Jane, Unlimited by Kristin Cashore (2)

Jane decides.

“You know what, Kiran?” she says. “I need to talk to Mrs. Vanders first. I think she knew my aunt. I’ll catch up with you later, okay?”

“Okay,” Kiran says, shrugging, disappointed. “Text me.”

“I will.”

Kiran wanders away.

When Jane reaches Jasper on his landing, he jumps up, circles around her, then runs at the back of her legs in his usual way. She scrambles past. “Geez, Jasper!” she says. “Come with me, you’re invited,” but when she turns back to check on him, he’s gone.

Jane finds Mrs. Vanders at the far end of the second-story east corridor, standing on one leg, studying a painting. The flat of Mrs. Vanders’s bare foot is balanced against her inner thigh and her hands are in a praying position. Jane assumes it’s some sort of yoga pose.

“Hello, Mrs. Vanders,” she says as she approaches.

“You,” says Mrs. Vanders, not looking at her, not moving. She’s got a walkie-talkie clipped to the back of her black yoga pants.

“Yes,” says Jane. “I heard that you knew my aunt.”

“You’re not Ravi,” she says.

“No,” says Jane. “Ravi went to visit someone. His mother, I think? Is she in the house somewhere?”

Mrs. Vanders’s response is a dismissive humph. “You’ve been spending a lot of time with Ivy,” she says. “What have you two been discussing?”

Jane is fed up. “Did you not know my aunt, then?” she says, choosing sarcasm. “Am I wasting my time?”

“My question about Ivy is relevant to your question about your aunt.”

“How could that possibly be? Did they know each other?”

“Do you travel much?” counters Mrs. Vanders.

“No!” says Jane. “Why? Did you travel with her or something?”

“We have one of your aunt’s travel photographs,” Mrs. Vanders says. “A little yellow fish, peeking out of the mouth of a bigger fish. Your aunt had a way of . . . finding what was hidden.”

“Oh,” Jane says, astonished. One of her photographs, here? Jane begins to swell with pride. How appropriate that Aunt Magnolia’s work should make its way into the artistic jumble of this house. “So, is that how you knew her? Did you buy the print from her?”

Mrs. Vanders sighs shortly. “Yes. That’s it.”

“I see,” says Jane, feeling that this makes sense, except—except for the parts that don’t. “But what does that have to do with Ivy?”

“I only wondered how much she’d told you.”

“Right, but why would it matter? Is the photo a secret?”

“Of course not. It’s hanging in the west wing,” says Mrs. Vanders, flapping one hand toward the west wing and finally stepping out of her one-footed stance. She brings her face very close to the painting before her.

“Did she come here?” says Jane. “My aunt? Did you know her?”

“We communicated about the photo,” says Mrs. Vanders.

“In person? Mr. Vanders seemed to know things about her, like, how she dressed.”

“Oh, hell,” says Mrs. Vanders, her nose only inches from the painting.

“What?”

“Forgive me,” she says. “Does this picture look right to you?”

Jane, who couldn’t care less about the picture, bites back an impatient retort and takes a look. It’s a lovely, smallish painting of a woman writing at a desk. A frog sits on the checkerboard floor behind the woman, its dusty blue skin touched by sunlight coming through the window. The frog has a secretive expression on its face and the woman is quite intent on her work.

“Right, in what way?” says Jane.

“Like the Vermeer it is,” says Mrs. Vanders. “Lady Writing a Letter with Her Frog.”

“I have no idea what that painting is supposed to look like.”

“Johannes Vermeer,” Mrs. Vanders says. “A woman with a pearl earring? A woman with her frog?”

“I know about Jan Vermeer,” Jane says. “He’s famous and all that. But how am I supposed to know if this one looks right? I’ve never seen it before.”

“Well, what do you think of the light?”

Jane peers again at the painting, which has soft, bright parts and deep, dark parts that she can, in fact, appreciate. The scene seems lit with true sunlight. “Incandescent?” she ventures.

“Hm,” says Mrs. Vanders. “I’m telling you, that lady looks peaky to me. She’s not as incandescent as usual.”

“Are you saying someone’s altered the painting?”

“Altered it or forged it,” says Mrs. Vanders.

“Forged it!” says Jane. “Seriously?”

“Or replaced it with a version by a different Jan Vermeer,” Mrs. Vanders adds darkly.

Jane is beginning to wonder if Mrs. Vanders’s physical balance is inversely proportional to her mental balance. “How much is the painting worth?” she asks.

“Vermeers are rare, and rarely change hands,” says Mrs. Vanders. “It could certainly fetch a hundred million dollars at auction.”

“Good grief,” says Jane. How strange that a painting can be more valuable than the entire house it hangs in. Like a wooden box containing a diamond ring, or a ship containing Aunt Magnolia.

“Listen, I can see it’s important,” says Jane. “But you should talk to Ravi about it, or Lucy St. George, not me. Can you tell me more about my aunt?”

At that moment, Ravi appears at the top of the hall, walking toward Jane and Mrs. Vanders with his remaining slice of toast in one hand.

“I’ll thank you to say nothing outright about the Vermeer to Ravi,” Mrs. Vanders mutters sidelong to Jane.

“Why?”

“Because I want to handle it,” says Mrs. Vanders.

Ravi carries a framed painting of lily pads under the other arm. It’s recognizably impressionistic, certainly a Monet. Except that as he approaches, Jane notices that there’s something . . . off about the frogs sitting on the lily pads. Their eyes are intelligent, but . . . dead. And the lily pads seem like they’re hovering, like, actually floating around the painting. Almost. It’s pretty strange.

“Have a minute, Vanny?” Ravi asks cheerfully. “I’ve brought you something.”

Mrs. Vanders glances at the freaky Monet Ravi’s carrying and comes over with a look of pure disgust. “Oh, honestly, Ravi,” she says. “Please tell me you’re not going to ask me to help you find a buyer for that.”

“Please, Vanny?” Ravi says.

“You try my patience. You and your mother!”

“Yeah, yeah,” says Ravi. “But you know all the specialized collectors.”

“I’ll think about it,” says Mrs. Vanders, then adds significantly, “As we stand here in front of the Vermeer.”

“Yes,” Ravi says, resting his eyes placidly upon the Vermeer. Jane watches Mrs. Vanders watching Ravi.

“It’s always been my favorite,” says Ravi.

“Yes,” says Mrs. Vanders, “it’s incandescent, isn’t it?” then says no more.

Jane looks from Mrs. Vanders to Ravi, still waiting for Mrs. Vanders to ask Ravi if anything seems strange to him about the Vermeer.

“I don’t understand,” she says.

“Mind your own business, girl,” says Mrs. Vanders sharply. “I do things in my own time.”

Something inside Jane snaps. “So you don’t actually care if something’s wrong with the Vermeer?” she says. “Was it just a convenient topic of conversation to keep you from having to answer my questions about Aunt Magnolia?”

“Something wrong?” Ravi says. “What are you talking about?”

“She thinks the lady looks peaky,” Jane says, then adds belligerently, when Mrs. Vanders directs a look of fury upon her, “She used the word forged.”

Ravi freezes. He squeaks out, “Forged?”

“I didn’t want to trouble you, Ravi,” says Mrs. Vanders. “Particularly just before a gala. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

Ravi reaches out and lifts the frame from the wall. “Screwdriver,” he says with what sounds like controlled panic.

“Ravi, I think it’s apparent I don’t carry a screwdriver on my person.”

“I do,” says Jane, reaching into her pocket for the small folding knife she keeps next to her phone. It has a tiny screwdriver extension that she snaps into place, then hands to Ravi.

A moment later, Ravi is crouching on the floor, ever-so-carefully taking the frame apart. With an intense focus, he separates the canvas from the frame, then holds it up against the light. Then he reaches his fingertip toward the face of the writing lady, almost, but not quite, touching her eye.

Mutely, he sets the canvas on the floor, then hides his face in his hands.

“So, I was right,” says Mrs. Vanders, sounding defeated.

“Where’s Lucy?” is Ravi’s muffled response.

“We’ll get her immediately,” says Mrs. Vanders. “Jane, do you think you could find her?”

“Happy to,” she says, but before she can move, Lucy herself appears in the corridor, walking toward them.

Lucy picks up her pace, looking puzzled, when she sees Ravi kneeling on the floor. “Ravi?” she says. “Why do you have that picture out of its frame?”

“It’s a fake,” says Ravi, gripping his white-streaked hair.

“What?” Lucy exclaims. “How can that be?”

A tear runs down Ravi’s face, then another. It’s so odd to Jane, that she should be standing here while someone as rich as Ravi kneels on the floor and cries about the theft of a painting of unimaginable value.

“It’s a perfect fake,” Ravi goes on. “Perfect except that it’s missing the pinprick in the lady’s eye. The pinprick is family knowledge. We’ve never told anyone.”

“What?” Lucy takes the canvas into her hands. “Give me this thing. What on earth are you talking about?”

“The lady’s eye is the vanishing point of the picture,” says Ravi. “Vermeer stuck a pin in the canvas. He attached a string to work out the perspective. That’s why the scene is so well-balanced. Mrs. Vanders discovered the hole, years ago.”

Lucy stares, incredulously, at Ravi. “You had knowledge of the way Jan Vermeer worked?” she says. “And you’ve never shared it with the art establishment? When we know so little about how Vermeer worked!”

“Someone has our Vermeer, Lucy!” cries Ravi in an explosion of passion. “I don’t care if he painted it with a brush stuck up his ass!”

“This is unbelievable,” Lucy says, holding the painting close. “It’s a remarkable forgery.”

“Even the cracks in the paint look right,” says Mrs. Vanders grimly. “At a quick glance, anyway.”

“And the edges,” Ravi says, reaching up for it, taking it back from Lucy. “The edges are a match. Someone took it out of its frame and photographed them.”

“It’s bad this has happened now, the day before a gala,” Lucy says. “The gala preparations only widen the spectrum of suspects.”

“Well, it’s not anyone in the Thrash family,” Ravi says. “Or the Yellan family, or the Vanders family. We all know about the pinprick.”

“Except that an argument could be made that you’d leave the pinprick out,” Lucy says. “If the forgery had the pinprick, but was discovered, in some other way, to be a forgery, we’d know the forger was a Thrash, Vanders, or Yellan.”

“Well, I know it wasn’t,” Ravi says stubbornly.

“Yes, all right, Ravi,” says Lucy, with a sudden flash of impatience. “I’ll be sure to include your sophisticated analysis in my investigation. Honestly, I still can’t believe it. You’re absolutely certain this is a forgery?”

Ravi answers her with a wet sniffle, then picks the folding knife up and returns it to Jane. “Where’s Kiran?” he says. “Have any of you seen her?”

“She’s in the winter garden,” Lucy says, “playing cards with Phoebe and Colin.”

Leaving the forgery and its frame strewn on the floor and his freaky Monet propped against the wall, Ravi stands. “I have to tell her,” he says, gliding toward the service staircase. The door swings shut behind him.

After a moment’s silence, Jane says, “Wow.”

Lucy’s eyes narrow on Mrs. Vanders, then on Jane, sharp and dark. In that moment, Jane can imagine Lucy sitting down with drug dealers and duping them into handing over a priceless masterpiece.

She knows it’s Lucy’s job, but really, it’s too absurd, that Lucy could imagine she has anything to do with it.

Still, Jane gets it, because her view on every other person in the house has also changed. Until she can work her mind through every possibility, she’s not going to trust anyone either.

Since that includes Mrs. Vanders and Lucy, Jane says, “Good-bye, then,” and goes to her rooms.

*   *   *

Jasper is waiting outside her door. When she lets him in, he burrows under the bed. Soon his soft snores emerge, which is cozy, and helpful somehow, like fuel.

Outside the morning room windows, she sees Mr. Vanders digging in the gardens in the same area the little girl was digging yesterday. He works with a trowel in a slow and graceful manner, as if the act of digging is the point, rather than achieving holes. He stops for a moment to sneeze. Jane wants to lean out and yell at him that nothing’s ever going to grow out there if everyone keeps hacking at it.

She turns back to the room of umbrellas, not really looking at them, her thoughts circling the forged Vermeer. On the one hand, it’s a relief that a house mystery is coming into the light, for everyone to know and to talk about. On the other hand, the more she learns, the less things make sense. And she really doesn’t want all of this to lead to the revelation that Ivy’s mixed up in art theft somehow.

Though if Ivy, or anyone, is mixed up in art theft, Jane supposes it’s better to know.

Dammit.

She snatches up a sketchbook, flips past umbrella sketches to a blank page, and begins a list, starting with the most blatantly suspicious.

Patrick Yellan

Philip Okada

Phoebe Okada

— Philip sneaking around with a gun. All three of them talking about the Panzavecchias? Philip seen in a back room in the attics, now gone someplace mysterious, lying about being a germophobe. Phoebe lying about Philip. Patrick “has something to confess” to Kiran but never actually confesses. Broods. Has easy access to boats. Was out late with Ravi.

Gritting her teeth, Jane adds the next name.

Ivy Yellan

— Keeping something from me. Says she’s taking photos of the art but is she? Has blueprints of the house including the art and decoration. Says she knows all the house’s secrets. Is “saving up” for college. Seems to resent Mrs. Vanders.

Now she decides she may as well round out the servants.

Mrs. Vanders

— Total control freak. Likes to control what everyone does and doesn’t know, where everyone goes, whom everyone talks to, and what they talk about. She’s Patrick’s boss. Was being cagey about admitting her forgery suspicions to Ravi. Why?

— On the other hand, she’s the one who pointed the forgery out to me, making her an unlikely suspect.

Mr. Vanders

— Seen with a small child yesterday. Seen with blueprints today. Evasive. Currently digging in the garden. (Can a painting be buried safely?)

Cook

— Never around.

Random gala staff

She moves on to the other residents and guests.

Lucy St. George

— Art PI, so she knows a lot about how heists work. Her father, Buckley, is an art dealer (as are her cousin and boyfriend). Recently lost a Rubens. On-again, off-again with Ravi. (Any bad feelings there? Revenge?)

Colin Mack

— Also knows a lot about the art world/art theft. Buckley is his uncle. Kiran doesn’t seem to like him even though they’re dating (but Kiran doesn’t seem to like anyone else either). Was being a jerk to Lucy, his cousin, at breakfast.

Kiran Thrash

— Unhappy. Mad at everyone. Hates the house, hates the art. Would she do something to act out?

Ravi Thrash

— Loves the art. The Vermeer is his favorite, he slept under it as a kid. Loves it enough to steal it? Is he a good actor? Why was Mrs. Vanders being evasive around him—does she suspect him?

Octavian Thrash

— Doesn’t seem to care about the missing Brancusi.

[NOTE TO SELF: The missing Brancusi! Surely this matters more now that the Vermeer is gone too!]

— His wife has disappeared. Seems depressed and antisocial. Mad at Ravi. Keeps vampiric hours. Are the Vermeer and the Brancusi insured? Don’t rich people fake thefts sometimes to collect on insurance?

Charlotte Thrash

— Mother may have been a con artist. Was drawing floor plans of a Vegas casino when Octavian met her—suspicious? Has been missing for a month, which is super-weird. When was the Vermeer forged? Could she have taken it with her? (When was the Brancusi last seen?)

Jane chews the end of her pencil, contemplating her list, trying to decide if anyone in the house is safe for her to talk to. Jasper, droopy-eyed and curious, waddles into the room.

Jane adds:

Jasper Thrash

— The only individual in the house (besides me) who’s definitely innocent.

She turns to a new page. She writes:

What to do?

Possibilities:

— Talk to Mrs. Vanders, who’s got to be innocent. Find out whom she suspects. Ask her probing questions about Ivy.

— Talk to Lucy St. George, who probably has inspirations about what’s going on.

— Confront Ivy.

“What do you think, Jasper?” she says.

He comes closer and leans against her boots, gazing up at her with what Jane decides is resolution.

“Personally,” she says, “I like the first two ideas better than the third.”

Jasper leans harder.

“Ready?” Jane says. “Let’s go.”

*   *   *

She heads toward the center of the house, figuring she’ll check the kitchens for Mrs. Vanders.

As she approaches the stairs, she hears voices in the receiving hall, then sees Kiran and Colin standing together. Kiran has her arms crossed tight, as if in self-defense.

Jane starts down toward them.

“I don’t know,” she hears Kiran say. “It sounds like Mrs. Vanders was looking at it and got a funny feeling.”

“Have you seen it?” says Colin. “It’s beautiful.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t have been able to tell it’s a fake,” says Kiran. “But the art is Vanny’s thing, after all.”

“Don’t you think it’s interesting that Philip left last night?” says Colin. “I was just pressing Phoebe about it and she told me he’ll be moving to a different remote location every day with some rich patient of his who’s on some trip. Doesn’t that sound convenient?”

“Except that I know plenty of rich people who’d think it was completely reasonable to expect their doctor to fly in to treat their tummyache,” says Kiran. “Imagine the retinue Buckley would bring if he went on some complicated trip.”

“Oh, come on. Buckley’s not that bad.”

“God, you suck up to him,” says Kiran.

Jane has reached the second-story landing, where Jasper blocks her like a short, hotdog-shaped linebacker, growling when she tries to sidestep him.

Sighing, Jane pauses to scribble in her sketchbook, turning to face the wall so it’ll look like she’s taking interested notes on the art rather than on the private conversations of people nearby.

Buckley St. George, she writes. Rich and spoiled. Then she draws an asterisk next to Philip’s name, because Phoebe’s explanation sounds ridiculous to her; then she writes, Why is Colin dating Kiran when she’s so awful to him?

Someone coughs behind her.

It’s Colin, standing a few steps below, looking up at her with raised eyebrows. “Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” says Jane, closing her notebook.

“What are you doing?” asks Colin. “Taking notes on that painting?”

Jane glances at the painting she’s supposedly taking notes on. It’s the tall oil of the room with the drying umbrella. “I was taking notes on the umbrella,” she says reasonably, then remembers that this won’t signify anything to Colin, who doesn’t know she makes umbrellas.

“Sure,” he says. “I’d suspect you of planning a heist, except no one would steal that picture.”

He’s teasing; or at any rate, Jane can tell he’s not seriously accusing her of anything. “Why not?” she says, seeing an opportunity to learn more about heists. “It’s nice.”

“It’s too big to move and it’s not worth anything.”

“Maybe I’m stealing it because I like it.”

“It’s by a painter of unremarkable talent,” Colin says.

“Do you think so?” Jane says, looking closer. “I mean, I guess it’s not amazing—”

“It belongs to no particular school, either,” he says. “Knowing Octavian, I bet it was a flea market purchase.”

“Well, but it has its charms, especially for fans of umbrellas. Why are you so determined to convince me it’s worthless?”

“Because,” says the voice of Lucy, who rounds the corner from somewhere or other, “if Colin sees someone focused on a picture he thinks is worth nothing, he begins to worry that he’s missing something.”

This surprises a grin onto Jane’s face, which makes Lucy laugh. “He’s my cousin,” she says. “I know him.”

“So, Colin,” says Jane, “you’re trying to convince me you’re right because you’re afraid you’re wrong?”

A crash below interrupts whatever indignant thing Colin’s about to say. The crash is followed by a series of yells. Jane, Lucy, and Colin look at one another in astonishment. Then, together, they rush to the railing, Jasper crowding Jane’s feet.

“Octavian!” Ravi screams, standing in the receiving hall and waving something around in his hands. “Octavian!” On the checkerboard floor, beside him, a vase lies shattered. Water and lilacs are strewn about. “Octavian!” he screams again, his voice straining out of his throat, tearing at the ceiling.

“Colin,” says Lucy breathlessly. “Is that the bottom half of the Brancusi sculpture? The pedestal for the fish that always sits in the receiving hall?”

“Yes,” says Colin in wonderment.

“But where’s the top half? Where’s the fish?” says Lucy.

“How should I know?”

“Colin,” Lucy says, in a voice suddenly made of steel. “Where is the fish?”

“I don’t know!” Colin says. “You’re the detective, not me! What do you think, I broke it off?”

Lucy waves a dismissive hand at her cousin and starts down the stairs toward Ravi. Cleaners and decorators are lining up at every level to stare down at Ravi’s fit. Ivy is also down there now, standing next to Kiran and Phoebe, all of them gaping at Ravi.

A strange sense of panicked relief fizzes through Jane. Now the missing Brancusi is coming out into the light too. And Jane remembers seeing the Grace Panzavecchia look-alike girl bringing something into the receiving hall, leaving it on one of the side tables. Had that been the pedestal?

Jane realizes suddenly that the white plush bag with ducks on it that Philip Okada had been carrying was a diaper bag. Baby Leo Panzavecchia is sick; Baby Leo is missing; Philip Okada is a doctor.

What’s going on here? Some sort of complicated conspiracy involving the Panzavecchias, their doctor, the servants, and art theft? Jane studies Ivy, who’s watching Ravi with calm concern but who doesn’t look particularly surprised. Patrick, she notes, isn’t here.

“Let me see that,” Lucy says to Ravi, trying to take the pedestal from his hands, but Ravi won’t give it to her. He yells over her, barely noticing her, “Octavian! Octavian!”

Finally, Mrs. Vanders sweeps into the hall. “Be quiet!” she says. “What in the name of all that’s reasonable is the matter with you?”

“This,” Ravi yells, shaking the pedestal at her. “This is what’s the matter with me!”

When Mrs. Vanders sees the pedestal, she freezes. Jane can’t see her face from the landing, but when Mrs. Vanders reaches a hand out to Ravi, he passes the pedestal to her. With one finger, Mrs. Vanders touches a spot in the middle of its flat, mirrored surface, then exhales as if in relief.

“Let me see it,” Lucy says. Mrs. Vanders passes the pedestal to Lucy. Lucy touches the same spot, then nods at Mrs. Vanders, who’s watching her closely.

“Ravi?” Lucy says. “The sculpture was removed cleanly from the base. Assuming the sculpture itself is unbroken, it should be easy to reattach it, once it’s found.”

“Once it’s found?” Ravi says. “Once it’s found!?” he shouts.

“Calm down,” Mrs. Vanders says to him. “Ravi, take a breath. Tell me where you got this pedestal.”

Ravi points to a row of side tables. “It was sitting there,” he says. “Someone—put—a vase of lilacs on it—as if it were a party decoration!” he screams.

“All right,” Mrs. Vanders says. “Take another breath.”

“It wasn’t there last night,” he says. “Someone took the whole thing away, broke off the fish, then put the pedestal back. What kind of lunatic would do that? And if this is what they’ve done to the Brancusi”—his voice grows almost hysterical—“what have they done to the Vermeer? I want a list of everyone who’s come and gone in this house. Now!”

“Very well,” Mrs. Vanders says sarcastically. “That would be the caterers, the musicians, the extra cleaning staff, the actual residents of the house, and your guests. Shall we start the interrogations now or later?”

“Why do you sound like that?” cries Ravi. “Don’t you appreciate what’s happened here?” He turns suddenly on Phoebe Okada. “Where’s your husband?” he spits at her. “He’s gone off the island, hasn’t he?”

Phoebe stares back at Ravi, her face made of stone. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just imply that Philip stole from you,” she says. Then she strides out of the room, disappearing into the Venetian courtyard, her face closed and intense.

“Truly, listen to yourself, Ravi,” says Mrs. Vanders. “Philip Okada is a physician who answered an emergency call.”

“Have you contacted the FBI?” says Ravi.

“How?” exclaims Mrs. Vanders. “Telepathically, while we’ve been standing here enjoying your tantrum?”

“Wait, you haven’t contacted the FBI?” cries Ravi. “Do you even remember about the Vermeer?”

“Ravi, of course I’ll call the proper authorities,” says Mrs. Vanders. “But you need to take a breath and realize that this thing with the Brancusi is very different from a fine forgery of a Vermeer. This has the indications of an accident, or a prank.”

“Who would play a prank with an irreplaceable work of pure genius?” Ravi says, his voice rising again. “Call the FBI, the CIA, and Interpol! My art could be in Hong Kong by now! Lucy!”

“I’m right here, Ravi,” says Lucy, standing beside him, still holding the pedestal to her chest. Her face is white and she actually looks a little nauseated.

“Lucy,” Ravi says, grabbing on to her shoulders, practically shaking her. “Lucy. Will you find my art?”

“Ravi, sweetie,” she says, “I’ll do all I can.”

“Thank you,” he says. “Thank you.” When he lets Lucy go, she stumbles, which he barely notices, because he’s swung back on Mrs. Vanders.

“We should cancel the gala,” he tells her.

“We’re not canceling the gala,” she responds.

“The gala is the perfect distraction if someone is trying to slip out with stolen art,” Ravi says.

“Ravi Thrash,” Mrs. Vanders says. “There has been a gala in this house every season for over a hundred years. Neither war nor the Great Depression nor Prohibition nor the death of three Octavian Thrashes has stopped the gala from taking place.”

Ravi glares at Mrs. Vanders. Then he takes a step away from her, raises his face to the upper levels, and roars, “Octavian! Wake up and get the hell down here!”

“Go to his room, Ravi,” Ivy says quietly. “You know he won’t get out of bed in the daytime.”

Ravi turns to Ivy then, his shoulders slumping. “Maybe you should come with me, Ivy-bean,” he says. “Will you come with me and keep me calm?”

“I’ll come with you if you keep yourself calm,” says Ivy.

“I’m sorry we lost your fish,” Ravi says, sounding like a little boy.

“It’s not my fish,” Ivy says, gently. “It’s your fish.”

“But you’re the one who’s always loved it most,” he says, then reaches to put an arm around Ivy. They walk together toward the stairs and begin to climb.

Mrs. Vanders stares at them as they go, a wary expression on her face. Then she holds a hand out to Lucy without even glancing at her. Lucy passes the sculptureless pedestal back to Mrs. Vanders. Lucy’s eyes flicker upward once, to Colin, who’s still standing beside Jane, white-faced. Lucy pulls her phone from her pocket.

“Are you okay?” Jane asks Colin, because he doesn’t look well.

“It’s hard to see Ravi so upset,” Colin says.

“He sure knows how to make a scene,” Jane says, wondering if this is why Mrs. Vanders didn’t want to put ideas in Ravi’s head about the Vermeer.

But why is she being so cagey about calling the FBI?

“The truth is, I’m worried about Lucy too,” Colin says. “It’s a humiliation for something like this to happen right under her nose, especially on the tail of losing that Rubens.”

“Right,” Jane says.

“It’s as if the thief is making a public point of not taking Lucy seriously as a private investigator,” says Colin. “It’s very personal.”

“Who do you think did it?”

Colin breathes a laugh, then shrugs. “Someone foolish.”

“Isn’t it scary?” says Jane. “To think there’s a thief in the house?”

“Sure,” he says. “But don’t worry too much. We’ve got Lucy on the case.”

“Do you know who Lucy suspects?”

“She doesn’t share that stuff with me,” says Colin, with a sharp little resentment that makes Jane curious. She badly wants to get back to her rooms, where she can think through all these new developments in peace. But as she turns to go, Colin says, “Kiran mentioned you make umbrellas. Is that what you meant earlier when you said you were artistic?”

Jane is startled. “It’s nothing,” she says, trying to build a dam that will hold back Colin’s interest. “Just a hobby.”

“I appreciate that,” he says. “Still, it’s a pretty cool hobby.”

“Thanks,” Jane says, turning to go again, but finding that he moves with her. Jane doesn’t want Colin to go with her. She stops again.

“I’m sorry,” he says immediately. “I swear I’m not stalking you. I’m just interested in the umbrellas.”

“I don’t really want to talk about them,” Jane says, “and I definitely don’t want to show them to you.”

“Fair enough,” Colin says. “Forgive me—I can’t help myself, really. It’s my job to be nosy whenever I hear about some new, interesting kind of art.”

“I’m only a beginner!” Jane says. “They’re a mess! They’re not art!”

Colin is all outstretched, surrendering hands and a smiling, open face. “I know,” he says. “Again, I’m sorry. Forget I brought it up. Here, I’ll prove it to you by walking you to your rooms and whispering not a single word about umbrellas. Okay?”

“I suppose,” Jane says.

As they walk up the stairs, Jasper follows.

“The Brancusi is an odd choice for a thief,” Colin says. “It’s not small. It’d be hard to sneak it out.”

“What does the fish look like?” asks Jane. “Will I know it if I see it?”

“It looks like a long, flat, ovalish, white sliver of marble,” Colin says. “Very abstract, as fish go.”

“Is it—beautiful?”

“It’s not really my taste,” he says, “but it’s certainly valuable.”

“Is the fish worth anything without its pedestal?”

“Sure, it’s worth something,” says Colin. “But Brancusi’s pedestals are critically important to his sculptures. That fish is meant to balance on that particular pedestal. They go together. Really, it would be ridiculous to display them separately.”

“So, then, this is a pretty strange theft.”

“Yes,” says Colin. “It’s a kind of vandalism, really. Will you just look at this crazy kitsch?” he says, tapping the head of Captain Polepants with his foot as they go by. “Uncle Buckley loves this stuff.”

“Really?” says Jane, wanting to know more about the spoiled and famous Uncle Buckley. “I guess I’ve been imagining someone very . . . sophisticated.”

“Oh, he’s got eclectic tastes too. Actually—oh, never mind,” says Colin, raising another yielding hand. “I forgot I’m not allowed to say anything about umbrellas.”

He’s baiting Jane. It’s working too. Now Jane really wants to know what Colin was going to say about Uncle Buckley and umbrellas. “As long as it’s not about my umbrellas, I don’t mind.”

“Well,” he says, grinning, “I was only going to say that Uncle Buckley collects umbrellas. He practically has one for every outfit.”

“He does?”

“Oh, yes. Polka dots, stripes, floral prints. He’s always wishing more people did representational things too, like, making the canopy look like the head of a frog, or a Volkswagen Beetle, or whatever.”

“Really!”

“He’s the sort of person who could help you someday,” Colin says, “if you ever decided you were ready to show anyone your umbrellas. But now I’ve probably crossed the line again, right?”

“What do you mean, help me?” Jane asks, because she can’t stop herself. She makes representational umbrellas; her eggshell umbrella is representational. It’s one of her best, really, one of the few she might be willing to show someone.

“Well,” says Colin, “he finds buyers for art. I understand that you think your umbrellas aren’t art. But if you keep working at it, maybe someday they will be, and a partnership with someone like Uncle Buckley is the sort of thing that could make an artist’s life explode. Like, in a good way.”

Jane has stopped in her tracks once again. Aunt Magnolia? Is this why you wanted me to come here? So that someone would see my umbrellas, and make my life explode?

Colin is lingering beside Jane awkwardly, scratching his head, swinging himself around to look at the art on the walls while Jane stands there having her interior monologue.

“Are you okay?” he finally asks.

“If I show you my umbrellas,” Jane says, “will you remember that I’m only a beginner?”

“Of course I will,” Colin says, smiling broadly. “I’m not an asshole, you know.”

Jane has a feeling that whether or not Colin is an asshole, this is exactly the result he hoped for when he promised to walk her to her rooms and not whisper a word about umbrellas.

Nonetheless, Jane opens her door, takes a deep, jellyfish breath, and ushers him in.

*   *   *

In Jane’s morning room, Colin weaves among her umbrellas, making thoughtful noises, lifting them to the light, and testing the tension of each one. He opens them with rough, swift movements that make Jane nervous that he’ll hurt them.

“Hey!” she says. “Gentle! They’re handmade!”

Jasper comes and leans against Jane’s feet, watching Colin anxiously. Bending, twirling, studying each creation fiercely, Colin reminds Jane of Sherlock. “It couldn’t be more obvious,” Jane expects him to say as he lifts her ivory and black lace spiderweb specimen to the light, thrusting it upward like a saber. “The butler did it, in the library, with the spiderweb umbrella.”

What he actually says is, “You know, until this moment, I’ve never understood my uncle’s fascination with umbrellas. Some of these are really something.”

To Jane’s alarm, her eyes fill with tears. She immediately turns away from him and touches her sleeve to her face.

“Why a spiderweb?” he says.

“We had a spider,” says Jane, sniffling, “one winter, living in our kitchen window. My aunt wouldn’t let me kill it. We named it Charlotte, of course.”

“And this one?” he says, lifting one up that seems red, until the light hits it and it turns various shades of purple.

Jane is rubbing her ears. “It’s made of two translucent fabrics,” she says, “red on the outside and blue inside, so it seems like it’s glowing different purples, depending on the light. I tried a yellow and blue one too, to make green, but the green gave people a sickly pallor.”

“Uncle Buckley would appreciate that you consider those factors,” says Colin. “Do they work? I mean, are they waterproof?”

“A few of them have little leaks at the seams,” Jane says. “Some of them open more smoothly than others. Some of them are a little too heavy, as you probably noticed.”

“Yeah, some of them are heavy.”

“But I use them when it rains,” says Jane. “They work well enough.”

“You’ll get better at the engineering,” says Colin. “It’s clear you have the talent, and the drive.”

Jane can’t respond to this without more tears, so she keeps her mouth shut.

“Will you let me take one to Uncle Buckley?” Colin says. “I think he might like to deal them.”

“After what I said about them leaking?”

“Well, not the leaking ones, obviously.”

“But, don’t you see how crooked they are? Can’t you see the uneven seams?”

“They’re handmade,” he says. “That makes them charming. There are people who would pay hundreds of dollars for these umbrellas.”

“Oh, get out,” Jane says.

“Rich people love to spend money,” Colin says. “If you let me show one to Uncle Buckley, we may be able to help you take advantage of it. It’ll make his day, which will make my day. I haven’t found anything interesting for him in a while.”

“Well,” Jane says, flabbergasted. “Sure, I guess.”

“I should really take a few,” he says. “Three or four, to show your brand.”

My brand? Jane can’t begin to think what her brand is. But as Colin makes his selections, she can see that he’s choosing some of her favorites. The copper-rose and brown satin that she held on the boat because it seemed appropriate for a heroic journey. The oblong, deep-canopied bird’s egg umbrella that’s pale blue with brown speckles. The dome umbrella, designed, both inside and out, to look like the dome of the Pantheon in Rome.

“I’ve never been there,” Jane says, “but Aunt Magnolia would talk about it as if it was a magical place. She said it rains right through the hole at the top of the dome, straight down into the building, but I didn’t think that would make for a practical umbrella design, so from the outside I show the view inside, and from the inside I show a view of the night sky. It’s painted silk, with glitter glued on for stars.”

“What are you working on now?” he asks.

“I’m—not sure,” Jane says. “I had an idea this morning, but now I’m getting a different idea.”

“Excellent. You artists must follow the muse,” he says, his arms full of Jane’s umbrellas. She follows him into the bedroom, wanting to touch them again, to say good-bye. Her babies.

“When will I hear back about them?” she asks anxiously.

“I’ll send them today on the mail run,” Colin says. “Uncle Buckley’s in the city. He’ll probably get in touch in the next couple days.”

*   *   *

After Colin leaves, Jasper goes into the bedroom and burrows under the bed.

“Fat lot of help you are,” Jane calls after him.

At her worktable, she absently strokes a dusty blue fabric at the top of her pile, noting an unevenness in the dye, like a watermark, all across it. It reminds her of something. What? It’s a flaw in the fabric, but there’s something familiar about it.

Using her waterproof fabric glue, Jane begins to glue points of glitter in various blues, sparingly, with no particular pattern, across the fabric, to accentuate the unevenness. She still wants to make the brown-and-gold self-defense umbrella, but right now, this uneven blue seems the right backdrop to her thoughts. Jane does some of her best thinking while she’s making umbrellas, if she’s working on the right umbrella.

As she slices the uneven blue fabric into gores, Jane comes up with one possible story that makes sense of everything. Sort of. What if the Panzavecchias, in addition to being microbiologists, are art thieves, in cahoots with the servants at Tu Reviens, and together they staged a disappearance, so that no one would suspect them when they subsequently stole the Vermeer? And their little daughter Grace wants to be an art thief like her parents, so she stole the Brancusi? But since she’s eight, she did it badly? Like, maybe she broke the fish part off by accident, then, in regret, returned the pedestal?

Or—maybe she doesn’t want to be an art thief, maybe she hates that her parents are art thieves, and maybe her parents stole the Brancusi. Then, in rebellion, she returned whatever part of it she could get her hands on?

Jane can see the glaring holes in these theories. They don’t explain the Mafia, the involvement of the Okadas, or why Mrs. Vanders would have drawn attention to the forgery in the first place, among other things.

Jane might think that there were two separate mysteries in the house, one about the servants, Okadas, and Panzavecchias, and one about art theft—if only she hadn’t seen that girl putting something on one of the tables in the receiving hall.

She fashions a rosette for the place at the top of the canopy where the gores meet. If I were a better detective, she thinks, I would’ve thought to check the receiving hall to make sure she didn’t actually put something else there, not the pedestal at all.

I suppose I should check it now.

Jane pushes her gores back, sets her glue down, and wipes her hands on her work apron, leaving a tiny constellation of stars. As she stands, she notices little carvings on her worktable: a blue whale and its calf, swimming along the corner of the table’s surface. Moving her supplies aside so she can search the rest of the table, she also finds a shark and its shark babies along the top edge.

Ivy made this worktable, then. Jane traces the carvings with her finger, wishing she didn’t like them so much.

“Jasper?” she calls out, pulling off the apron and grabbing her sketchbook. His nose emerges from under the bed as she passes through the bedroom. Together they leave the rooms.

“Aye, aye, Captain Polepants,” Jane says.

Flipping open her sketchbook as she walks, she glances through her list of names, again wondering whom to trust. It’s amazing, really, how easy it is to imagine a story around each and every person, turning that person into a con artist. Lucy, for example, is perfectly positioned to steal art. No one would suspect her, and she could frame someone else for the crime. Kiran has nothing but free time, goes wherever she wants, whenever she wants, and doesn’t exactly put out a vibe of beneficence. Mrs. Vanders and Ravi could be in on it together, staging tragic discoveries of missing art to deflect attention from their involvement. After all, isn’t Ravi apparently known for acquiring peculiar Monets from someone, probably his mother? Couldn’t the Monet be a forgery? And didn’t he bring it straight to Mrs. Vanders?

With a weary sigh, Jane flips her sketchbook closed.

On the second-story landing, before Jasper can begin his usual blockade, she takes the initiative and crosses the bridge to the opposite landing. With a protesting yip, Jasper hesitates, then sits his rump in place, apparently deciding to wait there.

Taking the west stairs down to the receiving hall, Jane wanders around the room, her big boots echoing on the checkered floor. The air reeks of lilacs. The various side tables are crowded with vases but also contain a few small, stark, modern-looking sculptures. A big family photo sits on one, Octavian with one arm around Ravi and his other arm around a blond, white, youngish-looking woman. The blond woman has an arm around Kiran, who doesn’t look happy, exactly, but nor does she look like she wants to stab someone, which might be the most one can expect from a family photo of Kiran. Ravi is beaming out of the frame. Octavian too has an aspect of pleasure, maybe also of quiet pride. The blond woman, who must be Charlotte, is smiling, but with a touch of confusion, or distraction. Her eyes are focused on something far away.

Jane picks it up, looking closer. Golden-orange nasturtiums hang on pink walls in the background of the photo. Jane wonders, could this be what the little girl delivered to these tables? Why not? It makes no less sense than anything else.

She’s trying to rub away a strange, bloated sensation in her ears when she hears the closing of a camera shutter.

With a grim unwillingness, Jane looks up at the third-story bridge. Ivy stands there, her camera raised to her face. She’s aiming it at a woman on the west landing who’s dusting a suit of medieval armor with a big, pink feather duster.

If I asked, Jane thinks, she’d tell me she’s taking a picture of the suit of armor. But Jane doesn’t ask. She just watches Ivy, until Ivy lowers her camera and sees her.

At the sight of her, Ivy flushes. Then her eyes drop and her mouth hardens with something like resentment. She turns and strides away.

Jane feels as if someone has punched her lungs. Okay, she thinks. Ivy is mad at me for some reason. Whatever, she thinks, clapping the photo back onto the table and standing tall. I’m going to solve this mystery.

Marching up the east staircase, she prepares herself for an altercation with Jasper, but this time he’s just watching her with a sad, droopy face. When she passes into the second-story east wing, he quietly follows.

She stops at the end of the corridor, where a single empty bracket on the wall marks the Vermeer’s previous home.

“You again?” says a faraway voice.

Jane turns to find Lucy St. George walking down the corridor toward her.

“And you again,” Jane says.

“Yes,” Lucy says. “I wanted another look. Or maybe I’m just wandering. I do my best thinking when I’m moving around.”

“I get that.”

“What are you up to?”

“Something drew me here.”

“Not the weird house noises, I hope,” says Lucy.

“I don’t think so,” says Jane. “I think I was hoping to see the painting again. The copy, I mean. I guess I should’ve known it wouldn’t be here, on public display.”

“Mrs. Vanders put it in the house safe, for the police,” says Lucy dryly. “She won’t even let me see it unless she’s hovering over me the whole time.”

“Has she called the police, then?”

“So she says.”

“You don’t think she has?”

“Well, I have contacts with the police, and the FBI and Interpol,” says Lucy. “I’ve asked a couple of deliberately vague leading questions, but no one’s mentioned it, even though I would’ve thought this would be big news.”

“Do you suspect her?” says Jane. “I mean, she’s the one who called attention to the forgery in the first place.”

“Let’s just say I don’t suspect her for the Vermeer,” says Lucy.

A new understanding of things begins to touch Jane’s mind. “Wait. Do you mean you think there are two different thieves?”

“A thief with the expertise to forge the Vermeer would never perform a hack job on a Brancusi,” says Lucy. “So, yeah. Two separate thieves. One with a lot of knowledge, time, and resources, and another—” Lucy pauses, shaking her head in disbelief. “Who’s arrogant and foolish.”

Staring at the blank space on the wall, Jane thinks about this. She wouldn’t have called Mrs. Vanders arrogant and foolish. She’s bossy and controlling, but not foolish. Neither is Patrick, nor Ivy. It sounds more like . . . Lucy’s idea of Colin, or of Ravi.

“I wonder which thief Ravi will hate more,” says Lucy, “the competent one or the incompetent one.”

“So, you don’t suspect Ravi?”

“Didn’t you see his histrionics?”

“Couldn’t that have been an act?”

Lucy twists her mouth. “Ravi is a child. What you see is what’s there. Apparently the art, at least, is capable of breaking his heart.”

She says this with an interesting bitterness. Jane finds herself wondering if Lucy is jealous of the art, but it’s hard to figure out how to ask. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, nothing,” says Lucy. “Forget it. It’s interesting Philip took off last night, isn’t it? He and Phoebe are always showing up for the galas early, eager as beavers to spend time in this house. They could’ve had time to plan the forgery of the Vermeer.”

“You’re connecting them to the Vermeer? Not the Brancusi?” says Jane, with mild disappointment, because it’s the Brancusi that’s connected, possibly, to the little girl, and the little girl who’s possibly connected to the Okadas. Then again, Lucy St. George doesn’t know about the late-night secrets of the Okadas. And the little girl might’ve just been carrying that family portrait. “What’s Phoebe Okada’s job, anyway?” Jane asks.

“Oh, she’s a mathematician,” Lucy says, “in the computer science department at Columbia. People talk about her as if she’s a genius.”

This doesn’t fit in anywhere, and Jane is getting frustrated. “I saw the Okadas sneaking around last night,” she blurts out. “With Patrick.”

Lucy’s eyes narrow on her. “What do you mean? Where?”

“In the servants’ quarters,” says Jane. “Just after four in the morning.”

“I think that’s when Philip was called away,” says Lucy. “Patrick was probably just helping him organize a boat.”

Jane almost says something, then stops. She doesn’t mention the girl, the diaper bag, the puzzling conversation, the gun. It’s not that she doesn’t trust Lucy; it’s that she doesn’t trust anyone. She needs to keep thinking.

“What’s wrong with that dog?” Lucy asks.

Jane looks down to see Jasper with his head tilted sideways, cradling her ankle gently in his long mouth. He’s not biting; until she sees him there, she doesn’t even feel it, although now she’s conscious of his drool soaking through her jeans leg.

“Jasper!” she says. “What are you doing? You look like you’re waiting for the right moment to eat me whole!”

“Maybe you taste good,” says Lucy with a chuckle.

Jane extricates her ankle and says, “The dog is the only person not on my list of suspects.”

“I noticed you seem to be detecting,” says Lucy with a grin. “Are you interested in a career like mine? Chasing down thieves, finding forgeries, recovering originals?”

Jane has been thinking about this; about copies of precious things, in particular. What if it turned out that there were copies of Aunt Magnolia? Like a Cylon, or a cloning project in some sort of sci-fi story? What if Jane’s personal copy wasn’t the original? Would that make Jane’s aunt Magnolia less precious? Wasn’t Jane’s copy precious because she was Jane’s? Jane isn’t trying to solve this crime because of forged art. She’s trying to solve it because she wants to understand the people. Ravi, Mrs. Vanders, Ivy. She wants to know why Aunt Magnolia sent her here. She wants to know what everything means.

“Not really,” Jane says. “The truth is, I don’t really care about the art being forged, not personally. I mean, I liked the forgery. I thought it was beautiful. Everyone’s said so, everyone’s been talking about it all day. And hardly anyone even noticed it was forged. Who cares if it’s the one worth a hundred million dollars or not?”

Lucy is watching her with a small, wistful smile. “A lot of people care.”

“Well,” says Jane, “I hope Ravi gets his painting back.”

“You hope that out of niceness,” Lucy says. “Not because you’re concerned about the money. It’s for the best. My job isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and Colin showed me your umbrellas. Anyone with half an artistic eye can see that that’s meant to be your career.”

A small implosion of happiness roots Jane to the floor. Then Lucy’s phone rings. Mouthing the word Dad, she steps away to answer it.

Jane goes back to her rooms, still glowing from Lucy’s words. There, her eyes fall upon her uneven blue umbrella in progress.

She realizes, suddenly, what the unevenness of saturation in the fabric has been reminding her of. It’s the discoloration in Aunt Magnolia’s eye, the blue blotch inside her brown iris. Aunt Magnolia’s muddy star, with its spikes, its spokes, like a broken umbrella.

Jane is going to make an umbrella that looks like a broken umbrella, but isn’t. It will be a working umbrella, but uneven and blotchy, a blue splotch umbrella that looks like Aunt Magnolia’s eye. Jane’s heart holds the idea, and her hands know what to do.

*   *   *

Sometime later, Ravi knocks on Jane’s bedroom door, comes into the morning room, and stands there, glaring.

“Yes?” Jane says, the word muffled around a bite of trail mix she’s found in one of her bags. She’s missed lunch.

“Octavian has forbidden me from searching anyone’s private property,” Ravi says.

Jane’s hands are measuring umbrella ribs against each other. The ribs of this umbrella will be unmatching, varying in length, which means that the canopy will be an odd, uneven shape, not round. “You’re welcome to look through my things,” she says.

“That’s what a thief would say,” Ravi says captiously. “Knowing I never would.”

“I don’t think, if I were a thief, I’d be the type to take that kind of chance.”

Ravi’s still glowering, but seems interested in this. “I think I would, if I were a thief.”

“That doesn’t particularly surprise me,” Jane says with a grin. “You like games.”

“That’s true,” he says, then softens his eyes on Jane. “You should play with me.”

It’s such an abrupt change of focus, and such an unmistakable invitation, that Jane bursts out laughing from the shock of it.

“Ravi,” she says. “No, and stop it.”

“Lucy and I are off again,” he says. “I told you.”

“I don’t care.”

“Okay,” he says with a shrug. “Just being frank about what I like.”

Just being Ravi, Jane thinks to herself.

“I keep picturing Ivy,” says Ravi.

“What?” Jane says, startled.

“She used to stand in front of the Brancusi, jumping up and down, singing it a song about tuna fish. She was three.”

“Oh,” Jane says. “That’s adorable.”

“I remember her in pigtails, wearing little saddle shoes.”

Jane can imagine this too, though the three-year-old she’s picturing has a big camera around her neck and smells like jasmine and chlorine, which is surely ridiculous. Jane can’t really picture the fish. “The way Colin described it to me,” she says, “it’s pretty abstract, for a fish.”

“Right, but that’s the beauty of it,” Ravi says. “It’s the human experience of a fish. There isn’t a single scale or fin. It’s just an oblong sliver of marble. But it has such a sense of movement.” He waves a hand, beginning to move around the room in his enthusiasm, finding the spaces that are clear of umbrellas. “It practically disappears from a certain angle, like a fish flashing through water. It’s a perfect representation of what you really see when you see a fish in water, before your brain tries to fill in all the things you know about what makes a fish a fish. And no one but Brancusi could capture it that way. I expect it’s the reason he mounted it on a mirrored base, for the movement and the flashing.”

“I’m sorry it’s missing,” Jane says, partly because at this point, she wants to see it for herself. “How much is it worth?”

“I don’t care,” Ravi says. “That’s not what this is about.”

Jane suspects he isn’t trying to be endearing; he’s just being honest. And of course he can afford not to care about the money.

It’s endearing anyway. “I get that,” Jane says. “But it’ll matter to the investigation. I’m sure it matters to the thief.”

“Yes,” Ravi says, wiping his eyes tiredly with a hand. “Lucy will need to know. Lucy is going to find our fish and our Vermeer, and when she does, I’m going to tell the whole world. This is going to redeem her from the Rubens she lost.”

“It’s nice of you to think of your loss that way,” says Jane. “As Lucy’s redemption.”

“I’m a nice person,” Ravi says miserably. Then he picks up an umbrella, a closed one that’s propped in a corner. It’s not one Jane has given much thought to recently, one of her simpler, smaller affairs, with pale gores of various complementary yellows and a varnished mahogany rod and handle. With careful fingers, Ravi caresses the umbrella’s ferrule and its notch, its hand spring, for all the world looking as if he appreciates the care with which Jane created it.

“May I open it?” he asks her.

The only person who’s ever asked Jane’s permission before opening an umbrella is Aunt Magnolia. “Yes,” she says breathlessly. It really is one of her more decent umbrellas; as Ravi slides it open, she warms with sudden, unexpected pride.

“It’s elegant,” Ravi says. “You’re talented.”

“Thank you,” Jane manages to say.

“For a teenager,” he says with a cheeky grin.

“You were a teenager not that long ago.”

“True. It makes me think of Kiran,” Ravi says. “The soft colors. She should have it. Can I buy it from you?”

“Seriously?”

“Of course.”

Jane almost tells him he can have it, as a gift. But, rich people love to spend money, says Colin. “It’s a thousand dollars,” she says, obeying a slightly hysterical whim.

“Done,” Ravi says. “Can I give you a check later?”

“Ravi,” Jane says, stunned. “I was kidding.”

“Well, I’m not. I’ll leave it here until I’ve paid you.”

“You can take it with you! I trust you not to steal!”

Ravi’s grin flashes bright. “That’s something, I guess.”

“Not to steal the umbrella,” Jane amends.

“Good to know I’m on your list of suspects,” he says. “You may as well know you’re not on mine. I wouldn’t even know about the forgery if you hadn’t blurted it out about Mrs. Vanders’s suspicions.”

“I guess that’s true,” says Jane, alarmed to realize her role.

“I could see people paying thousands for some of these umbrellas, you know,” he says. “Have you thought of working with a dealer? I could show a few to Buckley.”

“Colin has already offered,” Jane says, “and I think you’re both delusional.”

“Damn Colin,” Ravi says cheerfully. “He’ll get the credit, and the commission.”

“I’m sure you’ll miss that ten dollars. You say thousands, but Colin says hundreds.”

Ravi shakes his head. “Buckley will value them higher. Not all of them, but a few of them. And he’ll want to see what you do in the future.”

He leaves with the yellow umbrella under his arm.

*   *   *

At dinner, Colin is the only person who seems to want to talk. Ravi isn’t even there. Phoebe frowns at her plate and Lucy glances up from her phone now and then to pretend she’s paying attention. Kiran looks tired, flinching every time Colin begins to speak, as if listening is an unbearable strain.

It’s hard to watch, but Jane hopes Colin will keep talking nonetheless, because he’s asking some of the very questions she wants to know the answers to.

“Is either piece insured?” he asks the table.

When no one else responds, Kiran finally stirs herself and says, “No.”

“Why not?” asks Jane, who can’t fathom why anyone wouldn’t insure art that’s so valuable.

Lucy speaks absently, as if bored, not raising her eyes from her phone. “Insurance on pieces like that, especially a Vermeer, is prohibitively expensive.”

“None of the art is alarmed, either,” says Kiran. “Octavian trusts people. I’ve never understood it,” she adds sadly.

“Well, at least that rules Octavian out as a suspect,” says Colin. “He’d gain much more by selling them than by stealing them.”

Kiran’s face hardens. “No one in my family stole the fucking art,” she says in a low voice.

“Sweetheart,” says Colin in amusement. “I just said he didn’t.”

“Maybe you think I took it?” says Kiran. “Or my brother, or my mother, or my stepmother?”

“Darling,” Colin says, in a deliberately soothing voice that makes Kiran’s shoulders stiffen more. “Of course I don’t, but you know it had to be someone. We figure it out by eliminating people.”

“Yes,” Kiran says, “I’m not twelve years old, I understand how it works. But since it has to be someone, let’s not talk about it at dinner. There’s no way to consider any of the suspects without getting someone’s back up at this table.”

Phoebe frowns extra hard at this. Jane wonders then if Kiran might suspect anything about Patrick. Could that be why she seems so miserable?

“Would you feel better if I spoke more generally?” asks Colin, in an avuncular tone that’s starting to grate on Jane’s nerves. “Do you know much about Vermeer?” he asks, startling Jane by addressing the question to her. “Did you know there are few Vermeers in existence? Another of them is missing too, stolen from a Boston museum in 1990. It’s probably being passed around as collateral in the drug world, maybe at seven or eight percent of its market value. That’s the going rate at the moment for a stolen picture.”

“Colin,” says Lucy, emerging from her phone and speaking sharply. “We don’t want to talk about it. Just shut up.”

At that moment, Ravi comes exploding into the banquet hall. “Lucy,” he says, swooping down on her. “Colin. I’m taking another look at the fake. I want you both to look at it too and give me your thoughts on the forger.”

“Right now?” Lucy says, not even glancing up, her fingers moving furiously across her phone keyboard. “I’m eating.”

“Right now,” Ravi says.

“I’ll come later.”

“You’re not actually eating, Lucy,” Ravi says. “Anyone can see that.”

“Ravi—”

His voice changes, to something quiet, and forlorn. “Luce. Please?”

Lucy looks up, into Ravi’s face. Then, sighing sharply, she pushes herself back from the table.

Colin, watching these proceedings, speaks in his careful, singsong voice. “Kiran,” he says, “do you mind if I go with Ravi?”

“No, it’s fine,” she says. “You should help.”

It’s a relief to watch him go. A minute later, Phoebe finishes her food and also excuses herself. Jane is alone with Kiran, who picks up her fork and stabs a green bean, then stabs it again.

“Kiran?” Jane says, then stops when Kiran flinches. It occurs to Jane that Kiran doesn’t want another person asking her if she’s okay. “Is there—anything I can do to help with the missing art?”

Kiran coughs a laugh, then stabs a different green bean. “It’s not funny, of course,” she says. “It’s awful. Or anyway, Ravi feels awful, which makes me feel awful. And I feel awful speculating about who might have done it too.” She shakes her head briefly, as if clearing it. “Ravi gave me the yellow umbrella,” she says. “It’s lovely. Thank you. I hope you charged him lots of money.”

“I did, actually,” says Jane, surprised that Kiran remembers that money matters to Jane in a way it doesn’t to her.

“It’s really special,” Kiran says. “I’d like to see the rest of them.”

“I’d be happy to show them to you,” Jane says, “anytime,” realizing she means it, because Kiran feels different from everyone else. Kiran is careful. She’ll be respectful. She understood Aunt Magnolia, and she’ll understand the umbrellas.

“Do you want to go into business with them?” she says. “Ravi could help you.”

“Actually, Colin has taken a few to show to his uncle.”

Kiran eats a green bean, then stares at her fork. “I don’t know why I’m dating him,” she says.

She’s voiced Jane’s own question, but Jane isn’t sure how to respond.

“I mean,” Kiran says, “he seems like a fine person and all. Doesn’t he?”

“Uh-huh,” Jane says, “most of the time.”

“Ravi likes him.”

“But, do you like him?”

“I like having sex with him,” she says.

“Really?” Jane says, then, realizing how she sounds, flushes with embarrassment.

Kiran laughs. “He probably doesn’t seem the type, huh? Let’s just say there are benefits to him feeling like he needs to be an expert on everything.”

Jane once kissed a boy from her high school at a party, and a girl in her dorm who was pretty drunk. And she thinks about sex. But she hasn’t even come close. Not really.

“I feel like I should like him,” Kiran says.

“Aunt Magnolia used to tell me to be careful not to should all over myself,” Jane says, which makes Kiran glance at her in surprise, then chuckle.

“But, really,” Kiran says, with a strange, stubborn kind of earnestness. “I should like him. The funny things he says should make me laugh. The conversations we have should interest me. He’s smart, he’s educated, he never does anything objectively wrong. And yet I can’t relax around him, and I can’t tell whether it’s actually something about him, or if it’s just that I can’t relax anywhere, about anything.” She blinks fast, looking away from Jane.

“Oh, Kiran.”

“It sucks,” she says. “And trying to figure it out makes me really tired.”

“Is Patrick part of it too?” Jane asks.

Kiran makes a hopeless, impatient noise. “No. He doesn’t get to be part of it. At least Colin is an open book.”

“Well,” Jane says, feeling distinctly useless. “I wish I knew how to help. I don’t have much experience. Mainly what I know how to do is drop out of college and make umbrellas.”

A smile touches the corner of Kiran’s mouth. “What would your aunt tell me to do?”

Jane takes a careful breath. “She’d probably tell you to breathe like a jellyfish.”

“Do jellyfish breathe?”

“I mean, imagine your lungs are moving the way a jellyfish moves,” Jane says. “Breathe deliberately, deep and slow, into your belly.”

“Okay,” Kiran says, focusing on her next breath. “And this will solve my problems?”

Now Jane is smiling. “It will, if your problems relate to breathing.”

“Aunt Magnolia was a wise woman.”

Yes, Jane thinks. She was.

*   *   *

That night, Jane’s rooms feel cavernous and dark, the ceilings too high, the air too chilly. In her morning room, the darkness presses in. So she works, moving her hands steadily across the skeleton of her umbrella, trying to be patient with all the questions that don’t have answers.

There’s a stage in umbrella-making when the umbrella is little more than a rod and eight ribs. If Jane opens and closes it, it moves like a jellyfish made of wires, like an undersea creature in the world’s creepiest ocean.

Since she’s using ribs of different lengths for this umbrella, the frame makes a particularly strange and unbalanced jellyfish. It’s hard to know if this will have the effect she’s going for. She’ll have to wait and see. But she thinks she might want this umbrella to be like a secret. When other people look at it, they’ll see something broken-looking and weird. Only Jane will know that it’s the blue splotch in Aunt Magnolia’s iris.

*   *   *

Once again, the groaning house wakes her before dawn, this time from a dream about Ivy stealing a fish. The dream becomes a voice—a house voice—with moaning walls and rattling windows that tell Jane to look outside, and before she’s entirely awake, she’s stumbled out of bed and pressed herself against the glass in the morning room. The night is clear, the moon is just rising, and the garden is knit like black lace.

Jasper blunders into the room from the bedroom and stands beside her at the window. He presses his nose to the glass.

Beyond the garden, movement. A dark shape. No—two dark shapes. One of the shapes switches on a flashlight. The other person is illuminated briefly, not enough to make out any features, but enough to show that this person is carrying a flat, rectangular package. They cross the lawn and disappear into the trees.

Patrick and Ivy, Jane thinks, struck by a certainty she can’t justify. Her heart begins to beat in her throat. “Jasper?” she says. “Does that package seem the right size for the Vermeer?”

Jasper sneezes.

“Yeah,” Jane says. “So, what do we do?”

Jasper sets his paw on Jane’s foot. It’s a gesture Jane isn’t certain how to interpret. Is he trying to keep her here, or is he expressing team solidarity in the face of adventure?

Or maybe he’s a dog, Jane says to herself, he doesn’t understand language, and he likes how your foot feels.

“Well, Jasper,” says Jane. “I guess we need a flashlight. An ally would be nice too.”

Finding her hoodie and socks and slipping into her big black boots, checking the time—it’s not even 5:15 yet—Jane goes out into the corridor. After considering things for a split second, she knocks on Ravi’s door. Jasper leans on her ankles. When there’s no answer, she knocks harder, and when there’s still no answer, she takes a conscious risk of discovering him having sex with someone and barges right in. It’s not like he hasn’t barged in on her, and there’s no time to waste here.

Ravi’s bed is palatial, and empty.

Interesting. She tries to conjure up the mental image of the two figures entering the forest again, to see if she can turn one of them into Ravi, but it’s really no use; she didn’t see enough.

“I wish I knew which room is Lucy’s,” she says to Jasper as they proceed down the corridor. “I wish—” She trips over Captain Polepants. “Ack! I wish I knew who to trust.” Where is she likely to find a flashlight? The kitchen? The servants’ quarters?

Jane has a sudden vision of the two long, powerful flashlights propped on Ivy’s computer desk.

If Ivy’s in the forest now, there’s nothing to stop Jane from going into her room and “borrowing” a flashlight. And if it turns out that Ivy is in her room . . .

Jane heads toward the servants’ quarters. As she and Jasper round the courtyard, she hears music in the house somewhere. A Beatles recording, which strikes her as odd at this hour.

In the servants’ wing, she starts to lose her nerve. If Ivy’s in her room, then Jane’s appearance at five-something in the morning is going to be pretty unexpected. And Ivy hasn’t been too friendly lately. She stops outside Ivy’s door.

“Jasper?” she whispers. “What do I do?”

Jasper looks back at her with a blank expression appropriate to a dog.

With one big breath, Jane knocks.

After the briefest pause, Ivy’s door swings back sharply, Ivy’s face alert and interested behind it, her glasses in place. Behind her, one of her computers is on, fans whirring and lights flashing like a little spaceship in the darkness. “What do you want?” she demands in alarm, glancing past Jane into the corridor. “Why are you here?”

She’s still wearing the ratty blue sweater and black leggings from yesterday and her dark hair is unbound, falling down her shoulders messily to the middle of her back. And she looks so unhappy to see Jane that Jane is stung.

“I need a flashlight,” Jane says.

“What for?”

“I just need one.”

“Tell me what for.”

“Why should I?”

Ivy speaks roughly. “Because if you need a flashlight, that tells me you’re going outside, and it could be dangerous.”

“You mean because of the Panzavecchias,” Jane says, “and Philip Okada sneaking around with a gun?”

Ivy seems stunned into silence.

“Are you going to give me a flashlight or not?” says Jane. When Ivy still doesn’t respond, she turns on her heel and stalks out into the corridor.

“Wait,” Ivy calls after her. “Janie, wait.”

Jane doesn’t wait. When she turns down the corridor toward the center of the house, Jasper, behind her, yips and whines, then emits one short bark that finally gets Jane’s attention. She turns back to him impatiently. “What!”

Jasper is backing down the corridor toward the big plank door with the iron latch at the far end, the door that leads to the west attics. He’s whining as he moves, clearly begging her to follow.

With a frustrating sense of futility, Jane gives in. “Goddammit, Jasper,” she says, turning to follow. “You’re lucky I’ve watched so many dog movies.”

Jasper leads her through the wide plank door, then straight ahead to a sliding metal door that Jane realizes must be the freight elevator, and the fastest route to the outside. She presses the button. When the door slides open, she and Jasper step in.

As it slides closed, a hand reaches in and stops the door.

Jane is hyperventilating as Ivy pushes herself through the crack. She’s dressed in tight black from head to toe and she’s wearing a backpack and checking the light on her flashlight, which is big enough to bludgeon someone with. It shines like a beacon. Briefly, it illuminates the bulge of a gun holster under Ivy’s hoodie, below her left breast. The elevator doors slide shut.

“Ivy?” Jane says, her voice cracking.

“I’m going to stick to you like shit on your shoe,” says Ivy, “until you tell me where you’re going.”

Jane figures that if she’s stuck in an elevator with Ivy and a gun, there’s no point in holding back what Ivy’s going to learn eventually anyway. “I saw two people outside with a flashlight and a Vermeer-sized package,” she says. “They crossed the lawn and went into the trees.”

“Got it,” says Ivy.

“I assumed it was you and Patrick,” Jane adds nastily.

Ivy’s face is expressionless. “We have nothing to do with the Vermeer.”

“No, just the broken Brancusi,” Jane says. “And the bank robbery, and the kidnapping of children.”

Saying nothing, Ivy fishes a dark balaclava out of a pocket and pulls it down across her face, over her glasses. The contrast between her and Jane, who’s still in her hoodie and Doctor Who pajamas, borders on the absurd. The elevator screams as it descends, then lets them out into a blasting wind and the sudden noise of the sea far below.

Ivy grips Jane’s wrist, hard.

“Let go,” Jane says. “You’re hurting me.”

Ivy says, “We have to move fast,” then begins to pull Jane across the lawn. Jane scrambles along beside her, still hurting, amazed at how strong Ivy is and how fast she’s moving.

“Where are you taking me?”

“There’s a bay in the ramble,” Ivy says. “A hidden one, on the island’s northeast edge. A great place for sneaking art off the island.”

“You would know,” Jane says, then focuses on being dragged toward the trees without falling.

The ramble is a steep, rocky, hillocky forest of scrub pines. There are no trails and Jasper is pushing himself to his limits to keep up with the downhill sliding and jumping Ivy and Jane are doing. He disappears occasionally, then reappears, presumably finding alternate, more basset-hound-friendly routes of passage. The rattling wind covers whatever noise he’s making. Ivy continues to move with assurance, familiar with the forest. Daybreak is coming on fast.

Ivy grips Jane higher on her arm and jerks her to a stop.

“What—” Jane begins, then shuts her mouth as she sees what Ivy’s seeing. A man sits on a rock with his back to them, not ten feet away, surrounded by trees. His hair is clipped close and his body is hefty, sturdy; he has a red beard. His pants legs are soaked through, as if he’s been wading through water. Beside him on the rock is a small pile of orange slices. He reaches to the pile and eats one occasionally. A gun sticks out of the back waistband of his jeans.

Ivy pulls Jane away.

“Let’s go back to the house,” Jane whispers as Ivy tugs her down the slope, out of range of the man. “Please, Ivy, stop. Let me go.” But Ivy suddenly pulls her down behind a shrub and puts an arm around her, whispering Shhhh urgently in her ear, and Jane freezes, no idea what’s happening. Where’s Jasper? Jane begins to panic about Jasper. What if the horrible man sees—

Jasper presses against Jane’s leg on the side opposite Ivy. Pushing away from Ivy, Jane buries her face in his neck, breathing into his fur. “Oh, Jasper.”

But Jasper’s attention seems fixed on a point through a hole in the shrubbery. Ivy is holding some of the branches back and staring out into the growing light.

Jane moves some branches aside and looks where they’re looking.

It’s the bay of which Ivy spoke, some twenty yards away, a place where the forest gives way and the land slopes down to a small, crescent-shaped inlet of dark sand. Lucy St. George stands on the shore in all black, holding a gun. She’s pointing it at a very tall white man in a speedboat moored to a single wooden post in the water.

“Lucy,” Jane whispers. “Lucy! What is she doing?”

What Lucy seems to be doing is arguing with the man. He’s at the motor, one hand grabbing it as if he’s ready to take off at any moment. He keeps waving his other hand around and yelling things at Lucy that Jane can’t hear. His words have the tone of angry, passionate questions.

“Whatever,” Jane hears Lucy shout back in a derisive voice. “I’m not doing it anymore. It’s a waste of my talents. Yours too, J.R.”

J.R. reaches into his coat and Jane is frightened; she thinks, from the expression on his face, that he’s reaching for a gun. Instead he pulls out a whistle. He blows into it with a shrill blast. He’s the tallest man Jane has ever seen, thin as a reed.

A moment later, branches crack and leaves rustle and the red-bearded man who’s been eating oranges comes through the brush onto shore. Without even a sidelong glance at Lucy or her gun, he wades directly into the water, unmoors the boat, and climbs in. J.R. brings the boat to life like the waking of a thousand bees. Then the boat zips away, J.R. looking back at Lucy balefully.

“Who were they?” Jane whispers to Ivy. “Where’s the painting? Why did she let them go? Is it an undercover sting?”

“No,” says Ivy grimly, pulling off her balaclava. “I’m not getting ‘undercover sting’ from this.”

“Do you mean—”

“Shh!”

Still on shore, Lucy wraps her arms tight about herself, one hand still clutching her gun. Then she turns abruptly to scan the trees. Is she waiting for something? Someone? Finally, she makes a small, impatient gesture, sticks her gun inside her jacket, and begins to walk away from shore, directing herself not precisely toward the spot where Jane and Ivy are hiding, but near to it. She wears a fuzzy black knit hat that makes her look big-eyed and young. She seems very alone to Jane somehow, as if Jane is looking into a View-Master at the only woman in the world. As Lucy approaches, she wipes her cheeks with the back of her hand and Jane sees that she’s crying.

Ivy reaches under her hoodie toward the gun holster and makes a move to stand up.

“What the hell are you doing?” Jane whispers fiercely, grabbing on to Ivy’s arm and yanking her back down.

“I’m going to stop her!” says Ivy, struggling to break free of Jane’s grip.

“Stop her doing what?” Jane says. “We still don’t know what’s going on!”

“Don’t be so naïve!” says Ivy. “She’s an art thief!”

“Fine, but I won’t let you shoot her!”

“What?” says Ivy, staring at Jane with an incredulous expression. “I’m not going to shoot her!”

“Then why do you have a gun?”

“Okay,” says Lucy’s voice, rising, cold and careful, from a place very near. “Who’s there? I can hear voices. Come out slowly.”

Ivy is so startled that she drops back down, gasping, eyes wild. She reaches under her hoodie. “Stay hidden,” she whispers. “Let me handle this, please.”

Before Jane can even begin to try to figure out what to do, Jasper barrels around the shrubbery toward Lucy. Jane stands up, crying out, and watches the dog ram into Lucy. Unprepared, Lucy topples, cursing, struggling with her gun. The dog climbs on top of her and closes his mouth on her gun, growling, flailing to and fro. Everything is happening so fast. Jane runs to them, terrified that the gun will go off in Jasper’s mouth. Lucy struggles, her fingers bleeding and trapped; she understands too.

“Stop him,” Lucy sobs. “Stop him. Pull him away. He’ll blow my head off!”

“Jasper,” Jane says, wrapping arms around his middle and trying to pull. “She’s not going to shoot us!”

“I’m not,” Lucy gasps. “Of course I’m not going to shoot you. I swear!”

Jasper’s grip slips. The sudden release sends Jane falling down sideways with the dog in her arms. She and Jasper struggle and roll, then she finds her feet and rights herself.

When she stands, Lucy is on her feet again too. Lucy holds her gun, trained on Jane.

“Lucy,” Jane says, confused.

Lucy’s eyes are steady and hard behind the barrel of the gun. Blood runs down her hands. “So,” she says. “You’re charmingly trusting, aren’t you?”

Not really, no, Jane thinks, her thoughts taking sluggish steps, but there’s a world of difference between not trusting someone and believing they’re actually capable of shooting you. This is my fault, Jane thinks. Ivy is here. Jasper is here. I brought them here and put them in danger. “Jasper,” she says to the dog, who’s emitting a low growl beside her that terrifies her because of how Lucy might react. “Be quiet, and still.”

Ivy’s strong voice rises behind Jane from the bushes. “I’ve got a gun too,” she says. “Drop yours, Lucy, or I’ll shoot you.”

Lucy snarls. “You don’t have a gun.”

“Don’t I?” says Ivy. “If you hurt Janie, I’ll make your knees explode. Now drop it. I’m going to count to one.”

What happens next happens so fast that Jane can barely follow it. Jasper launches himself at Lucy. Lucy tries to shoot him. Jane screams and runs at them, Lucy’s gun goes off, and Jasper’s teeth are clamped around Lucy’s knee. Lucy goes down again, Lucy is screaming in pain, and Jasper is bleeding. Jasper is bleeding! Jane falls on Lucy and wrests the gun from her hands. She doesn’t know what to do with it once she has it, but then Ivy is beside her, taking it away. Ivy trains Lucy’s gun on Lucy, who’s still screaming, still struggling to escape the grip of Jasper’s teeth. Jasper is holding on hard.

“Brave dog,” Jane says, grabbing on to him. It’s just his ear. Lucy’s shot a hole through the flap of his big, floppy ear. Tears stream down Jane’s face. “Jasper, you brave, brave dog. I’m so sorry. Are you okay? Let go. Let me look at your ear.”

Jasper lets Lucy’s knee go. Jane hugs him and he licks her face, bleeding all over her. She cries into his fur. It’s a big wet mess. His ear is bleeding copiously and Jane presses on it with her sleeve, not really sure how to help him, until Ivy suggests Jane remove one of her layers and use it to tie the ear tightly to his head.

“I’d give you one of my layers,” Ivy says, “except that I’m not taking my eyes off this asshole.”

“It’s lovely, your concern for the dog,” snarls the asshole in question, rocking over her injuries, moaning. “I’m in bad shape here.”

Jane can’t stand the sound of Lucy’s voice in her airspace. “If she talks again,” she says to Ivy, “shoot her.”

“Changed your mind, then?” asks Ivy in a gently teasing tone.

Jane is too ashamed to look at Ivy. She tries to fashion a bandage for Jasper with her hoodie. It’s not going well. She’s still crying, and frightened, and shaking too hard.

She takes a deep, steadying breath.

“Hey, Janie,” Ivy says quietly. “You know we’re all going to be okay, right? We’ve got this.”

*   *   *

The three women and one dog make an odd procession back to the house. Jane is still in her Doctor Who pajamas, she’s covered in Jasper’s blood, and her face is tear-stained. Her hoodie is wrapped twice around Jasper’s head, its sleeves tied in a bow. Jasper doesn’t seem to mind looking silly. His head is high and he walks with a spring in his step.

“Jasper,” Jane says to him, “you are the picture of heroism.”

Several feet ahead of them, Lucy snorts. Lucy is bloody, bedraggled, and limping, her wrists locked together with restraints Ivy pulled out of her backpack.

Ivy walks behind her, Lucy’s gun held coolly in her hands, like some sort of ninja wondergirl.

“Who were you waiting for back on shore, Lucy?” Ivy asks. “After your friends in the boat left and before you heard us talking? Who were you expecting?”

“No one.”

“Bullshit,” Ivy says. “Who did you leave the house with early this morning, carrying a flashlight and the Vermeer? Janie saw you.”

“You’ll never link me to the Vermeer,” Lucy says. “Janie must’ve seen the guys from the boat.”

“No,” Ivy says, “she didn’t. Only one of those guys had wet pants legs.”

“So maybe the other one changed into dry pants when he got back to the boat.”

“What happened,” says Ivy, “is that you and an accomplice carried the Vermeer from the house to the forest this morning and passed it to the guy in the boat. The guy with wet pants was a lookout for the other one. We saw him sitting in the ramble. The person you left the house with acted as your lookout. I want to know who it is.”

“I don’t have an accomplice,” Lucy says in a bright, musical voice.

“Right,” says Ivy sarcastically. “Whoever your accomplice is, I expect all your wailing chased him neatly away, so, well done with that.” Then Ivy reaches an arm around to her backpack again, pulls out a walkie-talkie, and speaks into it. “Hello,” she says. “Somebody pick up. Mrs. V? Mr. V?” No one answers.

Jasper, struggling his way up the hill beside Jane, slipping on leaves and beginning to pant, makes Jane’s tears rise again. “Are you okay, buddy?” Jane asks him. “Do you want to be carried?”

“Almighty god,” says Lucy. “Maybe we should stop so you can build a shrine to the dog.”

“The dog is the reason we’re safe and you’re in trouble,” Jane says coldly to her back. “That’s why you keep making snide remarks about the dog. The dog kicked your sorry ass.”

Now Ivy is chuckling. Reaching once more into her backpack, she pulls out a chocolate bar and hands it to Jane. Jane tears it open, amazed at how hungry she is.

Again Ivy tries the walkie-talkie. Finally, as they break out of the trees onto the lawn, Mrs. Vanders’s voice comes crackling through. “Ivy-bean?” she says. “Where are you?”

Moments later, calls have been made and a contingent of New York State troopers is on its way.

“They’ll also search the waters between the island and the mainland, with the hopes of intercepting that boat,” says Mrs. Vanders’s scratchy voice. “And I’ll send a couple people into the ramble to look for the accomplice.”

“And a vet,” Jane says to Ivy. “Jasper needs a vet.”

“Yes,” says Ivy into the walkie-talkie. “Jasper needs a vet. Lucy shot him. He’s got a bleeding hole in his ear flap.”

“My god!” says Mrs. Vanders. “How unnecessary! Patrick!” Jane hears her bellow. “The dog needs a vet!”

“Has anyone snuck into the house in the last few minutes?” Ivy asks.

“Ivy,” says Mrs. Vanders’s voice, “are you forgetting it’s a gala day? The doors have been wide open and people have been streaming in and out since the sun came up.”

“Damn,” says Ivy. Then she says to Lucy, “Your accomplice is having one hell of a lucky day. Kind of makes you jealous, doesn’t it?”

“No doubt it would,” says Lucy, “if I had an accomplice.”

“You do realize you’ll go down for the Brancusi too, don’t you, Lucy?” says Ivy.

Lucy’s only response to this is a tight mouth and a closed face.

“Maybe they’ll even reopen the case on the Rubens,” says Jane.

“Yeah,” says Ivy. “Good point, Janie.”

When the group reaches the house, they’re met on the back terrace by Mrs. Vanders, who comes forward to clap a hand on Lucy’s shoulder and lead her inside, face grim. Octavian the Fourth, looking sallow in his paisley dressing gown, is also standing on the back terrace, as is Ravi, who is wide-eyed and speechless. Ravi’s eyes on Lucy are disbelieving. He looks like a hurt little boy. Lucy stares back at him. When a tear slides down Ravi’s face, Lucy begins to cry silent, angry tears of her own.

*   *   *

The police divide into two groups, one searching the forest for Lucy’s accomplice, the other commandeering the billiard room, because it has only two doors, and they both close. They’ve made clear their intention to talk to the entire household, one by one, starting with Lucy, then Jane, then Ivy, then Ravi. Then everyone who was awake when Jane and Ivy brought Lucy back to the house, which includes Octavian, Mr. and Mrs. Vanders, Cook, Patrick, all the regular staff, and all the temporary staff hired for the party. Then everyone who was asleep, or claimed to have been, and wandered downstairs after the fact: Phoebe Okada, Colin Mack, Kiran.

The vet has also arrived, a big bear of a woman who’s in the kitchen making a gentle fuss of stitching Jasper’s ear. She says Jane did well with the improvised bandage and shouldn’t be alarmed by the blood. “Ears bleed like that,” she says, “but it looks worse than it is. This dog is going to be just fine.” Nonetheless, every time Jane looks at Jasper, tears start sliding down her face. When he gazes back at her lovingly, it only makes the tears come faster.

The police, armed with the basic story, talk to Lucy alone for a very long time.

Jane and Ivy wait their turns in the gold sitting room, which adjoins the billiard room. Ivy sits quietly, watching Jane sniffle and rip her cuticles until they bleed. Jane looks back at Ivy once and notices that her irises turn purple at the edges. She doesn’t look at Ivy again.

Finally, Ivy speaks. “Are you mad at me?”

Jane finds some dirt under a fingernail and digs at it, only managing to lodge it deeper. Ramble dirt, no doubt. Crime-fighting, mystery-solving, confusion dirt.

“I’ve been trying to imagine what this is like for you,” says Ivy. “Especially since it sounds like—you know about some things. Like, you saw something, or overheard something, with Philip? Maybe with Patrick?” She pauses. “Anyway, I’d be mad.”

“I don’t see why I should tell you what I saw or heard,” Jane says simply, “when you haven’t told me anything.”

“You’re right.”

“And I don’t know why you’re asking me if I’m mad,” Jane continues in an even tone, “when you’re the one who’s been acting like you’re mad at me.”

“I’m not mad at you,” says Ivy dismally.

“Well, you’ve been wandering around with your camera,” says Jane, “making that shutter noise, pretending to take pictures of the art, and then, when you see me, you act like you’re mad.”

“I’m not mad at you,” Ivy repeats. “I’m mad that I’m not allowed to tell you what’s going on.”

“Well,” says Jane. “You need to improve your directionality.”

This almost elicits a surprised smile from Ivy.

“I’ve been failing lately,” Jane says, “pretty hard, at figuring out who to trust.”

“That’s partly my fault,” says Ivy, leaning toward her. “It’s Lucy’s fault too. She tricked you. She took advantage of your better nature. She’s the sucky, faily one, not you.”

“I should’ve known,” Jane says. “You knew right away.”

“Yes, well,” says Ivy with a wry expression, slumping back in her seat. “Not trusting people isn’t something to be proud of, either.”

“But you were right,” Jane says. “You got it right.”

“Only because I have more experience with untrustworthy people,” Ivy says. “Janie, seriously. You were brave out there. You tried to keep everyone safe, even Lucy, all while not knowing what was going on. You got the gun away from Lucy, for god’s sake.”

Smoothing the sleeves of her pajama top, Jane lets this praise lap against her, cautiously. Then one of the police officers sticks his head through the billiard room doorway, glares all around, retreats again, and slams the door.

“I’m nervous,” says Jane.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” Jane says. “I’ve never been questioned by the police before.”

“Ah,” says Ivy. “Well, all you have to do is tell the truth.”

“That’s just it,” says Jane. “What if I incriminate someone innocent by accident?”

“I think that in this sort of situation,” Ivy says, “you can’t help what you do by accident. And you’re much less likely to hurt innocent people if you tell the truth.”

Jane studies Ivy’s calm face. “The truth is that you told Lucy you had a gun,” she says.

“Ah,” says Ivy again. “But did you ever actually see that gun?”

“No,” Jane admits, “not exactly.”

“The police will ask you what I said and what I did,” Ivy says. “Just tell them the truth. They’ll conclude that I was only pretending to have a gun, for leverage.”

Jane swallows. “That does make me feel better. A little. Except that I saw the shape of the gun under your hoodie.”

Ivy glances down at her hoodie, which is flat now, with no gun-shaped bulges. She’s wearing canvas sneakers now too, and her hair is tied back in a messy knot. While Jane was fussing over Jasper and the household was waiting for the police, Ivy must have returned to her room and made a few changes. “Then you should tell them that too,” she says simply. “A shape under a hoodie is pretty inconclusive.”

“I want to know what’s really going on,” Jane says, holding Ivy’s eyes. “Personally, for myself.”

Ivy’s eyes are a soft, worried blue behind her glasses. “Is it okay with you if we have that conversation later? After the police go?”

“Will we actually have it?”

“Yes,” says Ivy. “I swear it.”

“Will you tell me everything?”

“Everything.”

“Is it going to upset me?”

Ivy takes a slow breath. She seems very tired suddenly, blinking eyes that look like they sting with exhaustion. “I don’t know,” she says. “The truth is, I’ve lost perspective.”

“I can help you with that,” Jane says. “If it’s upsetting, I’ll make sure to get really upset, so you can’t miss it.”

Ivy laughs. “You think you’re joking, but that probably would be helpful. That’s how much I’ve lost perspective.” Then she yawns. “Yeesh, sorry. Are you less nervous now?”

“Well,” Jane says, pausing. “I went to Ravi’s room first before I came to yours. He wasn’t there.”

“He wasn’t?”

“No.”

“Well,” Ivy says, “I can see why you wouldn’t want the police to know that, but Ravi can take care of himself. He’ll tell the police where he was. You could complicate things for him if you say he was where he wasn’t.”

Ivy is right. Jane’s best course is to tell the truth.

“Thanks,” she says.

“Sure,” says Ivy. “It’s normal to be nervous.”

“You’re not.”

“I am,” she says. “I’m like a duck on the water. I look calm but my feet are working a mile a minute underneath. And I haven’t slept yet, so I’m basically a mess.”

“Are you sure Lucy has an accomplice?”

“I don’t know,” says Ivy. “She definitely seemed to be expecting someone besides us on the beach. She must be going crazy trying to figure out who took the Brancusi, and I was hoping she suspects her own accomplice. Because could she really believe that there could be three art thieves in the house at once? Lucy, Lucy’s accomplice, and someone else? Wouldn’t she think that’s too much of a coincidence?”

“You’re certain Lucy didn’t take the Brancusi?”

“Yeah,” Ivy says. “I’m sorry it keeps coming back to the things I can’t tell you.”

“But that’s why you taunted her, saying she’d go down for the Brancusi?” Jane says. “You were hoping it would convince her to name her accomplice?”

“Yeah,” Ivy says. “If she has one. It could be that the guy with the wet pants came to the house to meet her, and you saw the two of them entering the forest. But I doubt it.”

Suddenly Jane realizes something. “Ivy,” she says. “The police are going to ask you about the Brancusi. And they’re going to ask if you really had a gun. Are you going to lie?”

Ivy pauses, glancing into the light coming from the ballroom doorway. The ends of her hair glow gold. “I’m going to do what I think is right,” she says. “And after all this is over, I swear to you I’m going to tell you all the things I can’t tell you right now.”

Jane sits quietly with this for a moment, until she realizes two things. One, that she believes Ivy. Two, that she really can’t believe, despite guns and missing children and stolen art, that anything Ivy’s doing is truly bad.

“You know there’s a word for that shutter sound?” says Ivy.

“Huh?”

“That sound a digital camera makes. The fake shutter sound.”

“It’s fake?”

“Well, think about it. A digital camera doesn’t have a shutter. It’s just designed to make the noise cameras used to make, back when they did have shutters.”

“I never thought about that!”

“There’s a word for a design choice that incorporates a feature that’s now obsolete. I can’t remember what it is.”

“Think it’s a Scrabble word?”

Ivy grins. “I certainly hope so.”

Jane can’t explain it, but she feels more ready for the police now. She feels like she can handle whatever comes. “I’d like to know what word that is.”

“I promise that when I think of it,” says Ivy, “I’ll tell you.”

*   *   *

When the police yank Lucy St. George out of the billiard room, she trips over the molding, remaining upright only because one of the officers is gripping her arm hard. It seems to Jane that they’re being unnecessarily rough. Jane wants to be glad, but Lucy’s not a big person. As they haul her through the gold sitting room, she winces in pain.

She catches Jane’s eye. “Is Ravi in the receiving hall?” she asks.

Jane can’t imagine why she should answer. “I don’t think so.”

Lucy seems relieved. “Thanks,” she says as the police drag her away.

Jane wants to yell after her that she didn’t arrange it for Lucy’s convenience. That she would never do anything for a person who lies and pretends, then shoots a dog.

A surly policeman who smells like the sea comes to the billiard room doorway and calls Jane’s name.

The police officers, two men and one woman, have impassive faces, sharp voices, and a lot of questions. Jane tells the truth, and most of the time, her honest answer is, “I don’t know.”

“The man in the forest was eating an orange,” she offers at one point.

“Eating an orange,” her interrogator repeats in an expressionless voice, not writing this illuminating piece of evidence down. Jane and the police officers are sitting, a bit awkwardly, around one end of the fanciest billiard table she’s ever seen, with dusty blue felt and lions carved into the wooden legs.

“Did Lucy St. George say anything to the men in the boat?” asks an officer whose mouth is hidden by a bushy white mustache.

Jane tries to remember. “Yes,” she says. “I think Lucy said, ‘I’m not doing it again, it’s a waste of my talents, and yours too, J.R.’ Or something like that. I was pretty far away and the water was noisy.”

“Not doing what again?” asks the mustached officer. “And who’s J.R.?”

“He’s the man who drove the boat away,” Jane says.

“Hmm,” says the officer. Jane can hear worlds of communication in that “hmm.” In these officers’ long careers, she’s the most useless witness they’ve ever questioned.

They ask her questions about her own history and her reasons for being in the house. They seem bored by her answers. She tries to sound casual when she tells them about never actually having seen Ivy’s gun. She aims for a blasé tone when she tells them about Ravi not having been in his bedroom too. They perk up a little at that, which deflates her. Ravi could be the accomplice, couldn’t he? Couldn’t his tantrums be an act? If they are, he deserves to be caught. Right?

No. Jane can’t believe Ravi is involved. Then again, she once thought the same about Lucy. “Do the police give medals to dogs?” she asks.

“Thank you for your time,” they respond grimly, then sweep Jane back into the gold sitting room.

“How was it?” asks Ivy, who’s still sitting there.

“I have no idea,” Jane says.

Toenails scrape and ring on tile as Jasper comes barreling into the room. His ear is bandaged and attached loosely to his neck with tape. When he sees Jane, he throws himself at her. Jane drops down to the floor, takes him into her lap, pets him, and, naturally, begins to leak tears again. He pants hotly into her face.

“I’ve never seen that dog behave toward anyone the way he behaves toward you,” says Ivy, searching through her many pockets, finally unearthing a tissue. She brings it to Jane, crouches down, and, while Jane’s still hugging the dog, touches the tissue, gently, to Jane’s face.

For a moment, Jane feels that everything is right.

“Ivy Yellan,” says an officer who appears in the billiard room doorway, in a tone of acute boredom. “And you,” he says, jutting his chin at Jane.

“What?” Jane says. “Me? You just talked to me.”

“Yes,” he says. “I haven’t forgotten your scintillating testimony. Do us a favor and go find Ravi Thrash, will you? He’s next.”

“I’m right here,” Ravi says, appearing in the ballroom doorway.

“Good,” the officer says to Ravi. “Kindly stay.”

The officer and Ivy disappear into the billiard room, leaving Jane and Ravi, who studies Jane’s face. She sniffles hard, wiping her eyes on her pajama sleeve.

“What are you crying about?” asks Ravi.

“The dog,” Jane says, which is true, if an understatement.

“Yeah,” he says grimly.

“You look tired,” she says.

“The FBI should be handling this case,” Ravi says. “If our artwork is still in New York State, it’s a miracle. Vanny is literally trying to give me an ulcer, calling in the state police instead of the FBI. How was it, talking to them?”

Jane pauses, then speaks in a particular tone. “I answered all their questions honestly.”

He rubs his neck, sighing. The white streaks in his hair suddenly make him seem old, tired. “Is there a reason you shouldn’t have?”

“I went looking for you first,” Jane says. “This morning. I went to your room first, before going outside. It was just before dawn and you weren’t there. I told them.”

Ravi’s eyes linger on Jane. “And now you’re telling me you told them,” he says, “so I’ll know not to tell them I was safely tucked up in bed the whole time?”

“Yeah,” says Jane. “I guess so.”

The corner of Ravi’s mouth turns up. “You’re a puzzle.”

“Ravi, if that’s a segue to flirting, I’m literally going to lose it.”

This elicits a sad smile, then a weary shake of the head. “I spent the night with my dad in the library,” he says, “listening to the Beatles.”

“The Beatles!” Jane exclaims. “I forgot to tell the police about the Beatles.” Placing Jasper on his four feet, she stands, turns, and barges through the billiard room door. Four surprised faces swivel up to look at her.

“I forgot to tell you that as I was crossing the atrium on my way to the servants’ quarters,” Jane announces, “I heard someone playing the Beatles.”

The faces stare at Jane in bewilderment. She leaves the room and shuts the door before things deteriorate any further.

“I’m pretty sure I’m their least favorite witness ever,” she tells Ravi.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “Patrick will brood, Kiran will be silent and depressed, Colin will be condescending, and Phoebe will say something snobbish and defensive.”

“Thanks,” Jane says. “That makes me feel better.”

His half grin again. “Keep me company while I’m waiting?”

Jane has sympathy for Ravi, who’s had a rotten morning. But she’s still dressed in her Doctor Who pajamas, she’s run through the ramble, fallen over, rolled around, had a gun pointed at her, been bled on by a dog, bawled her eyes out, and been interrogated by the police. She needs a shower, and a deep, dark nap with Jasper snoring into her ankles. “I need to get cleaned up,” Jane says.

“Yeah, okay,” he says. “Send me Kiran if you see her, will you? I’m worried about her.”

“Why?”

Ravi throws himself into an armchair and closes his eyes. “Nothing to do with any of this. Let’s just call it twin stuff.”

*   *   *

One moment, Jane is passing through the ballroom with Jasper at her heels, weary and spent, dodging gala staff whose voices are too sharp and bright. The next moment, she’s ravenous. This is why Jane does, indeed, cross paths with Kiran, who’s with Colin in the breakfast room, a little nook off the banquet hall, poking at a poached egg with a spoon.

“I just wish I was more surprised,” Jane hears Colin say. “Who’s your guess for her accomplice? Someone in the house? A servant?”

“I don’t have a clue,” says Kiran.

“She could have an entanglement with the guy who mans your boats,” says Colin. “One of those secret relationships across class.”

“Patrick?” says Kiran, sounding thoroughly confused, and rubbing her temples as if they hurt. “Where are you getting this from?”

“They look pretty cozy together. I can’t see him turning her down,” says Colin.

There’s a smugness to his tone, subtle, indefinable; he’s pleased with his own speculations.

Something inside Jane mutinies. “Colin,” she says. “Why do you keep pushing her into conversations she doesn’t want to have?”

“What?” Colin says, looking up at Jane. His hair is damp. He’s showered and bright as a daisy. “Pushing who?”

“Kiran!” Jane exclaims. “You keep badgering her.”

Colin sits back, offended. “I love Kiran,” he says. “What do you know about anything? You’re a child, and a stranger here.”

“She doesn’t want to talk about it,” says Jane. “She wants to be alone.”

“She’s depressed!” Colin says. “I’m getting her interested in something!”

“You bully her!”

“You have a lot of nerve,” Colin says, then turns to Kiran. “Sweetheart, do I bully you?”

Kiran is holding her spoon so tightly that her fingertips are white. “Colin,” she says to her plate, “I think it’s time we broke up. In fact, I’m sure of it. I’m sorry, but it’s over.”

Two spots of red grow in Colin’s cheeks. After a moment, he pushes his chair back quietly, and stands. “Very well,” he says stiffly. “By the way,” he adds, flashing hot eyes into Jane’s, “you’re wrong. She doesn’t prefer to be alone. She’s quite fond of a certain one of her servants. I used to think she could be happy with me, but now I’m not sure she’s capable of happiness.”

“Don’t talk about me as if I’m not here,” Kiran says, “you patronizing prick.”

Colin opens his mouth to speak, then claps it closed tight. He turns to go. As he’s walking away, he spins back suddenly and addresses Jane.

“Incidentally,” he says, “I hate to tell you, but there was an accident with your umbrellas. They fell into the street in Soho and got run over by a truck. I’m awfully sorry. I don’t suppose they were insured?”

Her Pantheon dome umbrella. Her eggshell umbrella. Her brass-handled, brown-and-copper-rose umbrella. Jane is choking over her own astonishment.

“How horrible,” Kiran says.

Jane looks into Kiran’s face and finds that all of Kiran’s warmth and feeling for her is real and surging.

Then she looks into Colin’s face, which contains the most perfect balance of sorrow, solicitude, and regret. Also something else. The tiniest gleam of something childish. Triumph.

An instinct pricks her.

Turning without a word, Jane passes through the banquet hall into the kitchen, stopping only to hold the door for Jasper. Mr. Vanders and Patrick are huddled together at a table, muttering to each other.

“Who did the mail run yesterday?” Jane asks them.

They barely glance at her. “Cook,” says Mr. Vanders.

“And where’s Cook right now?” Jane asks.

“Down at the dock,” says Mr. Vanders.

“I need to ask him a question.”

Mr. Vanders eyes Jane then, with curiosity. He reaches into a drawer behind him, pulls out a walkie-talkie, presses a button, and says, “Son.”

A moment later, a raspy voice answers. “Dad?”

Mr. Vanders hands the walkie-talkie to Jane. She’s never used one before. She presses the button and says, “Hello?”

“Yeah?”

“Cook?”

“Yeah?”

“Did Colin Mack give you a long, narrow package yesterday for the mail run?”

“Yeah,” says Cook. “Umbrellas.”

“How were they packaged?”

“With about a mile of bubble wrap around them,” he says, “and nailed into a crate. I helped him pack them.”

“Who was it addressed to?”

“Buckley St. George, at his Soho offices. I private-messengered it in Southampton with the guy the family always uses.”

“The family? Which family?”

“The Thrash family!” he says. “What family do you think? Octavian transports art from time to time. We always use this guy.”

“Is he clumsy?” asks Jane. “Does he drop things? Is he a bike messenger who’s always in peril?”

“Of course not! He’s a professional art courier! He drives a specialized truck!”

Jane hands the walkie-talkie back to Mr. Vanders and marches off, Jasper at her heels. “Hello?” says Cook’s voice behind her, somewhat irate. “Who is this? Dad? Is that Magnolia’s niece?”

Jane pushes back through the swinging door, amazed at her own certainty.

This time, when she barges into the billiard room, the surprised faces contain a touch of annoyance. Ivy has gone; the police are talking to Ravi. He brightens a notch at the sight of Jane. Ravi expects entertainment.

“Colin Mack is the accomplice,” Jane says, “or at any rate, he’s a jerk who stole from me. The proof is that you’ll find three umbrellas in the offices of Buckley St. George, who, frankly, I don’t trust either. Maybe St. George is behind the whole thing. Maybe he positioned his daughter and his nephew here so they could steal the art, and Colin, being an arrogant ass, couldn’t resist stealing my art too. Please note,” Jane adds with desperation, determined to tell the whole truth, “that all of this is conjecture, based on a look in Colin’s eyes and possibly also my inability to accept the slaughter of my umbrellas. But I think I’m right,” she finishes.

One of the police officers clears her throat. “We are investigating the theft of two pieces of art, worth, on the underside, over a hundred million dollars,” she says. “You’re talking to us about umbrellas.”

“Colin just told me that the umbrellas were destroyed,” says Jane. “That means that if those umbrellas are in Buckley St. George’s offices, then Colin lied to me so he could steal them. Are you looking for a thief or not?”

*   *   *

The police are at the house most of the day, despite the fact that it’s gala day. Jane plays some distracted chess with Kiran in the winter garden, and waits.

In late afternoon, the news comes through that the umbrellas have been found. Two are smack in the middle of Buckley St. George’s desk and Buckley himself is discovered walking through Soho with the third, the speckled eggshell, in the rain. According to the police, Buckley is charmed by Jane’s umbrellas. The pale blue with brown speckles matches his bow tie. He’s intended to purchase that one from Jane personally. He’s astonished to learn that Colin’s made up a story about them having been destroyed; he insists Colin never told him. “Damn stupid boy!” he says, and then, when he hears the part about Lucy and the Vermeer, he stops talking.

The police lead Colin away. He tries to look dignified and amused by this turn of events, but his face is bloodless, his eyes frightened. Jane watches him go with Kiran at her side. There is contempt in Kiran’s expression that could freeze a star.

But still there’s no sign of the missing Vermeer.

*   *   *

Later that day, the police ask Jane to come to New York to identify her umbrellas. Kiran comes too. The police don’t need her, but she wants Jane to have access to the Thrashes’ city apartment while she’s there, and Jane senses that she’d rather be anywhere than at the gala.

The light is falling as they board the boat. The gala is beginning; incoming boats sparkle on the water like stars.

Kiran unfurls a little, like a fern, as the police boat enters Long Island Sound and the Manhattan skyline appears. The city night fills her eyes, makes them clearer. Soon, the New York State Police barracks appear, on a strange, wooded patch of land in the East River called Ward’s Island.

Inside the noisy, yellow-lit building, an officer named Investigator Edwards places the umbrellas on a desk and asks Jane if she recognizes them. He has a voice like a man stranded in a desert and a face like John Wayne. It seems silly to Jane, this emergency nighttime journey to the city to identify umbrellas she could easily have identified by photo or even by description. But, with her umbrellas before her, Jane is relieved she came. He lets her pick them up, touch them, inspect them, even hand them to Kiran, who tells Jane that each one is beautiful. They’re in the same condition they were in when Jane saw them last.

“When can I have them back?”

“When we’re done with the investigation,” Investigator Edwards rasps, then adds, not without sympathy, “They’re evidence. That means we’ll take good care of them.” His eyes, Jane notices, gray and clear, are surrounded by fine laughter lines. Then she notices a slight brown discoloration in one of his gray irises and even though she knows it’s irrational, she trusts him with her umbrellas, implicitly.

“Your positive ID of the umbrellas will justify a search warrant of Buckley St. George’s office,” Investigator Edwards says as Jane hands the umbrellas back to him. “And his correspondence and his financials too. If he’s got other stolen property, we’ll find it.”

Kiran’s eyes slide to the investigator and lock on his face. Buckley St. George, Jane remembers, isn’t just Colin’s uncle and Lucy’s father. He’s Ravi’s boss. Ravi is going to lose his job. “You’re sure Buckley St. George is involved?” Kiran asks.

“Not sure of anything,” says Investigator Edwards. “We don’t think Buckley St. George knew that Colin Mack intended to steal the umbrellas. But we did find those two perps and the boat, entering the East River from the Sound. They could’ve been on their way to Buckley St. George, intending to deliver the Vermeer.”

“You said you found the guys,” Kiran says, “but you didn’t say if you found the Vermeer.”

His face splits into a grin. “Yeah.”

“That’s funny?” says Kiran.

Reaching down, Investigator Edwards retrieves something from a drawer. “The chief petty officer did find a parcel on board,” he says, “just the right size for the picture. But when he opened it, there was a blank canvas inside, and this.” He lays a flat, transparent plastic bag on the desk before Kiran and Jane. It contains a paper napkin on which someone has written, with a felt pen in block letters, the words BITE ME, YOU DESPOT.

“Huh,” Kiran says. “That is funny.”

“Yeah,” says Investigator Edwards.

“You think Lucy or Colin wrote that?”

“It appears to be Lucy St. George’s handwriting.”

“And you think it’s a note to her father?”

“Possibly.”

“So, what? You think Lucy stole the Vermeer at her father’s instruction, kept the Vermeer for herself, then sent that napkin to her father as a message?”

“It’s a theory.”

“And where’s the Vermeer?”

“No idea. Lucy’s not saying. Neither is Colin, who, by the way, still insists he’s got nothing to do with any of it. Unfortunately for him, we found the prints of his boots in the ramble. Stepped in mud from the recent rain, we assume, while serving as Lucy’s lookout this morning.”

Kiran rolls her eyes dismissively at this mention of Colin. “What about the two guys in the boat?” she asks. “You couldn’t arrest them. It’s not illegal to carry a paper napkin wrapped up to look like a stolen Vermeer.”

“You’re quick, Miss Thrash,” he says. “You might like detective work. You’re right, it’s not illegal. But guess what else?”

“You want to play a guessing game?” Kiran asks mildly.

Investigator Edwards smiles a dazzling smile. “Guess,” he says. “It’s about one of the guys, the tall, skinny one called J.R. Turns out the J is short for Johannes.”

“Johannes?” says Kiran. “Is that really his name? Like Johannes Vermeer?”

“Johannes Vermeer Rutkoski is his name,” says Investigator Edwards. “His parents hoped he would aim high.”

“He’s the forger?”

“Yup.”

“Here’s his workshop,” Investigator Edwards says, then shows Kiran and Jane a big, glossy photo of an easel in a cluttered room. On the easel is an unfinished painting. Jane has seen it before, in the west attics of Tu Reviens, where Mrs. Vanders is cleaning it.

“That’s our Rembrandt self-portrait,” Kiran says. “Or, it’s going to be!” She clutches her temples. “Octavian has never done a thing about security,” she says. “No alarms, no cameras. Ever since Charlotte disappeared, he doesn’t even lock the doors. He can’t bear to.”

“Well, it is an island,” the investigator says. “But that doesn’t make it inaccessible, and you do have all those parties.”

Inspector Edwards shows Kiran and Jane one more big photo: a whole row of canvases, leaning against a dirty wall, all painted to look like the Vermeer picture Lady Writing a Letter with Her Frog. “His practice attempts,” says the inspector.

“Johannes Vermeer Rutkoski is a prodigious talent,” says Kiran tiredly. “Makes me think there should be a museum somewhere of all the finest forgeries.”

By the time Jane and Kiran get to the Thrash family apartment, Jane is so exhausted that she collapses onto the proffered bed without even removing her clothes. It seems impossible that her scramble through the forest was only this morning.

Kiran comes to her doorway. “Good night, sweetie,” she says.

“Kiran?” says Jane. It’s the first time they’ve been alone all day. “Are you okay?”

“I’ve been better,” she says. “But I’ve been worse. Don’t worry about me, just get some sleep. You’re the hero of the day, after all . . .”

Jane falls asleep before she can hear Kiran’s reflections on heroes.

Her dreams are deep and wild. Ivy is running through a forest dressed in black. She’s in danger. She’s running away from Jane, vanishing behind tall, dark, slender trees. No. She’s turned. She’s running back toward Jane. As Ivy nears Jane, she slows, reaches out, hands Jane something. It’s an umbrella, and Jane realizes she’s not Ivy. She’s Aunt Magnolia, in the purple coat with the silver-and-gold lining.

The umbrella Aunt Magnolia hands Jane is the one she’s been working on, the one that looks lopsided and uneven, like the blue splotch in Aunt Magnolia’s eye. “It’s broken, darling,” she says, pressing it into Jane’s hands. “But it can still keep you safe.”

Jane wakes with a fuzzy-feeling mouth from not brushing her teeth the night before, and pins and needles in her legs from sleeping in jeans. The dream feels very near. She tries to hold on to it.

She emerges from her bedroom to find Kiran staring over Central Park through the glass walls of the penthouse, a coffee cup in her hands. When Jane joins her, the two of them witness a rare New York frogstorm. More of a drizzle, really, but enough to muck up the traffic and give the surface of the park the appearance of water, moving with hopping specks and waves of blue.

“How did you sleep?” asks Kiran.

“I had a wonderful dream,” says Jane.

*   *   *

It’s strange to step back into the receiving hall of Tu Reviens having missed the gala. It’s empty, stale; no musicians, caterers, or cleaners. No buzz of activity. The lilacs in the vases look, and smell, bruised somehow.

Kiran goes off to find Ravi and give him the news that the Vermeer is still well and truly gone.

Upstairs, Jasper lies outside Jane’s door with his nose to the crack. Seeing her, he leaps to his feet and comes running at her, lopsided and bandaged. As Jane kneels to receive his ecstatic, slobbery greetings, she has a startling sense of coming home. “Ow!” she cries as he scrambles into her lap, his claws digging into her thighs. “Jasper! You’re not small!”

In her rooms, she waits for a few moments, looking around, not sure what she’s waiting for. Then she sets off to find Ivy.

But when she encounters Mrs. Vanders in the kitchen, Mrs. Vanders tells her that Ivy’s gone away.

“Gone away!” says Jane. “Where? Is she coming back?”

Mrs. Vanders is tapping the keys on a laptop at one of the kitchen tables. Patrick stands at the stove sautéing garlic. “Of course she’s coming back!” says Mrs. Vanders. “Good god, girl. Don’t look so forlorn.”

“She didn’t tell me she was going.”

“Nor should she have,” says Mrs. Vanders crisply. “I strictly forbade it.”

“She was sorry to leave without explaining,” Patrick adds, glancing at Jane over his shoulder.

“This reminds me,” says Jane, in increasing annoyance. “I want to know about my aunt Magnolia.”

“Ivy asked me if she could be the one to tell you everything,” says Mrs. Vanders. “I said yes. It seemed important to her. So you’ll just have to wait.”

“Well, when’s she coming back?”

“In a few days,” says Mrs. Vanders.

For a couple of seconds, Patrick goes very still, staring at the wooden spoon in his hands. Then he lays the spoon on the stovetop carefully, switches the burner off, and says to Mrs. Vanders, “I’m done lying to Kiran.” He walks into the back of the kitchen and disappears through a door.

“Oh, god help us,” Mrs. Vanders says in alarm, springing up from the table, rushing off to follow him, then coming back, glaring in Jane’s general direction, slapping her laptop closed, and rushing off again.

“Jasper,” says Jane, focusing on the canine at her feet, who gazes up at her with his tongue hanging out. “I literally give up. None of them will ever make any sense. Well. As long as we’re waiting for Ivy, we should finish up the umbrella, don’t you think?”

*   *   *

The Aunt Magnolia umbrella is waiting for Jane, sitting in the middle of Ivy’s worktable, washed in the fading light of the morning room windows.

As her fingers move along its parts, fitting the uneven canopy against the mismatched ribs of the frame, Jane is thinking about broken things. She’s proud of herself, for stumbling and making mistakes but still, in the end, putting together the broken pieces of the mystery.

She wonders if she could fit the pieces of her life back together too.

Aunt Magnolia?

When the canopy is attached to the frame with that particular balance of not-too-loose, not-too-tight, Jane slides the runner up and props the umbrella open, then places it on Ivy’s worktable. She stands back. It’s crooked and inelegant, just as she meant it to be. It looks like one of those umbrellas you see sticking out of trash bins on rainy days. Except that its crookedness, if you look close, has a kind of balance that Jane has achieved with careful deliberateness, and it’s a good umbrella, an unusual umbrella that will protect her from rain. It’s also Jane’s secret, because when she looks at it in her peripheral vision, it becomes the spiky, spoky, foggy blue splotch of Aunt Magnolia’s eye.

I’ll never sell this umbrella, Jane thinks. This one’s for me.

“Jasper?” she says. “Want to go look at Aunt Magnolia’s photo?”

*   *   *

There’s some activity in the west wing of the second story. As Jane and Jasper walk down the corridor inspecting the art, Patrick comes out of a bedroom with a pile of sheets and blankets and dumps them on the floor. Mrs. Vanders follows with a vacuum cleaner.

“We’re clearing out the bedrooms that were used for the gala,” Patrick says, in response to Jane’s questioning glance. “This was Lucy St. George’s room, actually.”

Jane only manages a half-interested grunt, because she’s just discovered Aunt Magnolia’s photo on the wall across from Lucy’s room. It’s a big print. Backing away to get a better vantage point, Jane breathes it in.

A tiny yellow fish—that’s a goby—peeks out from inside the cavernous, sharp-toothed maw of some great gray fish with a bulbous nose. Jane remembers this photo; Aunt Magnolia took it in the waters near Japan. It’s always left Jane wondering. Has the big fish captured the small fish as food? Or, is the small, bright fish hiding inside the mouth of the big fish?

Jane is bursting with heartache and pride.

Then her perspective shifts and she notices a problem with the matting behind the photo. Something is creating an uneven bulge, as if the framer carelessly placed a thick rectangle of cardboard behind the print.

A framing mistake like that will ruin the print, and Aunt Magnolia’s photos deserve better care. “Mrs. Vanders?” Jane begins with mild indignation, and then, understanding, goes rigid and electric, like a bolt of lightning.

Jane reaches for the screwdriver in her pocket. Wordlessly, she lifts the frame from the wall. Laying it on the floor with the back facing up, she works at the screws that hold the frame in place.

“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” says Mrs. Vanders in an outraged voice, appearing beside her. “Just because that’s your aunt’s photo doesn’t give you license to take it apart! That’s an expensive frame!”

With trembling fingers, Jane removes the backing of the frame. Protective tissue-like paper lies under it, and through the tissue, Jane can see the outlines of what she knew she would find. Carefully, she takes hold of the edges of the thin paper and pulls it away.

Jane and Mrs. Vanders are looking down, astonished, at Lady Writing a Letter with Her Frog. Jane studies it. There’s something quieting, even awesome, about the fine web of cracks across the canvas, and its clean, soft light. It’s as if the lady, intent on her writing while sitting in a bath of light, is made of soft marble. As if marble can be a warm, living thing.

“Hold it up to the ceiling lamps!” says Mrs. Vanders.

Ever so carefully, Jane lifts the canvas by the edges and holds it up to the light. The lady’s eye glows like a tiny star.

“How on earth did you know?” says Mrs. Vanders.

Jane’s eyes are full of tears. Frightened she’ll drip on Vermeer’s masterpiece, she hands the canvas to Mrs. Vanders and says, “Aunt Magnolia led me to it.”

*   *   *

A week and a half after the gala, they finally get word from Investigator Edwards. Kiran tells Jane over a game of chess in the winter garden. “Turns out Buckley St. George has some interesting offshore accounts, and some irregular financials that possibly link him to a New Jersey heroin cartel.”

“Really?”

“The police raided the cartel and found a Delacroix that belongs to some friends of Ravi’s.” Kiran tilts her head to indicate Ravi, who’s sprawled in a nearby armchair, pretending to read an art magazine with a Rembrandt seascape on the cover.

“Delacroix?” says Jane.

“French painter,” offers Ravi in a grouchy voice, not looking up from his magazine. “Nineteenth-century Romantic. Influenced the Impressionists. I could take him or leave him.”

“Oh, stop it,” says Kiran. “You love Delacroix.”

“Nothing compares to the theft of a Vermeer.”

“It’s all over now, Ravi,” says Kiran. “Janie found your Vermeer. You can stop acting like you, personally, were the target of an outrageous conspiracy.”

“I’ll put it on my to-do list for the day after tomorrow,” says Ravi grumpily.

Kiran half grins at Jane. “Anyway,” she says, “Ravi’s friends didn’t even know the Delacroix was missing. They’ve had a forgery hanging on their wall, and they had no idea. Ravi introduced Colin to those friends.”

“That self-righteous shithead,” offers Ravi.

Kiran chuckles.

Raindrops ping like pebbles against the windows. Jane moves one of her rooks back and forth, idly. Kiran is a better chess player than she is.

“Did Colin really think that was going to work,” Jane says, “lying about my umbrellas? Out of spite? How much money could he possibly have made from them?”

“You humiliated him,” says Kiran. “He struck out to make you small again.”

“It’s kind of pathetic.”

“Yeah, well,” says Kiran. “It was stupid too, given what was at risk. I don’t think he’s the master manipulator he thinks he is. I’m really glad I broke up with him before we figured out he’s an art thief. Thanks for your help with that.”

“I helped too!” says Ravi.

“How did you help, exactly?”

“General moral support!” he says. “Through our psychic twin link!”

“Right,” says Kiran. “How could I forget.”

Their teasing is like the rain—gentle, and washing Jane with a kind of comfort, and a wistfulness too. Ravi pretends to be a child because it makes Kiran smile, which in turn gives Ravi the look of someone who’s made his favorite person happy.

“And you,” says Ravi, clapping his dark eyes upon her. “I have some ideas about you and your umbrellas.”

“Okay,” says Jane. “Anything specific?”

Jane has started a new umbrella, and Ravi knows all about it. It’s something to do with a house of mystery and intrigue. Jane hasn’t worked out the details yet, but she thinks this new umbrella might have windows made of clear plastic and doors that open and close, and art on the walls, and a freight elevator, and a basset hound. Ravi has taken to visiting her from time to time while she’s working on it. He asks questions about fabric tension and the placement of springs and inspects Jane’s inventory. He’s held her Aunt Magnolia umbrella out at arm’s length, trying to get some distance from it in order to understand it better. This hasn’t seemed to work for him.

“It’s the color of a frogstorm,” Jane has told him, not telling him all the rest.

He’s scrunched up his face, then put the lopsided umbrella back on the floor, muttering, “I guess every artist goes through a Frog Period.”

“You really think I’m an artist?” Jane has responded. But Jane is coming to know the answer to that question on her own. She’s seeing her umbrellas differently now. People other than she might love those umbrellas someday, probably not for Jane’s reasons, but for their own reasons—reasons Jane won’t know or understand. Jane is beginning to appreciate this wonderful, surreal fact about the creative process.

“You could start a business,” Ravi says now, stretching his legs out before him in the armchair and regarding Jane balefully. “I could help.”

“That’s not very specific,” Jane says.

“You’re young,” Ravi says. “You’ve got all the time in the world to establish yourself. And I bet we could get some millionaire designer to send you to college.”

“College?” Jane says. “Is there a college where I could make umbrellas?”

“Probably,” Ravi says, shrugging. “There’s a college for everything. How about a shop someday? I’ve been to an umbrella shop in Paris where each umbrella is different, and designed by the owner. Your umbrellas will be good enough for that.”

“Paris?”

“Or wherever,” he says. “The world is your rainstorm.”

He juts his chin at the windows and Jane smiles, because it’s pouring now, just like the day she arrived. Water streams down the glass and makes her feel safe, contained in a bubble. It’s a lot to think about. College, Paris, shops. Aunt Magnolia? Is this why you made me promise to come here? So the world would be my rainstorm?

“Do you think someday, when I’m rich and famous, my umbrellas will be used in the drug world as currency?” Jane says.

Ravi flashes her a grin. “Did you know that drug dealers who use art as currency are considered classy?”

“Classy? Seriously? How do you know that?”

“Lucy told me, of course.”

“If she’s the one who told you, how do you know it’s true?”

“I guess I don’t,” Ravi says. “But I expect most of what she told me was true. Really, there were only a few details she needed to lie about.”

The police are saying that Buckley St. George placed his daughter not just in the path of the Thrashes to steal, but straight into the drug underworld, where it was her job to pretend to be an undercover investigator pretending to be a crook. It’s difficult for Jane to wrap her head around. All that pretending and manipulating seems an odd direction to focus one’s passions.

“I wonder if she enjoyed it,” Ravi says. “It must feel amazing to get away with a theft like that.” He adds, with some bitterness, “And to fool people.”

“I’m not sure she enjoyed fooling you, Ravi,” Jane says. “I think she cared about you.”

“Don’t defend her to me,” Ravi says heatedly. “No one who cared about me and knew me at all would steal my art.”

“That’s true,” says Jane, “but I think she was surprised, and upset, by how much it hurt you.”

The charges against Lucy now include the theft of the Rubens she “lost,” although apparently Lucy blames that theft on pressure from Buckley, just as she blames the Brancusi incident on Colin. Lucy seems to have entered some sort of delayed adolescent rebellion. When the police put her in the same room with her father, she began to scream at him for pressuring her about whom to date.

In another part of the house, the Brancusi is back. It appeared, complete and undamaged, in its usual spot on a side table in the receiving hall, six days after the gala. No one in the house can explain it to Ravi, who’s alternately elated and furious. Mrs. Vanders had been keeping the pedestal in the west attics, storing it safely until the fish was found, and one day, when she’d gone up there, it—the pedestal—was gone. Then she’d found it, to her amazement, in the receiving hall, the fish perched atop the pedestal once again, complete and as it should be, or so she says.

Still scowling in his armchair, Ravi says to Kiran abruptly, “What’s going on with you and Patrick?”

Kiran takes one of Jane’s pawns with her knight and shrugs.

“Oh, come on, sis,” says Ravi.

Kiran sits back in her chair, looking untroubled, acting like she didn’t hear. Jane wonders how far to push.

“Did Patrick ever confess to you?” Jane asks, not glancing at Ravi, but feeling his hearty approval of her interference. “I saw him the other day, the day we got back from New York. He seemed . . . determined.”

“Yes,” Kiran says. “He actually said things, for once,” she says, catching Jane’s eye, but not elaborating. Finally, as the silence stretches out, she shrugs again and says, to Ravi as much as to Jane, “I’m thinking about the things he said.”

“What did he say?” Ravi demands.

“Stuff I’m thinking about,” Kiran repeats, stubbornly.

“What stuff?”

“Twin, if you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m not going to tell you.”

“Hmph!” says Ravi. “You’re lucky I need to keep you around, in case I ever need a kidney.”

“Like I’d ever give you my kidney.”

“You would totally give me your kidney.”

“There’s totally a universe somewhere where I’ve refused to give you my kidney,” says Kiran.

Ravi is smiling. “Let’s go get that Kiran’s kidney, just to spite her. We could keep it on ice until one of us needs it.”

“That’s a disturbing idea,” Kiran says. “But practical.” She presses a palm to her forehead. “I guess all three of us are kind of looking at a fresh start.”

“What?” says Ravi. “Is this about kidneys?”

“No,” says Kiran. “I’m thinking about you, me, and Janie. We’re all starting fresh. Janie because she’s so young and she’s alone. She’s got her umbrellas. She could really do anything. Sorry,” she adds, glancing at Jane doubtfully.

“For what?” says Jane.

“For reminding you that you’re alone.”

“It’s okay,” Jane says. I might not be, she thinks. Under the table, Jasper nuzzles his nose against Jane’s pants legs. He rests his chin on her boots.

“And you and me,” Kiran says to Ravi. “We don’t have significant others anymore, or jobs. I guess we could also do anything.”

“I do like being single,” says Ravi. “We could start a bordello. You could be my madame and find me clients.”

“Or something less gross,” says Kiran. “Blech.”

Grinning, Ravi stands. “I want coffee,” he says. “Either of you want anything?”

“A bowl of chocolate ice cream,” says Kiran.

“I’d take ice cream too,” Jane says.

“Coming right up,” Ravi says, then strides away.

In the room’s new quiet, Kiran watches Jane take a pawn. Jane has questions for Kiran too, less specific than Ravi’s, but, she suspects, just as nosy.

“Kiran,” Jane says, after a long silence, not sure how to get to the answer she’s seeking. “Are you . . . glad you came home?”

Kiran takes a moment to consider Jane’s question. “I’m finding,” she says, “that despite everything, I’m glad to live in this universe.”

“Huh?”

Kiran moves her knight again, endangering Jane’s queen. “If we live in a multiverse,” she says, “in which multiple versions of us live alternate lives in an infinite series of universes, I’m glad I live in this one. I think that maybe I’m better off than some other Kirans. In this universe, I found out that Colin was stealing from me before I did something stupid, like marry him. Some other version of me somewhere is probably married to a version of him and has no idea. And some other version of me lives with some other, less loving version of Ravi. I like my version of Ravi. I guess I even like my version of Patrick,” she admits, “given that he’s mine. I guess I even like my version of me.”

“Well,” Jane says. “That’s convenient, I guess. If weird.”

Kiran laughs. “By the way, you’re in check.”

“Dammit!”

“What if you’d been born in a universe where there was no rain?” Kiran says.

“Huh?”

“I wonder what you would do,” Kiran says. “Would you still find yourself drawn to make umbrellas?”

“Oh,” says Jane. “I see. Well, I don’t know. Could I make parasols?”

“There’s no sun, either,” Kiran says. “I wonder if you’d have this irrepressible urge to invent sort of a cloth shield on a stick? Would people think you were nuts?”

“Um,” says Jane. “It’s true I can’t imagine not making umbrellas. But don’t you think that’s partly because our universe does have rain?”

“I wonder if you’d even make them waterproof?” says Kiran. “Despite it being completely unnecessary?”

Her question stirs a memory of the conversation Jane had with Ivy while they were waiting to talk to the police. About the digital camera that makes a shutter sound even though it doesn’t have or need a shutter anymore.

“If I did make waterproof umbrellas in a rainless world,” Jane says, “would that be one of those things? Those things where a design incorporates a feature a thing used to have but doesn’t need anymore?”

“Huh?” says Kiran.

Ravi has stepped back into the room, carrying two bowls of ice cream. He’s grinning at Jane. “A skeuomorph?” he says.

“Is that the word?” Jane asks, delighted. “Ivy couldn’t remember. I can’t wait to tell her.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s the word,” Ravi says, walking to their table and handing each of them a bowl.

“I guess it’s a little long for Scrabble,” Jane says.

“You could build it onto the word morph,” Ravi says. “Who’s winning, anyway?”

“Me,” says Kiran. “Where’s your coffee?”

“I’ve only got two hands. I’ll get it on my next trip.”

“You’re a sweetie,” says Kiran. “Checkmate.”

“Play chess with me next,” Ravi says.

“Which one of us?” Kiran says.

“Either,” he says. “Both.”

“What, like, as a team?” says Kiran, teasing. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Whatever,” says Ravi, “I’m bored,” then reaches down to put his arms around his sister and pull her into an awkward hug. Ravi has been giving Kiran a lot of hugs these days. Jane has a feeling it’s as much for his own benefit as for hers; Ravi seems to need hugs. But it’s good for Kiran, Jane thinks, that he needs her.

A noise behind Ravi catches Jane’s attention. She leans past him to look. Ivy is in the doorway, in a long, wet coat, with her backpack on her shoulders. Rain plasters strands of hair to her cheeks. She looks at Jane shyly, a question in her face.

“Ivy,” Jane says. “Ivy, I have things to tell you.”

Ivy’s smile starts small, then grows big. She holds out a hand to Jane. “Yeah,” she says. “Me too.”