Ivy purses her lips. “In the case of Patrick, we have to make a distinction between attraction and intention. I mean, Ravi has principles. He wouldn’t consider Patrick that way, not seriously. Not that it would ever happen anyway, because Patrick is straight. But regardless, Ravi wouldn’t go there, because Ravi thinks Kiran should be with Patrick.”

There’s a lot to file away here, and questions Jane wants to ask but can’t, quite, because they’re not really relevant. Like, is Ivy straight? And why is she so easy to talk to? Even when she keeps switching over, intentionally, to a different, insincere version of herself?

“Ivy?” Jane starts.

Then, when Ivy responds with an appreciative Hm?, she sighs and says, “Never mind.”

“Is that a jellyfish?” says Ivy. “Showing under your sleeve?”

“Yes,” Jane says, growing warm, and suddenly shy.

“Can I see it?”

Carefully, Jane rolls her sleeve up to her shoulder. The jellyfish’s long, detailed arms and tentacles, then its golden body, come into view, anchored on her skin.

“Holy shit,” says Ivy, in a voice of awe. She reaches out and traces the bottom of the bell with a finger. “That is gorgeous,” she says. “Did you design it?”

Why does Ivy’s admiration make Jane so sad about Ivy lying? “It’s based on a photo my aunt took,” she says. “My aunt Magnolia. She raised me. Then she died. Maybe you knew that? She was an underwater photographer. She used to teach me to breathe the way a jellyfish moves.” It’s a ridiculous mouthful, but Ivy is still touching Jane, and Jane needs her to know all of it, all the parts of it.

Ivy’s finger drops. She frowns.

“Ivy?” says Jane.

“Ivy-bean,” says a deep, scratchy voice. It’s Mrs. Vanders, taking big, hurried steps toward them. “Where’s Ravi?”

“I think he’s having breakfast,” says Ivy thickly, her eyes on her camera.

“I need him,” says Mrs. Vanders. “I need to position him in front of the Vermeer.”

“Why?” says Ivy. “Is something wrong with the Vermeer?”

“I just want him to stand in front of it,” says Mrs. Vanders, “and not notice anything wrong about it, so that I can stop worrying about the damn thing and apply myself to the million tasks surrounding a gala. Send him to me, but don’t tell him anything! You,” she says, narrowing eyes on Jane. “I have things to say to you.”

“I’ve been getting that impression,” Jane responds. “Can we talk now?”

“I’m busy,” says Mrs. Vanders. “Find me! And say nothing to anyone!” She spins around and heads back the way she came.

“Ivy?”

“Yeah?”

“Earlier, in the kitchen, Mr. Vanders said that he knew my aunt Magnolia.”

“Yeah?”

“Did you know my aunt Magnolia?”

Ivy opens her mouth to answer. Before she can say anything, Mrs. Vanders pops her head around the entrance to the bridge again and yells, “Ivy! No more dawdling! Find Ravi!”

Ivy takes hold of Jane’s arm right where the jellyfish tentacles reach to her elbow. She grips so hard that it hurts. “Talk to Mrs. Vanders,” she says. “Please?” Then she turns away and heads down the stairs, leaving Jane to rub her arm and nurse her resentment.

The moment Ivy disappears, Ravi enters the receiving hall. He’s carrying two pieces of toast in one hand and a bowl of fruit in the other.

Taking a bite of toast, he jogs up the western stairs and crosses onto Jane’s bridge.

“Breakfast too sedentary for you?” asks Jane wearily.

“I wanted to say hi to you again,” says Ravi.

“Ravi,” says Jane, ever so slightly turning a shoulder to him, “aren’t you with Lucy?”

“On and off,” he says. “Off at the moment.”

“Oh,” says Jane, confused that this information pleases her. “I’m sorry.”

“Well,” he says, “to answer your question, yes. Every meal in this house is too sedentary for me.”

“Then,” says Jane, “that means you’ll want to keep moving.”

Ravi chuckles, then surprises Jane by doing just what she suggests. He doesn’t even crowd her too much as he passes. “I’m sorry to say that another soul awaits me this morning,” he says as he walks away. “What about you, do you have any interest in the universe’s multiple realities? Or are you like my twin, opposed to cosmology?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Come with me,” he says.

“Where?” Jane asks, thinking partly of Mrs. Vanders, but mostly of this strange little interplay she seems to have going with Kiran’s panoptically attracted brother.

“You do know what cosmology is, right?” Ravi says. “The study of the cosmos? You’re not confusing it with cosmetology? The application of makeup?”

“Condescending donkey,” says Jane, then adds, “No offense, Eeyore.”

Ravi chuckles as he steps away. “Your choice.”

Jane watches him move gracefully up the stairs. She’s completely forgotten to tell him that Mrs. Vanders is looking for him.

“Oh,” she says, meaning to call out to him. But in that moment, a kid darts into the receiving hall below her. This house is like Grand Central Station.

Jane has seen this girl before: She’s the one who was digging up the garden yesterday in the rain. Carrying something close to her chest, she goes to a side table, pushes some lilacs aside, and slides the thing onto the empty space. Jane can’t see it properly; there are too many lilac branches in the way.

It seems almost to Jane as if this little girl waited until the lilac ladies left, then snuck into the hall just when she wouldn’t be seen. The girl darts out again, taking the path under Jane that leads into the Venetian courtyard—spots Jane up on her perch, and freezes. She glares at Jane for a millisecond before continuing on, leaving Jane wondering if it’s utterly irrational to imagine that she looks like the news pictures of the oldest Panzavecchia child, Grace. The one who vanished from her school the same day her parents tried to rob a bank. The one with the mnemonic memory devices.

Ravi is long gone. Mrs. Vanders is long gone. Kiran is long gone and that child is just gone; only Jasper remains, still hopping and wiggling and occasionally whining on his landing. Piles of lilac branches litter the checkerboard floor below, like berries on ice cream.

The house is suddenly still, like it’s holding its breath.

Then the gunshots of Kiran’s boots touch Jane’s ears once more and Kiran stalks into the hall.

She walks to the pile of lilac branches on the floor. She picks one up, shakes the water out of it, then throws it back down again, seemingly just for the violence of it. Then she wraps her arms around her chest, hugging herself, pressing her chin to her collarbone. She doesn’t see Jane. Jane’s ability to see Kiran is an intrusion into Kiran’s personal pain; Jane knows this. Still, Jane reaches out, unable to stop herself. She wants to help.

“Kiran?”

Kiran’s mask slides into place. She raises her eyes to Jane. “Oh,” she says. “Hi, Janie.”

“Are you okay?”

“Why does everyone keep asking me that?” she says. “Do I seem so not okay?”

“You seem sort of . . . missing.”

“Missing!” Kiran says. “That’s just lovely. Why did I even come here if people are going to accuse me of being missing?”

“Did Patrick confess to anything yet?”

Kiran’s face flickers with irritation. “I forgot I’d told you about that. No. He’s said nothing. You’re sweet to remember.”

“What do you think it’s about?”

“I don’t know,” Kiran says, “and I’m trying not to care.”

The lilac ladies come trooping back into the hall with more armfuls of empty vases. Kiran swings her back to them so they can’t see her expression.

“Do you ever feel,” she says to Jane, “like you’re trapped in the wrong version of your life?”

This extraordinary question fixes Jane in place. She’s felt exactly that way, ever since Aunt Magnolia died and the wrong version of Jane’s life wrapped its arms tight around her, dove into the water, dragged her to the bottom, and held her there while she drowned.

“Yes,” says Jane.

“People tell you that what happens to you is a direct result of the choices you make,” Kiran says, “but that’s not fair. Half the time, you don’t even realize that the choice you’re about to make is significant.”

“That’s true,” says Jane. “My parents died in a plane crash when I was one. Most everyone on the left side of the plane lived and most everyone on the right side died. My parents picked seats on the right, randomly, for no reason.”

Kiran nods. “Octavian went to an art auction in Vegas but his flight was delayed. He got in so late that he missed breakfast, so he caught a cab, and told the cabbie to find him a restaurant out in the desert, where he could drink a Bloody Mary and eat eggs while surrounded by flowering cactuses. The cabbie told him forget it and drove him to the Bellagio, where he got lost trying to find the restaurant and ran into a lady drawing sketches of the layout of the casino. He asked her if she was planning a heist. She told him her name was Charlotte, she was an interior designer, and she was redesigning the casino floor. Now she’s my stepmother. Could that be more random?”

“On the other hand,” Jane says, “they did decide to get married. Some things happen because we choose them.”

“Right,” says Kiran. “Go ahead, say it. I’ve chosen to be unemployed and useless.”

“Kiran,” Jane says, remembering Colin’s words to Octavian. “You’re not useless. You just haven’t found your path. I mean, welcome to my world. I don’t have a path either. I’m a way bigger moper than you are.”

“You’re not moping,” Kiran says. “You’re grieving.”

Kiran has a way of saying words that send a beam of light through the bullshit. I’m grieving. It’s like pushing my will through molasses.

“Come walk with me,” Kiran says, “and I’ll tell you the mystery of Charlotte.”

A heating pipe clangs somewhere and the air moves in the hall, whispering a word that she doesn’t quite catch. Charlotte.

Jane rubs her ears, trying to decide. She wants to know more about Charlotte, sure.

But she also needs to ask Mrs. Vanders about Aunt Magnolia—though it’s not as if finding out that her aunt was best buddies with Mrs. Vanders will bring Aunt Magnolia back. Jane suspects that beyond her urgency to know lies a crash into disappointment.

So maybe Jane should follow that Grace Panzavecchia look-alike who vanished into the depths of the house? What if that girl really is Grace Panzavecchia? And what if that’s the answer to the Okadas and Patrick, to the gun?

Of course there’s a part of Jane that wants to follow Ravi wherever he’s gone; really, wherever he goes. Ravi makes Jane feel like she’s been asleep and she might finally be able to wake up.

And what’s going on with the dog? The ridiculous dog, who’s whining on the second-story landing, watching Jane with the single most tragic expression ever seen on the face of a dog.