Jane, Unlimited by Kristin Cashore (3)

Jane decides.

“I’d like to walk with you, Kiran, but can I join you later? I need to check on something.”

“Okay,” says Kiran, disappointed. “I’ll be in the winter garden when you’re free.”

“I’ll find you there,” says Jane. “Definitely.”

Kiran wanders away.

Jane has to find out the truth about that little girl who looks like Grace Panzavecchia. What if she’s in some kind of danger?

Her journey is intercepted on the landing by Jasper, who hops in a circle around her with sharp little barks, as if he’s trying to herd her from behind.

“Jasper! I’m not a sheep!” she says, racing down the stairs.

He stays where he is, whining disconsolately.

“You can come with me,” says Jane. “I’m on a mission. Aren’t dogs supposed to be good at tracking people?”

She turns, descending a few more steps. When she looks back, he’s gone. She can’t help feeling that it doesn’t say much for the likelihood of her finding a little girl if she can’t keep track of a dog who was there mere seconds ago. “Jasper, you’d make a terrible sidekick,” she says to the air.

Back to the task, Jane weaves through the lilac ladies in the receiving hall and goes to the side table where she saw the girl leave something. Next to a family photo of Kiran, Ravi, Octavian, and a blond, youngish-looking lady who’s probably Charlotte is a strange object, itself shaped like a small table. It’s a pedestal, with an oak base and a circular mirror top. There’s a tiny hole in the center of the mirror. Altogether, it doesn’t look particularly significant.

One of the lilac ladies appears beside her. “That’s just the sort of stand I need,” she says with satisfaction, setting a squat vase of lilacs atop the pedestal.

All right, then. Whatever its purpose was before, it’s now a platform for lilacs.

Did the girl leave the pedestal on the table, or the Thrash family photo?

And where did she go after that?

Jane crosses into the Venetian courtyard but has no idea which direction to choose next. She’s seen some of the rooms to the left—the ballroom, the banquet hall, the kitchen. Curiosity pulls Jane to the right, through the east arcade, then into a room she’s never seen before, with old-fashioned, floral green wallpaper, brocaded settees, a fussy green carpet, and no little girl.

Crossing that room, Jane opens a door in the opposite wall and enters another world—for she’s found the bowling alley. Not that it’s like any bowling alley she’s ever seen or imagined; the walls are made of rough stone reinforced with broad wooden beams and the light is low and moody, like something one might find in a cave under a mountain. Two bowling lanes stretch before her, burnished expanses of maple and pine. Pins gleam palely at the end of each lane. This is where the Pied Piper goes bowling, she thinks, by himself, after he’s entombed all the children.

Obscurely concerned now for the missing child, Jane walks straight down the left-hand bowling lane, the only route to a door set in the wall at its end. It feels wrong to her, immoral somehow—surely bowling lanes are not for walking on.

When she opens the door, her world changes again. Heat, light, lapping noises, and the smell of chlorine: the indoor swimming pool. The wall across from her is taken up by an enormous, long fish tank. A fluorescent green eel nestles against the glass, leering at her, and a bull shark—a species of shark known to attack humans—swims lazily from one side to the other.

Uneasily, Jane eyes the water of the pool. No drowned little girl. There’s a door in the fish tank though, a normal, wooden door with a brass knob. Jane finds this so peculiar that she opens it, imagining the water, the eel, the bull shark, pouring through the doorway. Instead she discovers a short, dark passage stretching before her, leading through the tank to another door. Opening that door, she finds herself stepping into a patch of crocuses.

Wind whips against stone. Jane can hear the sound of crashing waves somewhere below. It takes her a moment to orient herself: She’s at the back of the house.

To the left, some distance along the vast wall, the little girl sits on the ground, nestled against the side of a terrace. She’s tucked herself against the house with her arms wrapped around her legs, making herself small.

Jane approaches her stealthily. The girl is crying and shivering. Her hair is short and crooked, a dark shade of blond, her eyes swollen. Her sparkly purple sneakers and her blue jeans are splotchy from the wet grass.

The little girl jumps up as Jane gets closer, glares at Jane, and crouches like a runner about to take off. Jane freezes in her tracks and raises her hands. “It’s okay,” she says, not certain what she’s mollifying the girl about, but doing so instinctively.

“Who are you?” the girl demands.

“I’m Janie.”

“Are you with,” the girl begins, then spits out a few words in French that sound awfully well-pronounced.

“With who?” says Jane.

“Never mind,” says the girl. “Why are you here?”

“Did you say ‘espions sans frontières’?”

“No,” says the girl. “Why are you here?”

“Doesn’t that mean ‘spies without borders’?”

“I don’t speak French,” says the girl. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why are you here?”

She’s not the world’s best liar, this little girl. “Because I saw you in the receiving hall and wanted to see where you went,” says Jane.

“No.” Her tone is shrill. “Why are you in the house? What’s your affiliation?”

Jane finds herself speaking in soothing tones. “My friend Kiran invited me to visit. Kiran’s dad owns the house.”

“Seriously?” says the girl. “You’re just a person?”

“Of course. What else would I be?”

“Why should I believe you?”

“Grace?” says Jane. “What’s going on?”

“I’m not Grace,” says the girl quickly. “My name is Dorothy.”

“Okay,” says Jane, trying to sound like she believes this. “Nice to meet you, Dorothy. Do you live in the house?”

“I’m related to Mrs. Vanders,” says Dorothy. “I’m her great-niece. I’m visiting.”

“It’s funny, because you look an awful lot like Grace Panzavecchia.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“She’s in the news,” says Jane.

“A lot of things are in the news,” says Dorothy, wiping her bangs out of her eyes with a damp hand. “A lady got bitten by a bear at a zoo in France. It’s raining frogs in Seattle for a record fourteen days in a row. A guy in New York died of smallpox.”

“Grace Panzavecchia is a little girl whose parents tried to rob a bank in Manhattan,” says Jane. “Then the entire Panzavecchia family disappeared.”

“That’s preposterous,” says Dorothy. “What about their dog?”

“Their dog?” Jane responds in confusion. “What dog?”

“I mean, did they have a dog?”

“Actually,” says Jane, remembering something about a dog, spoken by a news anchor who’d looked a little like a St. Bernard (which is why it had stuck in Jane’s mind), “it’s funny you ask that. I do remember a dog. A German shepherd? The police found it in the Panzavecchias’ house after they all disappeared.”

“What else?” the girl says.

“About the dog?”

“Yes!” she says. “Who’s taking care of the dog?”

“I don’t know,” says Jane. “The news people aren’t talking about the dog. They’re talking about the Mafia being involved and the kids disappearing, and the baby being sick with smallpox.”

“Smallpox!” the girl says. “The baby doesn’t have smallpox!”

“What? No,” Jane says, realizing she’s misspoken. “Sorry. You’re right. You mentioned the guy in New York who died of smallpox and I got mixed up. They’re saying the baby has spots, like maybe it’s chicken pox or something.”

“Smallpox could be used as a biological weapon again,” the girl says, “like what the British did to Native Americans at Fort Pitt during the French and Indian War. Did you know that?”

“I—never really thought about it,” Jane says. “You seem to know a lot about it.”

“Smallpox is supposed to be one of those diseases no one gets anymore,” the girl says. “There’s supposed to be a stock of it in a lab in Atlanta and one in Russia, just for posterity. But that’s only what they say. Microbiologists could alter smallpox so it could be used for modern warfare.”

“Okay,” says Jane. “They announced on the news a few days ago that the guy who got smallpox had some sort of freak accident. They said he broke into the labs of the CDC in Atlanta and got into something he shouldn’t.”

“Yeah,” says the girl, jutting her jaw with obvious scorn. “That’s a likely story.”

Jane tries to remember what she’s heard from the news. The parents of the Panzavecchia family, Giuseppe and Victoria, are microbiologists. They reportedly walked out of their lab and attempted to rob a Manhattan bank. In the middle of the heist, they panicked, ran from the bank, rounded a corner, and basically disappeared. The bank teller was so startled that she turned to the colleague beside her and asked, “Did that just happen?”

It had just happened, and as it was the Panzavecchias’ own bank and one they visited frequently on lunch breaks, they were recognized. The police immediately searched their lab (no sign of them); their brownstone (empty except for their German shepherd); and the private academy of their “brilliant eight-year-old daughter, Grace” (who’d asked to use the restroom, then never returned to class).

The search moved on to the section of Central Park where the two younger children, Christopher and Baby Leo, liked to spend their mornings, and where the “distraught au pair” was having hysterics. She’d been walking with the children under one of the arches when “a person of iron strength” had grabbed her from behind and put something to her face. She’d tried to wrap her arms protectively around the children, she’d tried to scream, but darkness had come. The last thing she remembered was her attacker lowering her gently to the ground while a nearby saxophone played the Godfather music.

And then at dinner last night, Phoebe brought up the rumors that the Mafia had threatened to harm Giuseppe Panzavecchia’s family if he didn’t pay his gambling debts. But Lucy St. George, private art investigator, thinks something else must be going on. Giuseppe is too devoted to his kids to risk getting involved with the Mafia; all he ever does is brag about Grace and her amazing mnemonic memory devices.

None of which explains what kind of work the Panzavecchias were doing in their lab. Or if it has anything to do with smallpox. Or why Grace is talking about French spies. Or why she’s here.

Who even knows she’s here, besides Jane? Doctor Philip Okada? He was in the attics yesterday wearing medical gloves, then sneaking around in the middle of the night, saying inscrutable things about a journey and carrying a gun. And a diaper bag. Jane realizes suddenly that the white bag with orange ducks Philip was carrying last night must have been a diaper bag.

Phoebe Okada? Patrick? Mr. Vanders? Jane saw him carrying another small child—little Christopher Panzavecchia?—across the Venetian courtyard only yesterday. What about Ivy, who was with Jane then and didn’t give any explanation for the little kid when Jane asked? Ivy was in the attic with Philip too.

What on earth is going on in this house?

“Grace,” Jane says. “Are you okay?”

The question seems to trigger the girl’s fury. She sits her rump down again, wraps her arms around her legs, and starts crying, but it’s angry crying; it’s her temper she’s trying to contain by holding her own body tight. “I don’t even know who you are!” she yells.

“Is someone here hurting you?” says Jane. “Patrick? Or—” She can’t get her mouth to say “Ivy.” “Phoebe Okada? Are your parents in the house too?”

“I bet you’d like to know! I bet you’d like to ask me a whole lot of questions! I’m not telling you anything!”

“Grace!” says Jane. “I only want to know that you’re okay!”

“Stop calling me that! My name is Dorothy!” She rockets to her feet suddenly.

“Where are you going?”

“I bet you’d like to know!” she yells again, then takes off running, around the terrace, along the wall of the west wing and away from Jane. She disappears around the corner of the house.

Jane is standing there, staring numbly after the girl, when the scrape of an opening door spins her around. It’s the door Jane came through herself, the one in the fish tank. Patrick emerges, looks to right and left, sees Jane. His face registers nothing. Patrick seems to have a gift for projecting innocent, blue-eyed vacuity. At any rate, his is more convincing than Ivy’s.

“Hello,” he calls, walking toward Jane. He’s swinging a heavy flashlight in one hand, powered off at the moment. “Getting some air?”

“Yes,” Jane says shortly. “Clearing my thoughts before I do some work.”

“Ivy tells me you make umbrellas,” Patrick says, clapping his bright, blank eyes on Jane’s face. “Seen anything interesting out here?” he adds, just as if he couldn’t care less, and the hair rises on the nape of Jane’s neck. She thinks, for some reason, of the leer of that eel in the fish tank.

“Not a thing,” says Jane. “What are you doing out here, anyway?”

“Lost something,” he says, indicating his flashlight, as if having lost something is a justification for carrying a flashlight in broad daylight. “Thought I might find it here.”

“What is it?”

“It’s hard to describe.”

Does it have crooked blond hair, Jane wants to ask, a tear-stained face, and a mistrust of all people? “How enigmatic,” she says.

A sudden, staticky noise makes her jump. “Patrick?” says a metallic version of Mrs. Vanders’s voice. “Come in, Patrick?”

Patrick pulls a walkie-talkie from his back pocket. Tucking his flashlight under one arm, he presses a button on the walkie-talkie. “Go ahead.”

“Dorothy’s come home,” says Mrs. Vanders’s voice.

Patrick grins brightly. “There’s no place like home,” he says, then pockets the walkie-talkie, gives Jane a nod, and moves on, taking the same route Grace Panzavecchia took, along the wall and around the western corner of the house.

“Aunt Magnolia,” Jane says to the air. “What the actual hell is going on here?”

The air does not respond.

*   *   *

Jane winds her way back through the pool room, the bowling alley, the stuffy green parlor. Her goal is the second-story east wing, where she last saw Mrs. Vanders headed—something about a Vermeer—and where she intends to confront Mrs. Vanders about how she knew Aunt Magnolia, about who Dorothy is, about everything strange going on in this house. But when Jane steps into the Venetian courtyard, Mrs. Vanders is right there, standing beside the fountain, her back to Jane. She’s muttering into a walkie-talkie.

“Who’s Dorothy?” Jane asks without preamble.

“Oh, hello, Jane,” Mrs. Vanders says, lowering the walkie-talkie and turning around smoothly. “Dorothy’s my great-niece, visiting from out west. Why? Have you met her?”

“I was with Patrick when you called him on the walkie-talkie and said ‘Dorothy’s come home.’”

“Yes,” says Mrs. Vanders. “She knows she’s not supposed to wander around without telling us where she’s going, but she does it anyway. I worry, especially since there’s a pool in the house. Patrick is fond of her. He was worried too.”

“What did you mean by ‘Dorothy’s come home’? Where’s home?”

“Wherever I happen to be when she finds me,” says Mrs. Vanders crisply. “I’m her family. Family is home.”

“Speaking of family,” Jane says, “Mr. Vanders just told me you knew my aunt Magnolia.”

Mrs. Vanders grunts, her eyes sweeping the balconies of the courtyard.

“How could that be?” says Jane. “I don’t remember Aunt Magnolia ever saying anything about knowing anyone here, besides Kiran.”

Mrs. Vanders grunts again, then says nothing, just studies Jane. An odd silence stretches between them. Jane tries again.

“She made me promise once that if I was ever invited to Tu Reviens,” she says, “I’d come. Was that so I would meet you?”

“Do you like to travel?” says Mrs. Vanders.

“Yes, I guess,” says Jane. “I haven’t really traveled much, so I don’t really know. Why? Did you travel with her or something?”

“We have one of her travel pictures,” Mrs. Vanders says. “A yellow fish peeking out of the mouth of a big gray fish. Your aunt had a talent for . . . uncovering hidden truths.”

“Oh,” Jane says, amazed, then flushing with pride that Aunt Magnolia’s photo should end up on the walls of a fancy house like this. “So, is that how you knew her? Were you in touch about the photo?”

“Do you like Ivy?” responds Mrs. Vanders, peering at Jane.

“Sure,” says Jane in confusion. “Why?”

“I may ask for your help at the party,” she says. “If I do so, I’ll convey the message through Ivy. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” She turns and walks away.

“I don’t work for you, you know,” Jane snaps at the empty air.

It’s one thing for Mrs. Vanders to lie and evade on the subject of Grace Panzavecchia, who’s obviously mixed up in something bad. But why would she need to be cryptic about Aunt Magnolia?

Unsettled, Jane stares into the cheerfully splashing fountain. Somewhere behind her, she hears the approaching voices of Lucy St. George and Colin Mack, and finds herself moving away from them, up the stairs. She needs to think. “I’ll be a bit longer,” she texts Kiran as she climbs.

Jasper is waiting outside her door. Inside, smoothing her ruffled, red-orange shirt, Jane sits on one of the armchairs before the cold fire. Jasper burrows under the bed and begins snoring, a soft, low, soothing rumble.

For some reason, Jane can’t stop picturing the last thing she ever saw Aunt Magnolia wear, the day she left on that final, fateful Antarctic trip. A simple, deep purple dress, flowy, with long sleeves and pockets. Her clunky, sturdy black boots and her long, iridescent purple coat with the silver-gold lining. She’d looked like some sort of fashion warrior set to take on the Antarctic night.

Jane has only just begun the gold-and-brown self-defense umbrella, with its sharp ribs and powerful springs. But what she’s imagining now is an iridescent purple umbrella, with a contrasting interior of silver and gold.

Could Jane make an umbrella like that, without it hurting too much?

Probably not. But she gets the feeling she’s about to do it anyway.

*   *   *

In her morning room, Jane works, until she becomes aware of the sound of someone yelling. No, not someone; Ravi. Somewhere in the house, Ravi is yelling.

With only half her focus, she goes into the bedroom and sticks her ear out into the corridor. It’s coming from the house’s middle, quite some distance away.

The trouble is that Jane’s stumbled upon an unusual challenge with the curve of this umbrella, and it’s asking for her full attention. Damn Ravi, she thinks, then comes awake. Wait. If people are yelling, it’s got to be about Grace Panzavecchia.

Jane moves quickly down the corridor toward the noise. She steps onto the third-story bridge and finds Ravi in the receiving hall far below, holding that little mirror table she was inspecting earlier, waving it around and screaming. The table’s reflective top flashes at Jane as he whirls it about. The checkered floor is strewn with flowers and water, the glass shards of a broken vase.

“Octavian!” Ravi screams. “Octavian!” Cleaners and decorators, interrupted in their work, line the bridges and staircases, staring. Lucy St. George stands beside Ravi, as do Colin Mack, Kiran, Ivy, and Phoebe Okada.

“What’s going on?” Jane whispers to the person nearest her, who happens to be the man with the bucket who’d asked directions at breakfast this morning, the apologetic cleaner with salt-and-pepper hair. He’s wiping down the banister of the third-story bridge with a wet cloth.

“Don’t know,” he says, wringing his cloth into his bucket intently. “He just started yelling.”

“What’s that little table he’s holding?” Jane asks. “What’s it for?”

“Don’t know,” the cleaner says again in his unplaceable accent, then freezes for just an instant as Mrs. Vanders sweeps into the receiving hall. She stops before Ravi.

“Be quiet!” bellows Mrs. Vanders. “What in the name of all that’s reasonable is the matter with you?”

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

From where Jane is standing, she can’t see Mrs. Vanders’s face. She can only observe the housekeeper’s silence and the stillness of her stance as she holds a hand out for the little table, inspects it, then passes it to Lucy. White-faced, Lucy inspects it too, especially the small dot in the middle of the mirror. Lucy raises shocked eyes to Colin, who’s standing nearby. Lucy doesn’t look well; she’s a bit shaky.

“Ravi?” Lucy says, clearing her throat. “The sculpture was removed cleanly from the pedestal. Assuming the sculpture itself is unbroken, it should be easy to reattach it.”

“Well, that’s just wonderful,” Ravi says, chewing on sarcasm, “just fantastic, except,” he screams, “where is the goddamned sculpture?!”

“Calm down,” Mrs. Vanders says. “Take a breath, Ravi, and tell me where you found the pedestal.”

“Right there!” Ravi points to a row of side tables. “It was sitting right there—with a vase of lilacs on it—as if it were a party decoration!”

“All right,” Mrs. Vanders says. “Breathe.”

“It wasn’t there last night,” says Ravi. “No part of it was there when I got in. Someone took the whole thing away, broke the fish off the pedestal, then put the pedestal back! What kind of lunatic would do that?”

Jane is remembering, now, something about a million-dollar sculpture Ravi was asking Octavian about last night. A fish, a missing sculpture of a fish, by Brancusi. This little mirrored table must be the pedestal for Brancusi’s million-dollar fish.

“I don’t get it,” she whispers to the cleaning man. “Isn’t that sculpture worth a fortune? I can see why someone would steal it, but why would someone break it?” And why, she doesn’t say aloud, would Grace Panzavecchia be carrying the pedestal around, slipping it onto tables in the receiving hall? Are her parents involved in art theft now, since the bank theft failed?

Now Ravi is interrogating Mrs. Vanders, demanding a list of everyone who’s recently set foot in the house. Turning suddenly on Phoebe Okada, Ravi spits, “Where’s your husband? Where’s Philip? He’s run off, hasn’t he?”

“Good question,” Jane whispers, then glances at the cleaner beside her, who’s gotten very quiet. It’s because he’s gone. Only his damp cloth and his bucket of suds remain, and when Jane peeks around in confusion, she catches a glimpse of him stepping off the bridge into the house’s east side.

She’d think little of it, except for something odd that happens below. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just imply that my husband stole from you,” Phoebe says to Ravi, then strikes out across the floor, heading for the Venetian courtyard. But before she starts moving, she throws her head back and narrows her eyes at Jane, or rather, at the space beside Jane where the cleaner was a moment ago. Something about it seems . . . deliberate. Phoebe’s gaze on the empty spot beside Jane is ferocious.

It’s enough to turn Jane around and propel her onto the nearest balcony overlooking the Venetian courtyard, to see where Phoebe is going. Behind Jane, Mrs. Vanders is suggesting to Ravi that the broken sculpture might be an accident or a prank. Ravi is responding with bewildered hysterics—“Call the FBI, the CIA, and Interpol!”—while in front of Jane, in her own private world of bewilderment, Phoebe zooms across the courtyard floor to the stairs on its west side. She begins flying up them, two and three at a time, faster than Jane has ever seen anyone move in her life. Phoebe is somehow achieving this astonishing speed in high-heeled boots without making a clatter; Jane hears nothing but the voices in the receiving hall and the splash of the fountain. Who is Phoebe? What is her job? Phoebe shoots desperate glances now and then at the third-floor balconies across from her, and when Jane tracks her gaze, Jane finds the cleaner, slowly rounding the atrium via those balconies. It’s as if Phoebe is racing to intercept him somewhere without him knowing, and it’s as if everything depends upon it.

“Espions sans frontières,” Grace said, or at least, that’s what Jane thinks she heard. Espions. Spies.

She’s moving before she’s even really decided. She catches up with the cleaner as he nears the final turn before the servants’ wing. He doesn’t hear Jane behind him, just slinks smoothly around the corner and out of her sight again.

As she nears the corner, Jane hears a conversation start up between the cleaner and Phoebe, who seems not only to have beaten him to the servants’ quarters but to have done so without getting winded. Their voices stop Jane; suddenly Jane can’t think what she imagines she’s doing, pursuing the cleaner, spying on Phoebe, eavesdropping. How will she explain herself?

“Hello,” Jane hears Phoebe say, in a casual, even tone. “Where are you going?”

The man clears his throat. “To the bathroom.”

“So far from where you were a moment ago? There’s a toilet beside the main staircase on every floor.”

“Why does it matter to you which bathroom I use?”

“When a theft has been discovered,” says Phoebe, “everyone’s movements become fascinating, don’t you think? Interesting that you’re sneaking away while a member of the household is making a scene and everyone’s distracted.”

Jane can’t stand there listening anymore. Where does Phoebe come off suggesting that this random guy might be involved in the theft, just because he has to pee? She stomps around the corner. “Phoebe!” she says. “What are you doing?”

Neither one seems surprised to see her. “Janie,” says Phoebe, raising an eyebrow at her. “Come to play Robin Hood?”

“What does that even mean?” says Jane. “I’m here to tell this guy that he can use the bathroom in my rooms. If that’s your idea of Robin Hood, then, yeah.”

“All right,” says Phoebe. “Go on. Do your ‘tired masses yearning to be free’ routine, but I’ve got my eyes on this fellow. I’ve half a mind to tell Ravi, or Mrs. Vanders.”

“Tell them what?” says Jane. “That you can quote the poem on the Statue of Liberty? That you’ve been stopping people from going to the bathroom? That you hate immigrants?”

“It’s ‘huddled masses,’” says the man, interrupting.

“What?” say Jane and Phoebe.

“‘Yearning to breathe free,’” he says. “‘Give me your tired, your poor, / your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.’”

“Oh,” says Jane.

“Whatever,” says Phoebe. “I’m British.”

“So?” says the cleaner. “I’m South Korean.”

“Well, I’m American,” says Jane, “and I’m kind of offended by the poem now that I’m hearing it. My ancestors were not wretched refuse!”

“Perhaps the wording was chosen for alliterative purposes,” says the man, with a brief, comprehensive look at Jane. His eyes take in her boots, her red-orange ruffled shirt, her striped skinny jeans, her boisterous hair. She feels oddly . . . catalogued.

“I’m getting a headache,” says Phoebe. “Are you taking this cleaner to your toilet or aren’t you?”

“Ugh!” says Jane, disgusted by Phoebe; floored, really, that some people are actually this snobbish. “My rooms are at the other end of the house,” she tells the man.

“Thanks,” he says.

“What’s your name?”

“Ji-hoon.”

“Ji-hoon,” says Jane, extending a hand. “I’m Janie. Do you know a lot of poetry?”

“I have a remarkable memory,” he says. “I use mnemonic devices.”

Phoebe watches Jane and Ji-hoon walk away.

*   *   *

After Ji-hoon uses Jane’s bathroom, he takes his leave, bestowing upon her the parting gift of a recitation of “I Hear America Singing” by Walt Whitman. It’s a little weird, but by now Jane is beyond expecting anyone to be anything but weird. Ji-hoon holds her eyes for a moment, nods briskly, then goes.

Scratching her head, Jane goes back to her Aunt Magnolia Coat umbrella, filling her hands with metallic and iridescent fabrics, letting her work tug at her, and thinking things through. Espions sans frontières. Spies without borders. Jane is no expert on the world of espionage, but she’s pretty sure spies wouldn’t even exist if there weren’t any borders.

Maybe she heard Grace wrong.

Before too long, her stomach informs her it’s lunchtime. Jane has no idea if Tu Reviens has an official lunch hour and she decides it doesn’t matter. She’ll go to the kitchen and bring something back to her rooms. She’ll eat while she’s working.

“Hungry, Jasper?” she says to the bed as she walks through the bedroom. Jasper pushes an inquisitive nose out into the light and snorts. “I’m going to the kitchen, if you’re interested.”

He bolts out eagerly, sticking so close to her that Jane feels a bit unsafe on the stairs and holds hard to the banister. On the second-story landing he almost trips her. “Jasper! I need my feet to walk. I can’t walk when there’s a sixty-pound dog attached to them. I want your company, you banana-head, but we can’t actually occupy the same space, do you get that?”

He hops on his front legs once, in a manner heralding an ominous intention to charge. Jane’s instinct takes over and she legs it across the bridge. But he doesn’t charge. He stays there on the east landing, hopping around in front of that tall umbrella painting, howling delicately, like an opera singer holding herself back before the big climax.

“Fuzzball,” Jane calls across to him, “you fit right in with everyone else in this house.” Then she continues on into the west wing, because she’s just had a thought. If the Thrashes and guests are currently at lunch in the banquet hall, Jane wants nothing to do with it. If there’s a back entrance to the kitchen, it might be at the bottom of the staircase at the end of the west wing. She’ll try it.

She isn’t paying much attention to the art on the walls, until something familiar brings her up short. It’s Aunt Magnolia’s photograph, blown huge.

Backing away to get a better vantage point, Jane soaks it up.

A tiny yellow goby peeks out from inside the cavelike mouth of a big gray fish. Aunt Magnolia took this photo in the waters near Japan. Jane remembers. And she feels like the little fish right now, bright and determined, but not altogether safe.

Jane is so proud of Aunt Magnolia, she could burst.

Then her perspective shifts and she notices a bulge in the matting behind the photo, as if the matting is way too small for the print. She’ll have to mention it to Mrs. Vanders. A framing mistake like that will damage the print, and Aunt Magnolia’s work deserves better care.

*   *   *

Jane was right about the back entrance: At the bottom of the staircase is a big metal door that deposits her into the kitchen. The dumbwaiter and a pantry are to her right. Two huge appliances to the left, presumably a refrigerator and a freezer, block her view of the rest of the room. She eases around them, then stops.

Patrick and Mrs. Vanders stand near the stoves with their backs to Jane, blocking her view of the person they’re speaking to. But Jane recognizes the voice of Phoebe Okada.

“Yes,” says Phoebe. “I think he’s the one. He says he’s South Korean, but I don’t believe him.” Then Phoebe hands a distinctive black thing to Mrs. Vanders that Jane also recognizes: Ivy’s camera.

Mrs. Vanders peers down at the camera and says crisply, “Yes, I’ve wondered about him. Patrick, find out what Ivy’s learned.”

“Now,” says Phoebe, “what about my appointment?”

“Mr. Vanders is busy,” says Mrs. Vanders. “He’s digging holes.”

“I saw,” says Phoebe. “Why, exactly?”

“He’s pretending to garden,” says Mrs. Vanders.

“So, my appointment is canceled because Mr. Vanders is playing make-believe?” Phoebe says blandly.

“We got a tip that Grace might’ve buried it in the garden or the backyard,” says Mrs. Vanders. “Mr. Vanders is looking for it.”

A tip that Grace buried something? Jane saw Grace herself, digging holes in the rain. Jane mentioned it to Mr. Vanders this morning; she said to him, “I saw a little girl digging in the garden yesterday.” Then Mr. Vanders froze in astonishment. So is it Jane, then, who provided this “tip”? About what?

“You’re kidding,” says Phoebe.

“No,” says Mrs. Vanders dryly.

“She’s a clever pain in the ass, isn’t she?” says Phoebe. “How old is she, eight?”

“She’s taking years off my life,” says Patrick proudly.

“Regardless,” says Phoebe, “I scheduled this appointment weeks ago. I need to talk to Mr. Vanders.”

“There’s nothing we can do,” says Mrs. Vanders. “Someone needs to look for that sculpture. If we can’t put it back together, our contact isn’t going to help us move the children.”

“Well, you’ve made an inconvenient choice as to who’s the gardener.”

“Mr. Vanders is no happier about it than you are,” says Mrs. Vanders. “But he’s trying to approach the digging as a meditative activity. He would not otherwise have time to meditate on a day like today. Meditation improves his sessions.”

“Well, that’s no use to me if my sessions are canceled, is it?” says Phoebe.

“You could go dig with him.”

Phoebe makes a scoffing noise. “Sure. No one would think it was out of character with my snob persona if I dropped to my knees in the garden next to the butler and started digging. Why isn’t Patrick digging? Are you too pretty to dig, Patrick?”

“Patrick also has his hands full at the moment,” says Mrs. Vanders. “It’s the day before a gala, Phoebe. I appreciate your needs, but I’m certain you appreciate ours as well. Everyone at Espions Sans Frontières is making sacrifices. Cook has barely had time to touch his saxophone and my yoga has most certainly suffered.”

Then Mrs. Vanders shifts to one side and Phoebe and Jane are looking straight into each other’s faces.

Phoebe smiles, with a sincerity Jane’s never seen in her face before. “You keep popping up,” she says, “don’t you. You have a talent for sneaking.”

Patrick and Mrs. Vanders spin around. Their faces are unsurprised, unreadable.

“I’m not sneaking,” Jane says. “I wanted some food. So I came to the kitchen.”

Patrick glances at Mrs. Vanders, then walks toward Jane, past her, almost brushing against her. “You’ve got an awfully quiet tread,” he says, “for someone your size, and wearing those boots.”

“My aunt Magnolia taught me not to push myself onto any environment,” Jane says, earning a small chuckle from Phoebe.

“Tell me when Mr. Vanders is free, please, I beg you,” Phoebe says to Mrs. Vanders, then turns and exits through the kitchen’s main door. Patrick has also made his exit, through the back door.

Jane is alone with Mrs. Vanders. She lifts her chin and holds the housekeeper’s steely eyes. There’s no more point in pretending.

“I know Grace Panzavecchia is in this house,” says Jane. “I know she took the Brancusi sculpture. I know Phoebe and Philip Okada aren’t who they’re pretending to be, and neither are you.”

Mrs. Vanders stares at Jane, with a silence so obstinate that it’s somehow aggressive. “Tell me,” she says, “how do you feel about it?”

“What does it matter how I feel?” cries Jane. “Is this a therapy session or something?”

Mrs. Vanders smiles, grimly. “It could be, if you wanted it. Mr. Vanders is a licensed psychologist, specializing in these things.”

“Specializing in what things? People who lie?”

“Specializing in the needs of political agents and government operatives,” says Mrs. Vanders.

“Oh, come on,” Jane spits out, truly at the end of her patience. “You’re all playacting some silly game.”

“Well, playacting is part of the job, it’s true,” says Mrs. Vanders with another grim smile. “Your aunt Magnolia was quite good at it.”

“Aunt Magnolia didn’t playact,” says Jane automatically.

“Your aunt is dead,” says Mrs. Vanders. “It’s time you knew who she really was. I’ve meant to get in touch with you for months now, but I guess I’ve had too much on my plate. Magnolia would be furious at the delay, rest her soul.”

Jane has this strange feeling, as if she’s in a car, careening in slow motion toward a tree. “Stop it.”

“The servants of Tu Reviens are a secret espionage-advocacy group,” says Mrs. Vanders. “We provide confidential, non-partisan services for agents, operatives, and assets of all political loyalties, mostly during this house’s seasonal galas. We’re called Espions Sans Frontières, Spies Without Borders. Your aunt Magnolia—”

“Stop it!” says Jane.

“Your aunt Magnolia was an operative for the American government.”

“She wasn’t,” says Jane. “She was an underwater photographer. She was not a spy!”

“She did underwater photography too,” says Mrs. Vanders. “It was the cover for her work as an operative. In our circles, spy is, in fact, a rather derogatory term.”

“Oh, come on! This is preposterous!”

“It may be preposterous,” says Mrs. Vanders, “but it’s entirely true. It’s why I knew Magnolia. ESF helped her from time to time. I’d like to know how you feel about it, because we’re always recruiting.”

Behind Jane, a door opens and Ivy steps in, tall and easy in her ratty blue sweater. At the sight of Jane, she stops, a stricken look coming to her face. “Janie?”

In Ivy’s eyes, Jane sees concern, misery, guilt. She sees the truth. Her heart plummets. This is real.

“What is it, Ivy-bean?” says Mrs. Vanders harshly. “You can go ahead and say it in front of Jane.”

Ivy clears her throat. “I’ve looked into that man who’s calling himself Ji-hoon,” she says. “I’m not sure, but Phoebe could be right.”

“Very well,” says Mrs. Vanders. “Until we know for certain, we can’t do anything extreme, but we can make damn sure he gets nowhere near the children. Please ask Phoebe to come see me at her earliest convenience.”

“You can’t really ask more of Phoebe, can you?” says Ivy. “She’s a British operative. She doesn’t work for ESF.”

“The Brits benefit if we get the children away,” says Mrs. Vanders. “Everyone benefits, and Phoebe knows that. She’ll do what I ask.”

“All right,” says Ivy, then hesitates, looking at Jane.

“Ivy,” says Mrs. Vanders, not without a sudden, surprising touch of tenderness. “Go. Ji-hoon and Grace are both in the house; we can’t take risks.”

Ivy goes.

“You needed food?”

Jane casts about for a grip on what Mrs. Vanders is saying. “What?”

“Come,” says Mrs. Vanders. “I’ll help you collect some things.”

“Okay,” Jane says automatically, not caring. As she follows the housekeeper into the pantry, a staticky noise emerges from one of the shelves.

“Sweetie?” says the deep voice of Mr. Vanders.

Mrs. Vanders reaches for a walkie-talkie sitting atop a fruit basket. “Go ahead.”

“I found the fish,” says her husband’s voice. “I’ll bring it up to your studio. It badly needs cleaning.”

Mrs. Vanders releases a breath of air. “Thank heaven for small blessings.”

“Are you still worried the Vermeer’s been forged?” says Mr. Vanders’s voice.

“Ravi hasn’t noticed anything wrong with it. We talked for ten minutes standing right in front of it.”

“Have you had it out of the frame?”

“Not yet,” says Mrs. Vanders. “I’ll do it after we’ve moved the children. If it has been forged, it’s nothing to do with the children or any of this, so I simply can’t spare it a moment’s attention right now.”

“Don’t blame yourself for putting it on the back burner,” says Mr. Vanders.

“I do blame myself,” says Mrs. Vanders. “If the Vermeer has been forged, it’s a calamity. You know how seriously I take my responsibilities to the family. Ravi’s already so upset about the Brancusi.”

“He’ll have his Brancusi back in a week’s time, none the wiser,” says Mr. Vanders. “And you’ll be able to give the Vermeer your fullest attention after the children are safe. Which will be soon, now that we have the Brancusi in hand. The gala is tomorrow. This is almost over.”

“Thank you, Arthur,” says Mrs. Vanders. “I suppose it always gets like this before the galas.”

“There is always something,” says Mr. Vanders with a chuckle, then a sneeze. Then the static cuts out. Mrs. Vanders shoves the walkie-talkie back onto the fruit bowl and reaches for a cutting board.

“Which cheese do you prefer,” she says, “muenster or gruyere?”

“What?” says Jane. “Cheese?”

“I’m making you a sandwich,” says Mrs. Vanders. “Do you like chicken liver pâté?”

“Are you—” Jane’s head is aching. “Are you using the Brancusi sculpture to pay someone to move the Panzavecchia children out of the house? Because of something to do with smallpox?”

“See now,” Mrs. Vanders says, pausing in her swift slicing of thick, dark bread to peer at Jane keenly. “This is what I mean. If you’ve managed to figure that out, it suggests to me that you have instincts for our kind of work.”

“But—it’s not your Brancusi,” says Jane. “You’re stealing the Brancusi?”

“We do not steal the family art,” says Mrs. Vanders. “We borrow it, to use as collateral while we act as go-betweens. I give a picture or sculpture to Person X. Person X releases an item to me—an agent I’m trying to save, information, goods—and I deliver that item to Person Y. Person Y pays me with the thing Person X needs—again, an agent, information, goods—and I deliver that thing to Person X. Person X gives me the picture or the sculpture back. A masterpiece is an excellent cash alternative. Recognizable, with undeniable value, and harder to trace than cash, which isn’t an option anyway, because we don’t have it.”

Jane feels herself stupidly nodding. She’s heard of this strategy. “But Ravi doesn’t know,” she says.

“No one in the Thrash family knows about ESF,” says Mrs. Vanders. “I’ll tell Ravi I’ve taken a picture away to clean it, or that I’m doing some sort of research on it.”

“You’ll lie,” says Jane.

Mrs. Vanders piles cheese and pickles and pâté onto bread. “People want to hurt these children,” she says. “There’s a woman who’s offered to move Grace and Christopher Panzavecchia for us, in return for the brief loan of our Brancusi and also our Rembrandt. She’s a peculiar woman. It’s not about money or information for her; it’s about having various pieces of art in her collection, briefly, from time to time. And she never asks for anything easy. The Rembrandt picture is big and heavy, painted on wood, and the Brancusi sculpture so fragile, but those are the only two pieces that’ll do for her this time. We’ll have them back in the house within a week.”

“Why are the Panzavecchias so important?”

“I can’t answer that,” says Mrs. Vanders. “ESF provides protection, to political agents who are exploited, kidnapped, left to fend for themselves. If their loyalties come into question, we provide exit strategies, safe passage for them and their families. Often our services require the help of third parties. These third parties don’t help us out of the kindness of their hearts. They require payment. We’ve learned to use whatever’s available to us.”

“By lying to people in this house who trust you implicitly,” says Jane.

“What should I be doing instead?” she says, exasperated. “Should I never lie, which would endanger countless people? Should I not risk the house art, when it can ensure the safety of two children?”

“I need to go now,” says Jane.

“Don’t say anything to anyone,” says Mrs. Vanders. “Grace and Christopher Panzavecchia are only eight and two. You’ll endanger their lives if you speak of any of this to the wrong person. Would you like that on your conscience? A dead child?”

“Why should I believe you’re trying to help them?” says Jane. “If you’re being so helpful, why does Grace keep trying to sneak away? Why did she break the sculpture you need so badly to ‘rescue’ her?”

“Grace is a traumatized child who’s been torn from her family and desperately wants to go home,” says Mrs. Vanders. “She doesn’t understand that home no longer exists. She’s trying to create problems for us, draw attention. She’s acting out! But even she knows where the line is!”

“Why does home no longer exist? What happened?”

“That is far more information than you’re in need of at this juncture,” says Mrs. Vanders.

“Where’s Baby Leo?” Jane asks. “Why is no one talking about him?”

“The baby is safe,” Mrs. Vanders says. “Here’s your sandwich, some grapes, and a kumquat.” She shoves a plate at Jane so forcefully that grapes go diving off the edge, rolling into unknown and unreachable parts of the pantry.

“I can’t believe you lie to Ravi,” says Jane. “And Kiran too. Every single day. How can you do that?”

Mrs. Vanders’s face is made of granite. She shoves a doughnut onto Jane’s plate, causing more grapes to go flying. “We’ll be keeping an eye on you,” she says. “We’ll know if you start wandering the house. And we have ways of knowing if you’re engaging in mobile phone or Internet activity. If we decide that we can’t trust you to keep your mouth shut, you’ll find yourself deeply regretful.”

“Wow,” says Jane. “You really make me want to work for you. I want a job where I get to threaten innocent visitors and lie to all the people who trust me most.”

“On second thought,” says Mrs. Vanders, “you stay right here. I’m getting someone to walk you back to your rooms.”

“Kiss my ass,” Jane says, then turns and walks out.

*   *   *

As Jane is making her way up the back staircase with her plate, Patrick comes clattering down from the west attics, which doesn’t surprise her. He reaches her, then turns back around to accompany her. Jane doesn’t even look at him.

“What would you do if I started screaming something about your stupid organization?” she says. “Wrestle me down and gag me?”

“No,” says Patrick calmly. “But I would stop you.”

“I’m innocent, you know,” Jane says, “and I didn’t ask to be involved in all this crap.”

“Didn’t you?” says Patrick. “Weren’t you following Grace around this morning? And weren’t you asking everyone questions about your aunt Magnolia?”

“Not because I was hoping to find out she was a spy!”

“She had reasons.”

“Do me a favor,” says Jane, “and don’t flaunt the ways you knew my aunt better than I did.”

“Don’t be silly,” says Patrick. “She was your aunt. You’re the one who knew her.”

He sounds like he means it, but it’s too absurd to be answerable. They’re walking back the way Jane came before, through the second story’s west wing, past Aunt Magnolia’s photograph.

If it’s even hers.

“All these years,” she says to Patrick, “you’ve been lying to Kiran about who you really are.”

He doesn’t speak again for the rest of the walk.

*   *   *

Jane remembers the questions she’d had after Aunt Magnolia’s death. One of her aunt’s colleagues had called from the Antarctic Peninsula. “A storm came up,” he’d said, his voice cutting in and out; the connection on that phone call had been terrible. “She was too far from the base. She never made it back. I’m sorry,” he’d said, but Jane hadn’t understood what that meant.

So she’d dragged herself to her doctor, Doctor Gordon, and asked what it meant to die in a snowstorm in Antarctica.

Doctor Gordon had sat Jane down gently. “The first thing that happens is that your blood moves from your skin and extremities to your core,” she’d said. “This is called vasoconstriction. It helps you conserve what heat you have, rather than lose it to the environment.” She’d stopped, waited for Jane’s nod. “Then you start shivering,” she’d gone on, “all over your body. You become clumsy. It becomes difficult to use your hands or walk.” Another nod. “Your thoughts start to get dull, you have some amnesia. Apathy sets in, which is a blessing, really. You might burrow somewhere, like a hibernating bear,” she’d said, “before you lose consciousness. Once you do lose consciousness, you might wake now and then to hallucinations, but finally you fall asleep and don’t wake up again. Your body can take a long time to die, but during that time, you’re not suffering. Do you appreciate that, Janie? That at the end, she wasn’t suffering?”

But Jane hadn’t been able to bear the idea that Aunt Magnolia had certainly known, in a snowstorm in Antarctica, what her own sleepiness had meant. Jane’s sleep had gotten even worse from that day on, because that’s how Aunt Magnolia had died. Or so Jane had thought.

Did she ever even go to Antarctica? Or did I drag myself to the doctor and sit through that horrible litany for nothing? She’s suddenly hot with shame at the thought, as if Aunt Magnolia has pranked her.

Her eyes find the framed photos she’s hung on the morning room walls. The anglerfish in Indonesia. The squid in Peru. The falling frogs in Belize. The Canadian polar bear, suspended underwater. Aunt Magnolia had used to draw Jane a map for every trip she took, with the dates written carefully, so that Jane could have the comfort of following her progress and knowing where to imagine her at any point in time.

All lies. Other people had known where Aunt Magnolia really was. Ivy had probably known. Jane crosses to the photo of Aunt Magnolia herself, standing in scuba gear on a New Zealand seafloor, touching a whale. Is that even Aunt Magnolia? In scuba gear, it could be anyone.

Jane reaches into her pocket for her folding knife. She flips the screwdriver extension open, takes the photo down from the wall, and applies the screwdriver to the back. When the backing comes loose, she throws it aside, then grabs the photo and holds it out before her, staring at that person on the ocean floor.

Liar, Jane thinks, and tears it in half, separating the person from the whale. Then, with a growing rage, she tears the person in half, then in fourths, then into as many tiny pieces as she can. She runs to the fireplace in the bedroom, hurls them into the grate, and throws some small pieces of wood in there with them. Finding a box of matches, she lights a few and throws them in there too.

Back in the morning room, she takes the next picture down from the wall, and the next, and the next, tearing the squid in pieces, tearing the anglerfish, the frogs, tearing the polar bear with Aunt Magnolia’s writing that says “Sing Ho! For the life of a Bear!”

Lies, she thinks, all lies!, stumbling back into the bedroom and throwing the pieces onto the fire. Miraculously, a corner of wood is alight, despite her careless fire-building, and pieces of the first photo are curling and catching fire. She watches them turn black, trying to decide what she’s going to do with the huge photo hanging in the second-story west corridor. Bring it back and throw it on the fire? Or smash the whole thing to pieces right there? She runs into the morning room again, lifts the Aunt Magnolia Coat umbrella-in-progress over her head, and crashes it down onto the rug. When nothing breaks, she crashes it again, harder, until she hears the ping of ribs snapping off the runner and small pieces of metal go flying. Crying now, she grabs the purple iridescent fabric and pulls until the seams tear apart with a scream of breaking thread. She traps the silver-gold fabric under her boots and pulls again, ripping it to pieces.

She’s reaching for the next umbrella, the pale blue eggshell with brown spots, she’s lifting it and raising it high, when Jasper runs into the room, presses against her legs, and starts whining.

Jane is momentarily confused, because she last saw the dog on the second-story landing. How did he get in?

Ravi’s voice, rising from her bedroom, answers her question. “Not much of a fire,” he’s calling to her. “You need to build a sort of chimney out of these smaller pieces of wood.”

“What?” Jane drops the eggshell umbrella and grasps her head. What’s going on?

“Don’t worry,” Ravi calls, “I’m fixing it.”

“You can’t just come into my rooms!” she yells back at him.

“I knocked and you didn’t answer.”

“That means you’re supposed to go away and leave me alone.”

“The dog wanted in.”

Jane glances around. Crumpled on the floor, the Aunt Magnolia Coat umbrella looks like some sort of large insect she’s defeated in hand-to-hand combat. And she feels like she’s been in a battle. Her face is swollen and her breath short. Mopping her eyes with her sleeves and sniffling hard, she pushes the umbrella’s broken pieces into a pile, hoping Ravi won’t notice it, or her tears.

Ravi appears in the morning room doorway, wiping his hands on his shirt. He peers at her. “You okay?”

She avoids looking at him directly. “Yeah.”

“You look—crazed.”

“It’s an artist thing,” Jane says. “Don’t worry about it.”

He indicates the mangled umbrella. “What happened to that one?”

“Sometimes they don’t work out.”

“Okay,” he says skeptically, surveying the rest of the room. He wades into the midst of the completed umbrellas and surveys them gloomily, dismal and pathetic, like Hamlet, or maybe Eeyore.

“This is the only room in the house where I feel any peace,” he says, gripping his white-streaked hair and sighing.

“If you’re hitting on me again—”

“I mean the umbrellas,” Ravi says, waving his hand around. He points across the room at one that leans in a corner. It’s a simple, understated umbrella, alternating pale yellows with a mahogany rod and handle. “May I open that one?”

“Really?” Jane says tiredly. “Now? I’m working, Ravi.”

“I think I want to buy it for Kiran,” he says. “It makes me think of Kiran. If I like it when it’s open, I’ll give you three thousand dollars for it.”

“That is ludicrous,” Jane says, enunciating each syllable. “Come back when you’ve recovered your senses.”

“No one is taking this seriously,” Ravi says. “Have you noticed that?”

“Taking what seriously?”

“The Brancusi!” Ravi says. “Mrs. Vanders still hasn’t called the FBI. It’s all ‘the gala’ this, ‘the gala’ that, as if the gala is more important than the family or the house.”

Jane has completely forgotten all about the Brancusi, the gala, everything. She considers, for a moment, what would happen if she told Ravi that his servants are using the Brancusi to pay some woman to protect the missing Panzavecchia children, because Giuseppe and Victoria are mixed up in some sort of espionage, possibly involving weaponized smallpox.

He would flip out. Loudly, and dangerously. That’s what would happen.

Jane crosses to the yellow umbrella. Carrying it back to Ravi, she places it into his hands and says, “Take it with you. Open it in your own rooms. Inspect it. If you like it, you can buy it for a hundred dollars.”

“Like hell,” Ravi says. “That would be theft.”

“I’m not taking three thousand dollars from you for one umbrella.”

“Twenty-five hundred, then.”

“I’m pretty sure this isn’t how bargaining is supposed to go.”

“I’m not going to stand here while you undervalue your own work,” Ravi says. “Don’t forget that valuing art is my job.”

“You’re not going to stand here at all,” Jane says. “You’re going to leave, and I’m going to lock the door behind you, and then I’m finally going to be alone.”

“How about two hundred for the umbrella and twenty-three hundred for me to go away and leave you alone?” he says.

Despite herself, Jane laughs. Ravi has found the only workable angle; her solitude is definitely worth twenty-three hundred dollars. “Take the umbrella,” she says, “and we’ll talk about it later.”

“All right,” Ravi says, with a mild twinkle of amusement. “That’s acceptable. It’s an honor to do business with the artist.” He turns to leave.

“Ravi,” Jane says.

“Yeah?” he says, turning back. He narrows his eyes on her in curiosity.

Fuck it, Jane thinks. “Have you looked closely at the Vermeer?”

“The Vermeer?” says Ravi. “What about it?”

“Mrs. Vanders mentioned earlier that she thought there was something wrong with it.”

“Wrong? What are you talking about?”

“I overheard her talking to Mr. Vanders. I think she might have used the word forged.”

Ravi freezes. “Do you have a screwdriver?” he says thickly.

Jane crosses to the place where she threw her little folding knife on the floor, its screwdriver still extended. She tosses it to Ravi, who fails to catch it, scoops it up from the rug, then, without a second glance, leaves the room.

*   *   *

Alone again, Jane stares at the ruined umbrella. This is her Aunt Magnolia Coat umbrella, and she’s lost hold, entirely, of what that means.

She can’t quite bring herself to go into the bedroom and check out the state of the photos. She can hear a fire crackling brightly in the fireplace, so she has a feeling she knows what she’ll find.

Did Aunt Magnolia even take the pictures?

Did she die because she was a spy?

Outside noises touch Jane’s ears: the squeak and rattle of a ladder being placed into position. The wet protest of a cloth against glass. Idly carrying her sandwich and some grapes to the glass wall, she leans, looks down, and can just barely see the edges of Ji-hoon, man of mystery, washing the house’s outside windows in preparation for the gala. He too is apparently not what he seems.

Everything around me is a lie.

“Except you, Jasper,” she says to the dog, who’s watching her anxiously.

After a while, a knock sounds on the bedroom door. The notion of having to talk to someone is exhausting. It’ll either be someone she has to lie to or someone who’s lied to her. She drags herself through the bedroom and swings the door open.

Ivy stands there rubbing the back of her neck, looking a bit nervous.

“Hi,” she says. “Are you okay?”

“Seriously?” Jane says. “You’re really asking me that?”

Ivy raises her eyes to Jane’s and they’re so full of unhappiness that Jane is instantly furious.

“What do you have to be so upset about?”

“Plenty, actually,” says Ivy, with a touch of sharpness.

“Whatever. What do you want?”

Ivy lets out a short sigh. “Mrs. Vanders says you have to have dinner in your rooms. We’ll bring you food.”

“She doesn’t trust me with the other guests now,” says Jane; a statement, not a question.

“She’s pretty mad that you told Ravi to go look at the Vermeer.”

“It’s true, then? It’s forged?”

“Yeah,” says Ivy with a weary sort of indifference. “Turns out that in the middle of all this other stuff, someone stole the Vermeer.”

“So, what, she’s not glad to know for sure?”

“Well, yeah. But Ravi’s in hysterics, which is pulling Mrs. Vanders away from things she needs to be doing. And now it’s even harder to justify not calling in the cops. A lot of cops in the house will make it even more tricky for us to move the kids.”

“Oh,” Jane says, understanding, with a prick of guilt that makes her mad at herself, and then at Mrs. Vanders, that this would, of course, be true. “Right. It doesn’t mean I’m going to start telling people about the Panzavecchias at dinner, though.”

“I know,” Ivy says miserably. “I’m really sorry.” She examines the ratty end of her blue sweater. “I’ve been trying to imagine what this must be like for you.”

Jane finds herself laughing, quickly, once. “Maybe when you figure it out, you can fill me in.”

“Look, Janie,” Ivy says. “I was born into this work. I’ve never known anything else. And I’ve been wanting to get out of it for a couple years now, and finally I’m about to. This is my last op.”

“Really?” Jane says, curious, despite herself. “You’re allowed to stop?”

“As long as I clear it with headquarters.”

“There’s a headquarters?”

“Espions Sans Frontières is an international organization,” Ivy says. “We’re just one of the branches. It’s based in Geneva. I’ll go there and have an exit interview, then I’ll make plans to leave this house. I’ll do something else, something that doesn’t give me nightmares. This house gives me nightmares!”

Now Jane is trying to imagine what Ivy’s life has been like. “Are all the servants here born into this life?”

“Pretty much. I was, and Patrick, and so was the Vanders family,” Ivy says. “It’s been going on for generations. My parents died doing this work.”

“What?” says Jane, startled. “I thought it was some sort of travel accident.”

“I guess it was, technically,” says Ivy. “It was four years ago. They were trying to help an agent get to—someplace safe, far away from here. The same way we’re trying to help the Panzavecchias get someplace safe. That time, we were trying to fake the agent’s death. That part worked. But other things went wrong and they were shot.”

“My god, Ivy. I’m sorry.”

“Well,” Ivy says. “You lost your parents unexpectedly, and then the person who was basically your mother too. You know what it’s like.”

Jane examines her own boots for a moment. “The thing about learning that someone isn’t who they said they were,” she says, “is that you start to wonder if you ever really had a relationship with them in the first place. You try to picture them, and instead, there’s this empty space. The only thing you’re sure of is that they were a person who lied.”

“Oh,” Ivy says with conviction. “You knew your aunt. She was yours more than she was anyone’s.”

“But I don’t even know what she did,” Jane says. “In my mind, she was underwater with the animals. She was waiting, and observing, and not pushing herself in.”

“I know a little about what she did,” says Ivy. “Not a lot. But a little.” She pauses. “Do you want me to tell you?”

“What’s the point? I should’ve heard it from her, not someone else. Hearing it from you will just—” Hurt, Jane thinks. It’ll just make it even more plain that my life is a lie.

“I’m sure she didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Don’t defend her to me,” Jane snaps.

“But what if it helps explain things?” says Ivy. “I mean, wouldn’t it at least give you a more solid target to be pissed off at?”

“Now you sound like a therapist,” Jane says, but she sees Ivy’s point. “Okay, fine,” she adds. “Tell me.”

“Well,” Ivy says quietly. “I know she was an underwater nature photographer, for real. But she also salvaged the wreck of a North Korean submarine once, and an Iranian sub, and that Russian aircraft carrier that sank a few years back, remember? And sometimes she tapped undersea cables. Sometimes she cut undersea cables and set it up to look accidental.”

This is impossible. Jane is laughing again. There is no way for her to recognize the person Ivy is describing, a person who salvaged submarines full of nuclear missiles, full of secret information, full of the bloated corpses of drowned soldiers. Aunt Magnolia took pictures of beautiful animals. She was trying to save the oceans. “That’s enough.”

“Okay,” Ivy says. “I only ever met her a couple times. She had a great wardrobe, and sort of a steady, reassuring temperament. She seemed—eccentric, but also practical, no-nonsense. Kind of like you.”

Ivy’s words make Jane wish, suddenly, for a mirror. She wants to find the parts of her face that are like Aunt Magnolia’s. “Was the Antarctica trip actually a spy trip?”

“As far as we know,” Ivy says, “Magnolia was really going to Antarctica to take pictures of penguins and whales.”

Is it better or worse, Jane wonders, that she died as a nature photographer, not as a spy?

“You know not to trust anyone in the house, right?” Ivy says. “Especially don’t get involved with that guy who’s pretending to be a cleaner, the one who calls himself Ji-hoon. He could be dangerous.”

“He actually is a cleaner,” Jane says. “I mean, he is cleaning things, whatever else he’s doing.”

Ivy smiles slightly. “I still wouldn’t trust him. Even to clean.”

“Why is he so dangerous, anyway?” Jane asks. “Who is he?”

“Mrs. Vanders would strangle me if I told you.”

“Is he, like, armed?”

“Oh, no question he’s armed,” Ivy says. “He wants to get to Grace. She has something he wants.”

“Grace!” Jane says, thinking of the girl, huddled up and crying, angry. Small. “What could Grace possibly have that armed people want?”

Ivy hesitates. “She’s got something in her mind. Information.”

In Jane’s own mind, something stirs. “Grace has an amazing memory,” she says. “She uses mnemonic devices. Her father is very proud of it.”

“Yes.” Ivy starts to say something more, then stops with a frustrated sigh. Strands of hair have escaped her messy knot and her shoulders seem hunched and tight. “I want to tell you everything,” she says. “I’m sorry, Janie. I just can’t.”

Jane wants to reach out and push a strand of hair out of Ivy’s eyes. She wants to touch her shoulder; she wants to understand.

She doesn’t touch Ivy, but Ivy’s eyes do touch hers once, shyly.

“I have to go,” Ivy says. “I’ll leave dinner outside your door in a little bit. I’ll tell Kiran you’re not feeling well, if that would help.”

“Okay.”

After Ivy leaves, Jane goes back to her morning room.

Tu Reviens is making noises. Hums of water, breaths of heat; settling moans. Jasper wanders blearily into the room and comes to lean against Jane’s feet. “This house makes a lot of weird sounds,” she says to him. “Don’t you think?”

A wail begins, so distant and so faint, so mixed with the strange, metallic banging of the heater that Jane would assume it was just a trick of wind or water if she didn’t know it was probably Christopher Panzavecchia, age two, somewhere in the house.

She goes once to the window, peeking down at Ji-hoon. He washes the glass, slowly, like someone giving the house a backrub to help it fall asleep.

Jane tries a deep, jellyfish breath, but she can’t do it. Even the jellyfish feels like a lie.

*   *   *

The house wakes her from a dream about—what is it? A man who’s stolen Baby Leo Panzavecchia and it’s more terrible than even the newscasters realize, because the man is infected with smallpox, and now Baby Leo is too. He’ll pass it on to Grace and Christopher, to Espions Sans Frontières, to the Sicilian Mafia, and to the fishes, because Baby Leo sleeps with the fishes.

The dream shifts as Jane leaves it behind, as dreams do. She flails around in a fit of itching, calling for Aunt Magnolia, who saves itchy, underwater babies, it’s part of her spy work, and then she’s awake, Aunt Magnolia’s scratchy wool hat pressed against her sweaty neck.

Jane is in her bed in Tu Reviens. A warm basset hound snoozes at her feet. The clock beside her bed glows the time: 5:08 a.m. She breathes through a spinning panic, remembering that in the weeks before that last Antarctic trip, Aunt Magnolia had been unusually distracted. She’d left a burner on one day after heating some soup, unheard-of for Aunt Magnolia. More than once, Jane had caught her staring into a book she clearly hadn’t been reading, because she’d never turned a page. And then there was the night Jane had woken to find her awake, the night Aunt Magnolia had made her promise to come here if invited.

The day Aunt Magnolia had left, Jane went into her own bedroom and discovered the hat sitting in the middle of her bed. Aunt Magnolia always took that hat with her to cold places. But that time she’d left it behind, for Jane to find. Why?

Why do dreams make us wake with questions that have nothing to do with the dreams?

Under the covers, Jasper crawls around until his head is resting against her elbow. Jane listens to his steady breathing, wondering if maybe Jasper breaths are even better than jellyfish breaths.

*   *   *

The day dawns yellow and green. Jane hasn’t really succeeded in falling back asleep. Finally she slips out of bed, quietly, so as not to disturb Jasper. She goes to the morning room and peers out the window.

A figure approaches the house from the ramble: Colin Mack, dressed all in black. He seems in a hurry, glancing over his shoulder more than once. It’s a little strange; does he think he’s being pursued? Why is he out there? Surely not everyone in the house is a spy? She watches him enter the house through the door that leads to the swimming pool.

When she turns back to face the room, the ruined umbrella on the floor undoes her. Its broken pieces are angled such that she can see purple fabric with the merest glimpse of a silver-gold interior. It creates a shimmer in her mind, the way a bright light will create a memory of itself that lingers inside a person’s eyelids, then fades. A momentary ghost of Aunt Magnolia.

“Aunt Magnolia?” Jane says out loud.

She’d always responded swiftly when Jane had called her, putting aside her own concerns whenever Jane had said her name. Those moments had been real.

Gently, Jane lowers her butt to the floor, her head leaning back against the window glass. The umbrella is a trick, nothing more.

*   *   *

Apparently Jane is allowed to attend breakfast when the time arrives, because no one tries to stop her. The route to the banquet hall passes through the ballroom. She keeps close to the walls and tries to avoid the team of women cleaning the ballroom floor.

No one is at breakfast, and no one seems to be serving, either. A carafe of coffee sits at the far end of the long table next to fruit, cold cereal, milk, sugar, and a pot of congealed oatmeal. She pours herself some cornflakes and eats quickly. Then it’s back to the receiving hall, which is swarming with people. She’s not sure where to go next, really, until she sees Jasper on the second-story bridge. He’s sitting contentedly on his rump, his nose poking through the balusters, and Jane thinks that maybe he has the right idea. She climbs to him. “I guess you’ve witnessed a lot of gala mornings, haven’t you, Jasper?”

The hullabaloo below begins to make more sense. The people resolve themselves into separate currents: cleaners and caterers and musicians. Patrick and Ivy, zooming across the hall or up and down the stairs at random intervals, no doubt doing spy stuff. Do they ever even do any housework at all? Who knows. Mrs. Vanders herself does not zoom. Mrs. Vanders stands like a rock in the center of the receiving hall, the currents swerving gracefully around her. She barely speaks, as if she’s controlling the action with her eyeballs.

Kiran comes along the bridge and stops on the other side of Jasper, yawning. Yet another person who has no idea what’s going on in her own house. Don’t make me have to lie to you, thinks Jane.

“Morning,” Kiran says with half a smile. Her hair is pulled back into a ponytail and Jane thinks maybe she’s not wearing any makeup yet. “Getting the bird’s-eye view?”

“It makes more sense from up here,” Jane says.

“Are you feeling better?”

“Yeah, I’m lots better today.”

Kiran leans her elbows on the railing. “When we were little,” she says, “these were our favorite days of the year. I used to love standing here with Patrick, watching all the people. Ivy was tiny then; she would hold my hand and stare, her eyes big as saucers. Ravi loved getting in everyone’s way.”

“How? What would he do?”

“Mainly he would slow everyone down by insisting on carrying things himself, and having really bad ideas about where everything should go.” Kiran flicks her ponytail over her shoulder, half smiling. “I’m sure he thought he was helping.”

“And he was allowed to do that?”

Kiran shrugs. “Not if Mr. or Mrs. Vanders or Octavian caught him at it, but they were always running around like crazy themselves. Ravi knew how to avoid them. He was a charming little autocrat. It was . . . educational to watch how people responded to him.”

“Educational?”

“A lesson in class,” Kiran says. “Probably also sex, and certainly age and race. What does a white, female string quartet do when a little half-Bengali rich boy whose white daddy owns the house tells them to set their stage up someplace really stupid, like the middle of one of the staircases?”

“I don’t know,” Jane says. “What?”

“It was generally one of three things,” Kiran says. “Ignore him; stall until a Vanders or Octavian came through and shut him up; or do what he said while shooting him hateful looks. In that particular case, they ignored him, and when he started howling, they kept ignoring him, and finally Octavian came in and carried him away on one shoulder, kicking and screaming for Mum. Who of course didn’t come, because she was working.”

“What would Octavian do next?” Jane says. “Spank him?”

“Probably go bowling with him,” Kiran says, “while having a man-to-man talk about respect for other people.”

Jane supposes it’s the sort of approach Aunt Magnolia might have taken, if they’d had a private bowling alley. “That sounds kind of nice.”

“Ravi and I have had a lot of character-building conversations while bowling,” Kiran says with a wistful sort of amusement. Jane finds herself studying Kiran. Her eyes are too bright and she’s blinking. Jane wonders, how much sleep did Kiran get last night? Did Colin share her bed? Has Patrick ever shared Kiran’s bed, lying to her when he has to get up suddenly to take care of some spy emergency?

“What about Ivy and Patrick?” Jane ventures. “Would Octavian give them talkings-to too?”

“Oh, no. They got their lectures from their parents, and from Mr. and Mrs. Vanders.”

“I see,” Jane says. I’ll bet they did. “Would Patrick tell you about the lectures he got?”

“He used to,” Kiran says. “Then he stopped.”

“Stopped?”

At that moment, Ravi sweeps into the hall below with wet hair and an air of injured righteousness. Coming to a halt before Mrs. Vanders, he speaks in a voice that booms into all the high spaces.

“I’ve invited the New York State Police, the FBI, and Interpol to the gala,” Ravi announces. “I’ve given them the run of the house.”

Jane’s stomach drops. This is her fault. “You’ve what?” cries Mrs. Vanders.

“The New York State police, the FBI, and—”

“To the gala? Have you completely lost your gourd?”

“Why shouldn’t I?” says Ravi. “It’s my Brancusi and my Vermeer! It’s my house! It’s my party!”

“It’s your father’s Brancusi and your father’s Vermeer!” says Mrs. Vanders. “It’s your father’s house and your father’s party!”

“My father is a ghost,” Ravi says. “He wouldn’t care if we built a bonfire in the courtyard with his art. If he’s stopped caring, that leaves me to care double.”

“I’m already in touch with the police,” says Mrs. Vanders. “They are already investigating, discreetly.”

“Where? Why haven’t I seen them?”

Patrick has walked onto the bridge and is standing beside Kiran. He rests his forearms casually on the banister, as Kiran is doing. Kiran doesn’t look at him or even acknowledge him, but Jane senses a new tension in her. Their shoulders are touching.

Jane stiffens when Ivy arrives on the other side and stands beside her.

“What a fun party it’ll be for everyone,” says Mrs. Vanders acidly, “with the FBI and Interpol asking all the guests rude questions.”

“Why should it bother anyone who isn’t an art thief?” Ravi demands. “Honestly, Vanny, I could almost think you don’t care.”

“Damn you, Ravi,” says Mrs. Vanders. “You know I care, it’s my job to care. I only wish you’d had the consideration to ask me whether inviting law enforcement to the gala might create undue strain for all the people your family has hired to guarantee that the guests of your gala have fun. That’s our job too, you know. You’ve made things more difficult for me and Mr. V, Patrick, Ivy, Cook, all the staff, because your single-mindedness makes you thoughtless.”

Mrs. Vanders raises her eyes then, to Jane, and pins Jane with the same accusation. Heat suffuses her. Grace Panzavecchia is going to be discovered by someone who shouldn’t discover her, and it’ll be her doing.

“Hey,” Ivy murmurs beside Jane. “Don’t worry. You did nothing I wouldn’t have done.”

“I wasn’t looking for reassurance,” Jane says, suddenly resentful of Ivy, who has no right to be reading her mind.

“It’s our job,” Ivy says. “We’ll deal with it.”

“You do that.”

Kiran has been quiet on Jane’s other side. Jane has no idea if she’s overheard this conversation, or what she’d make of it if she did.

“Good morning, Ivy-bean,” Kiran says across Jane, to Ivy, ignoring Patrick.

“Hi, Kir,” says Ivy, her eyes bleary behind her glasses.

“Want to go bowling?” Kiran asks.

It takes Jane a moment to realize the question is meant for her, not Ivy. “Me?” she says. “Okay, sure.”

Kiran takes Jane’s wrist and leads her away, carefully skirting Patrick. “Come on,” she says. “The bowling alley will be the only quiet room in the house.”

*   *   *

There is, of course, nothing quiet about throwing weighted balls onto a maple floor. But the initial crash, the deep rumble of the rolling ball, and the high-pitched, plasticky explosion of pins are the punctuation to a mostly uninterrupted silence between Jane and Kiran.

Kiran stalks to the foul line, throws a loud strike, and spins back, grim-faced, and Jane registers that she’s been angry this entire time. Kiran was angry when she walked into the campus bookstore back home. Imagine how angry she’d be if she knew the truth, Jane thinks. She’d bowl a perfect game.

Jane slips her fingers into a ball. “The gala’s soon,” she says, hoping it might get Kiran talking.

“Maybe that’ll interrupt the boredom,” Kiran says.

“Do you always come home when there’s a gala?”

“Pretty often,” Kiran says. “I might make three out of four most years. It’s sort of a family tradition. Octavian always gives me a special invitation call about it, or anyway, he used to.”

“He stopped?”

“I doubt Octavian’s raised a phone to his ear since my stepmother left. He’s depressed.”

Jane strides toward the foul line and releases the ball with a satisfying thud. Idly, she watches its progress toward the pins, six of which go flying. “You did tell me Patrick was the one who invited you this time.”

“Right,” says Kiran. “With all those vague noises about wanting to confess something.”

“He still hasn’t confessed anything?”

“Nothing,” Kiran says.

Jane’s ball pops onto the ball return. “What do you think he wanted to say?”

“Who knows?” Kiran says. “It’s typical, really; it’s his specialty. He expects the people who love him to be clairvoyant. Can you imagine loving someone like that? Someone who’s not going to help you understand him?”

“I—yes,” Jane says.

“The problem is,” says Kiran, “I’ve seen a different Patrick. I’ve seen two or three different Patricks, and they’re different from my Patrick.”

Jane’s next ball misses her remaining pins entirely. “Yes, well, people have many sides.”

“My Patrick is secretive,” Kiran says. “Pointlessly secretive.” Then she flings her ball down the lane, barely waiting for the pins to reset. As her ball eviscerates the pins, she says, “They’re not all secretive like that.”

“All men?” Jane says, a bit lost.

“All the Patricks,” Kiran says. “I’ve seen a Patrick married to a Kiran. They’re happy together. That Patrick isn’t secretive. I’ve asked her.”

“I’m confused,” Jane says. “Are you talking about ideas of you and Patrick that you’ve imagined?”

Kiran lets out a short, impatient sigh. “Yeah,” she says. “Something like that.”

“But the real Patrick is secretive.”

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” Kiran says. “It’s ridiculous, the questions he won’t answer. ‘What did you do last evening, Patrick?’ ‘Why are you running around the house shining flashlights into all the closets, Patrick?’ ‘Where were you that time you disappeared for three days, Patrick?’ I mean, I respect his privacy. But it’s not like the questions I ask are nosy. We grew up together. I’m his friend. I don’t even need to know! I trust his reasons are good ones, whatever stupid thing he’s doing. But it’s hard that he doesn’t trust me.”

This, Jane realizes, is part of what hurts so much about Aunt Magnolia. It’s not just that she lied and hid who she really was. It’s that she did it because she never trusted Jane enough to tell her.

*   *   *

Kiran, Jane thinks later, would make a good spy.

The gala is in full swing. Jane is on the second-story bridge, looking down at all the fancy people, Kiran and Jasper at her side again, except that now Kiran is wearing a strapless crimson gown that probably cost a million dollars. A diamond hangs from a fine gold chain and sits nestled in the hollow of her throat; her ears drip with diamonds. Jane has never seen so many diamonds.

Jane is wearing a gray cashmere sweater dress with long sleeves, unlike anything she’s ever worn before in her life. She borrowed it from Kiran. She’d planned to wear a sleeveless gold top over purple jeans to look like a royal gramma, a reef fish found in the Atlantic tropics, and carry the Aunt Magnolia Coat umbrella. She’d planned to keep her tattoo fully visible so people would ask about it. But if Aunt Magnolia pretended to be someone else, well then, she can too.

She’s still wearing her big black boots, though. They’re what she wears when she’s mad.

The scene below is like something out of a movie. Women in flowing gowns of every color and men in black mill about, holding drinks in crystal glasses, smiling and laughing, shifting shoulders and backs now and then to let someone new into their group or squeeze someone out. Lucy St. George is down there, wearing an understated chocolate-colored gown and talking to Phoebe Okada, who’s dazzling, actually, in turquoise. It’s funny that Lucy goes undercover sometimes as a private investigator, but has no idea about Espions Sans Frontières.

Near them, Ravi, who always looks good in black, has his arm thrown around Colin’s shoulder with a sort of affectionate possessiveness and is talking and laughing with a man and a woman Jane doesn’t recognize. Among these guests are two New York State Police officers, two FBI special agents, and one Interpol officer. They’re formally dressed, like everyone else, except, according to Kiran, who spots them instantly, they’re not dressed like everyone else.

“Like me?” Jane asks.

Kiran takes a sip of her Pimm’s and glances at Jane with an expression that startles Jane, because of the fondness it contains. “You do look like the rest of us, sweetie, except for those boots,” she says. “It’s strange to see you this way. These cops are trying to fit in, but their shoes are cheap and their clothes lack a certain tailored elegance.”

Kiran points out the state police officers, the FBI special agents, and the man from Interpol. It’s the FBI special agents, in fact, that Ravi’s flirting with.

A woman Jane doesn’t recognize comes through the front door with Ivy, who, Jane now understands, is the reason black gowns were invented. Her hair is wrapped around her head in a series of complicated twists and braids that must’ve taken someone ages, and her glasses are the perfect touch. The woman beside her is maybe fiftyish, small and plain, in a simple gray dress, carrying a dripping black umbrella. Ivy leads the woman on a winding route through the crowd, gently taking her hand or her arm, positioning her to left or right.

Jane imagines herself in the woman’s place.

“I wonder who that is with Ivy,” says Kiran. “I can’t tell anything from her clothing. But it’s interesting, isn’t it, that Ivy’s shielding her from the cops?”

“What?” Jane says in instant alarm, less because it’s probably true and more because Jane doesn’t want Kiran noticing Ivy shielding spy-type people from cops.

“She’s doing kind of an amazing job of it,” Kiran says.

“What?” Jane says. “She’s not!”

“Watch her,” Kiran says.

And so Jane watches as Ivy and her charge pass near Colin, Ravi, and the special agents. Not only does Ivy put herself between her companion and them, but she reaches a hand to Colin’s arm and gently shifts Colin, hence Ravi as well, to better block the agents’ view of the woman she’s leading. Colin glances around in absentminded annoyance, but doesn’t seem to gather what’s happened or who’s touched him. Ivy and the woman are already beyond his sight.

Next, Ivy and the woman pass through the doorway that leads into the ballroom. Then, a moment later, the Interpol officer passes primly through the same doorway. Before Jane even realizes what she’s doing, she herself is moving across the bridge, propelled by worry for Ivy.

Not missing a beat, Kiran moves with her. “Going somewhere?” she says, too suspicious, too interested.

“Just for a walk,” Jane says, beginning to move down the stairs.

“I’ll join you,” Kiran says, which is stating the obvious, since she’s practically glued to Jane’s side.

“It’s not necessary.”

“Isn’t it?” Kiran says in a menacing voice, then plunks her Pimm’s down onto the tray of a startled serving man who tries to give her a tiny meat pie. “Beautiful party,” she tells him with a serene smile, not pausing as she and Jane fly along. The dog thuds from step to step behind them, trying to keep up.

From the ballroom, Jane and Kiran pass into the banquet hall, where guests congregate around mountains of food Jane barely notices, because she’s looking for the slightly balding head of the Interpol officer. Kiran grabs Jane’s wrist and pulls her into the kitchen, and there he is, striding past the stoves and the long wooden table. An uproar of catering people are preparing tiny English food. None of the regular house staff is present.

“Kiran?” says Jane. “What are we doing?”

The officer disappears into the kitchen’s deepest depths, where the dumbwaiter, the door to the back stairs, and the pantry are. Kiran follows him around the refrigerator and freezer, still gripping Jane’s wrist, not speaking, her heels clapping across the tile floor like gunshots. Jane feels like she’s on a Nantucket sleigh ride.

As they reach him, the Interpol officer opens the door to the dumbwaiter carriage and sticks his head in.

“That seems dangerous,” Kiran says to him cheerfully, letting Jane go. “We don’t want to be responsible for an injury to an Interpol officer. What if someone sent something down while your head was in there?”

“Up, rather,” the officer says, extracting his head from the dumbwaiter doorway, shutting the door, and peering at Kiran and Jane suspiciously. “I can see the mechanism below. What’s down there? I heard the voice of a man speaking what may have been Bengali.”

“Yes, I heard it too,” Kiran says. “That’s one of the servants, Patrick. Today’s Saturday. Saturdays are Patrick’s Bengali days.”

“Bengali days?” says the officer dubiously. He’s a pale man with puckered lips, French-sounding, and speaks English with a deliberate distinctness, as if he’s determined to convey how much he hates speaking it.

“To help him learn,” Kiran says. “Patrick has a gift for languages. On Wednesdays he speaks only German. Would you like to meet him?” she says brightly, taking hold of the handle on the back door. “We’re headed down to help him carry up some English sparkling wine.”

“English wine,” says the man, looking mildly offended.

“There’s a secret trapdoor in the wine cellar floor that leads to a genuine oubliette,” Kiran adds. “You might find that interesting, being French.”

“I’m Belgian,” says the man stiffly. “And I can think of nothing more silly than an American oubliette in a building barely one hundred years old. This house is a theme park.”

“You don’t want to see the oubliette, then?” says Kiran. “It’s super creepy.”

With one last, affronted glance at Jane’s boots, the Interpol officer releases a breath of air and stalks from the kitchen.

“Good riddance,” Kiran says once he’s gone.

“Kiran?” says Jane. “Why did you chase away the Interpol man?”

“This door is locked,” Kiran says, tugging at the back door. “Why would it be locked?”

“Does Patrick really speak Bengali and German?”

“He knows some bedroom Bengali,” Kiran says, distracted. The dumbwaiter is humming and squawking.

Kiran yanks its door open.

A man sits cross-legged inside, brown-skinned, with thick black hair, dressed in a fine black suit and gaping at Jane and Kiran in sheer amazement as he glides upward in the carriage.

Kiran speaks a few words to him calmly in a language Jane doesn’t understand. The dumbwaiter continues its smooth upward climb and the man disappears from sight.

“Did you know that guy?” Jane squeaks.

“Never seen him before in my life,” Kiran says, closing the dumbwaiter door, “but that was the guy the Interpol officer thought he heard speaking Bengali in the wine cellars. Because he’s an interfering Belgian ignoramus who can’t tell Bengali from Arabic even though they’re nothing alike.”

“You speak Arabic?”

“It was one of my majors.”

“What did you say to him?”

“‘Have no fear,’” Kiran says. “‘Your cover isn’t blown.’”

Jane is beginning to feel a little hysterical. “What’s that supposed to mean? Kiran, why would you say that to him if you don’t even know him?”

Kiran shrugs. “It seemed the safest thing to say. I mean, think about it. If he’s a bad guy, we don’t want him to think we’re against him, right? And if he’s a good guy, then of course we’re not going to blow his cover.”

“Kiran,” Jane says, enunciating each syllable. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Listen,” Kiran says, “I don’t have the foggiest idea what’s going on in this house tonight, but I think you’re pretending to be more ignorant about it than you actually are and I don’t appreciate being lied to.”

The dumbwaiter is making its noises again, and before Jane can contrive to stop her, Kiran swings the door open. The carriage, descending from above this time, passes by containing Patrick, who holds on one arm a toddler with curly dark hair, solemn dark eyes, and southern Italian looks. It’s Grace’s little brother Christopher Panzavecchia. Jane recognizes him from the news reports.

“Hi!” Christopher cries cheerfully. Patrick, meanwhile, gapes at Kiran in dismay. In his other hand, he holds a gun.

“Hi,” Jane says to Christopher, because, wide-eyed and delighted, he seems to be waiting for it.

“I love you,” Patrick says to Kiran, almost as if it’s a question, as the carriage slowly glides past.

“Go to hell, Patrick,” Kiran says, practically spitting.

Once he’s gone, she slams the dumbwaiter door, holds on to the handle, and seethes. The groans of the mechanism fade away, then go silent.

“Goddamn him,” Kiran says. “Goddamn him to hell. He loves me? He’s in my dumbwaiter with a gun and a Panzavecchia baby who’s wanted by the Sicilian Mafia and the New York State Police! Goddamn you, Patrick!”

“Oh, god,” Jane says, because this is her fault. She’s the one who sprang off to follow the Interpol man while Kiran was growing increasingly suspicious beside her. She’s the reason Kiran’s seen what she’s just seen. “Oh, god.”

“Oh, brace up,” Kiran says, clapping Jane on the shoulder.

“Brace up?” Jane cries, incredulous.

“I mean, really, it’s funny,” Kiran says. “Isn’t it funny? He invited me home. He wanted to confess something! Ha! Ha!” Kiran begins to gasp, then clasps her stomach and roars with laughter, until she’s wiping tears from her face with one pinky, trying not to disturb her mascara. “Oh, lordy,” she says, hiccupping. “At least now we know the Arabic man is a good guy.”

“We do?”

“Well, Patrick is a good guy,” Kiran says. “It follows that anyone else riding in the dumbwaiter is a good guy too.”

“It does?” Jane cries in utter confusion.

“I mean, I’m furious,” Kiran says, drawing herself up straight, dropping all traces of amusement. The dumbwaiter is humming and squeaking again. “I never want to see his face again. The things I’ve told Patrick, trusting him. And I was right; I always knew there was something off about him. But he’ll have a good reason to be in the dumbwaiter with that child and a gun.”

“I—think he actually does,” Jane says weakly.

The dumbwaiter stops rumbling. Kiran swings the door open. A folded piece of paper is propped inside the carriage with a message written on it. “KIRAN,” it says. “GET IN.”

“Mrs. Vanders’s handwriting,” Kiran says, then begins to climb into the dumbwaiter carriage. “This feels like something out of Alice in Wonderland. Where do you suppose this is going?”

“I don’t know,” Jane says. “The west attics? The servants’ wing? The oubliette?”

“There’s no oubliette,” Kiran says. “I made that up to get rid of the snotty Interpol man.”

“You’re awfully good at this,” Jane says a bit wildly.

“Am I?” Kiran says, sitting there calmly in her crimson gown, clusters of diamonds sparkling in her ears and at her throat, her arms wrapped around her legs. “I guess it’s the first time I’ve had fun since I stepped back onto this goddamned island.”

Someone somewhere along the track of the dumbwaiter pounds a wrench—maybe it’s a gun—against metal, twice. Kiran checks that her fingers and toes are completely inside the carriage, then knocks twice on one of the walls, impassively, as if everyone knows that’s what a person is meant to do in this situation. The carriage begins to rise.

“Meet me above,” she says, “if you like. Unless you’ve got some secret mission you’re on too.” Then she’s gone.

Jane is left in the kitchen, staring at the moving cables in the empty track of the dumbwaiter carriage, trying to fit square pegs into round holes. Is this why Aunt Magnolia became a spy? Because it was fun? How can Kiran see what she’s just seen, and laugh, and say it’s fun? Oh. Jane clutches her temples, wishing for a way to extract herself from all of this.

Then Jasper leans heavily against her legs.

“Well, Jasper,” she says. “I guess, whatever else happened, we succeeded in getting that Interpol man off Ivy’s tail. What do you say? Should we return to the party and see if we can undo any more of my damage?”

Back in the ballroom, she finds the Arabic-speaking man from the dumbwaiter drinking Pimm’s and being charming with other party guests. She supposes he must be a good guy if Mrs. Vanders is letting him ride in the dumbwaiter, but she gives him a wide berth anyway. Passing into the receiving hall with Jasper, she spots a familiar form: Ji-hoon, the South Korean “cleaner,” who’s smoothed his hair handsomely back and donned dark-rimmed glasses and black formalwear. Jane almost doesn’t recognize him, he’s so polished and slick. He’s ascending the east staircase calmly, unhurriedly. He doesn’t see her.

Abruptly, Jane turns for the west stairs and starts up them, moving as fast as she can without drawing undue attention. Why do I keep doing this? she asks herself, exasperated. Why do I keep involving myself! Jasper falls behind. Guests drift past now and then as she climbs, seeming to come from all wings of the house. Jane gathers that there must be a tradition, at these parties, of wandering the upper floors to look at the art. No wonder people can sneak all over the place without arousing suspicion.

She’s huffing and puffing by the time she reaches the third floor. Stopping outside the door to the servants’ wing, she catches her breath, no idea what to do next. Assuming this is even Ji-hoon’s destination, she’s beaten him, but how will she stop him when he arrives? Start reciting poetry and hope he joins in? Ivy has warned her that he’s dangerous, he’s armed. Where is Jasper?

Then the door to the servants’ wing swings open and Phoebe Okada steps out, her turquoise dress delightfully swishing, her eye makeup smoky and flawless.

“I’d love to know what you think you’re doing,” she says.

“Phoebe,” Jane says. “Ji-hoon is coming.”

Casually, Phoebe reaches under her skirt and extracts a gun. “Don’t give yourself an aneurysm,” she says. “We’re tracking him. You need to leave. This is no place for kids. You should go to your rooms and stay there.”

The door opens again and Ivy sticks her head out. She grabs Jane’s arm and Jane says, “Wait,” irrationally, waiting for the dog, who then appears on cue, shouldering his way toward them, gasping for breath. Jane is impressed. He must have made a heroic effort on that last stretch of stairs.

“Quick,” says Ivy, hustling Jane and Jasper into the servants’ wing.

“Where are we going?” Jane asks.

“Out of the way.”

It’s a humiliating answer, coming from Ivy. I’m like Ravi, she thinks, when he was a child, “helping” the gala staff.

“Is Mrs. Vanders mad about Kiran?” she asks.

Ivy shoots Jane a cautious look, as if trying to gauge whether she’s friend or foe at the moment. “Mrs. Vanders has been going back and forth about telling Kiran the truth for some time now,” she says. “She thinks Kiran would be really good at our work.”

“She would,” Jane says fervently.

“Personally, I’m relieved she finally knows,” says Ivy. “It’s been hell being around my brother.”

For a moment, a wave of dizziness fuzzes Jane’s brain. Ivy is shepherding her along quickly and it occurs to her that she’s been holding her breath. “Wait,” she says. “Can I have a second?”

“Yes,” Ivy says with immediate concern. “Are you okay?”

It’s impossible to breathe deeply and deliberately without thinking about a jellyfish. Jane tries to think of a dumbwaiter instead, her own internal dumbwaiter, air moving up, air moving down. Her body is a microcosm of this house. This corridor is a path toward . . . toward something. Toward the next step; toward however Jane will get through this night.

“Why do I trust you?” Jane asks.

“I don’t know,” Ivy says. “I trust you too. And I’ve been trying to imagine finding out that my aunt, who was basically my mom, was an operative. You’ve been so cool about it. I’d be furious.”

“You have no idea.”

Ivy hesitates again. “I think,” she says cautiously, “you should let Mrs. Vanders tell you whatever she knows. All the details, whatever they are. It might not help right away. But maybe it’ll help eventually.”

Jane gives up on her dumbwaiter metaphor. As a tear slides down her face, Ivy takes her hand.

Aunt Magnolia? Jane thinks, then remembers, with a sad tug, that she’s no longer speaking to Aunt Magnolia.

“Come up to the attics,” Ivy says. “You’ll be safe up there.”

*   *   *

In the west attics, Jane finds Kiran and Mrs. Vanders standing on opposite sides of a long table, arguing.

“You understand this was over a hundred years ago?” Mrs. Vanders is saying in a voice of exasperation.

“What does that matter?”

“The first housekeeper of Tu Reviens had a son,” Mrs. Vanders says. “Her son had gotten mixed up in the Spanish-American War some years before and became an American operative. He’d also fallen in love with a Cuban agent.”

“How romantic,” says Kiran caustically.

“It ended with both of them dead.”

“Of course it did,” says Kiran, “or it wouldn’t be so romantic.”

“They were Mr. Vanders’s grandparents,” says Mrs. Vanders. “Afterward, Espions Sans Frontières approached his great-grandmother, the housekeeper, about secretly using her employer’s house. Given that such an organization might have saved her son, can you really blame her for saying yes?”

“Yes to lying to my great-great-grandfather, who trusted her?” Kiran says. “Yes to endangering everyone in this house, which wasn’t hers, for generation upon generation? For making the family liable?!”

Another pitched battle that’s been taking place behind Kiran finally erupts into something no one can ignore. It’s a quarrel between Patrick and Grace Panzavecchia, who’s refusing to get into the dumbwaiter. “Why don’t you make me?” the little girl yells. “Why don’t you stab me with methohexital, again? I hate you!”

“Yeah,” responds Patrick reasonably, “I know you do, Grace, but Christopher’s down there all alone with Cook.”

“Because you brought him down there!”

“Yes. I know it’s unfair,” says Patrick. “Now, do you want to be awake to look after your little brother, or do you want to be asleep?”

“I hate you!” Grace yells. “You ruined my life! You left Edward Jenner behind!”

Ivy pulls out a chair at the table, then nudges Jane toward it. Numbly, Jane sits, Jasper settling in around her feet. Then Ivy moves to the end of the table and begins wrapping something with long sheets of bubble wrap. Vaguely, Jane recognizes it as the Brancusi sculpture, which is complete again, a flat, oblong piece of marble—the missing fish—attached to the pedestal. Ivy takes great care, as if she’s winding sticking plaster around a broken bone. The fish is pale and smooth, bonelike. It soothes Jane to watch.

“It’s your decision, Grace,” says Patrick calmly. “Awake or asleep?”

“It’s not my decision!” Grace says. “I didn’t decide to go away from home! I didn’t decide to leave Edward Jenner behind!”

“It’s true, she didn’t,” says Ivy quietly. “The least we could’ve done was collect Edward Jenner.”

“Ivy,” says Mrs. Vanders sharply, “that’s enough.”

“Okay,” says Kiran, “I give up. Isn’t Edward Jenner the guy who developed the smallpox vaccine? Like, two hundred years ago?”

“Edward Jenner—” Patrick begins.

“I was not talking to you,” says Kiran behind bared teeth, not looking at Patrick.

“It’s the dog,” Jane realizes.

Mrs. Vanders clears her throat. “Yes,” she says, “that’s correct. When Ivy, Patrick, and Cook collected the children from school and the park, the dog was at home. They had to leave him behind.”

“You left him alone in the house,” Grace says. “Now some mean people probably have him. He’s living with strangers. He’s a German shepherd! That means he’s genetically predisposed to degenerative myelopathy! Who’s going to take care of him?” Grace’s eyes are swollen and crying, her fists are held tight, and her small body is taut with the fury of despair. In Grace’s eyes, Jane sees something she recognizes. Grace Panzavecchia has been betrayed.

“Why is this necessary?” Jane hears herself asking, with real indignation. “She’s eight years old!”

With a sigh, Mrs. Vanders pulls a chair out and, heavily, sits down. “Because she’s in danger and we intend to help her.”

“But not my dog!” says Grace. “You don’t intend to help my dog! I hate my parents! They drugged me with a diuretic so I’d have to go to the bathroom so you could grab me! What kind of parents drug their kid? You’re all kid-snatchers!”

“Christopher is downstairs alone,” Patrick reminds her.

“I hate you!”

Jasper has stirred from Jane’s feet. He steps out from under the table tentatively. He walks a few steps toward Grace and stands before her.

“That’s not my dog!” says Grace. “That’s the stupidest dog I’ve ever seen! What’s wrong with his legs!” Then she drops down onto the floor and holds out her arms and Jasper climbs into her lap and she starts yelling “Ow! Ow!” because he’s heavy, and then she wraps her arms around him, presses her face into his neck, and starts howling. Jane is proud of Jasper. Possibly he’s the most sensible adult in the attics.

“I am never,” Ivy mutters from her end of the table, “ever, involving myself in anything like this again.” She’s now turned her attention to a painting. It’s the picture of the man in the feathered hat, the Rembrandt Jane saw on her first day in this house, sitting on a table inside Mrs. Vanders’s glass restoration room. It’s large and seems heavy. Ivy labors to move it around.

Grace throws her head back from Jasper and yells, “Someday I’m going to kill you all!”

“This is the last time I’m asking, Grace,” says Patrick. “Awake in the dumbwaiter or asleep in the dumbwaiter?” Patrick remains calm; he might be giving her the choice of broccoli or peas for dinner.

“She’s not going to keep quiet,” says Ivy. “Do you want a screaming dumbwaiter to slide past the gala guests who are looking at the second-story art?”

“No,” says Patrick, “which is why, unless you’re silent all the way down, Grace, Cook is going to put you to sleep the moment you reach the cellars, and then Christopher will see you that way.”

Grace has grown eerily calm. “Someday I’m going to kill you all,” she says, then adds, specially for Patrick, “And I’m going to kill you first.”

“Someday,” Patrick says with a suppressed sigh, “you’re going to look back on this experience and be amazed by how much latitude we allowed you, given the circumstances.”

Ivy makes a tiny snorting noise that brings Mrs. Vanders swinging sideways to direct at her the full force of an outraged expression.

“Ivy,” says Mrs. Vanders, “we’re aware of your dissatisfaction and we’re used to your childish tantrums. But HQ will not extend you the same latitude. If you expect fair treatment from them during your exit interview, you’re going to have to curb your self-righteousness and your sarcasm long before you get to Geneva.”

Ivy doesn’t respond to this, only looks down at the Rembrandt as if she’d like to pick it up and smash it on the floor. Instead, she sighs, runs one gentle finger along its top ridge, then eases a soft sack over its form. She follows this with the most enormous sealable plastic bag Jane has ever seen.

“I want my brother,” says Grace.

“Have you decided, then?” asks Patrick.

There’s a pause. “I’ll go if I can take the dog with me in the dumbwaiter,” says Grace.

“Quietly?” says Patrick.

“I’ll be quiet,” says Grace. “I can’t help it if the dog starts barking.”

“What are you going to do, pinch him?” says Patrick.

“You would think that,” says Grace, in a voice of the purest disgust. “You would think I’d pinch the dog, probably because you pinch dogs every day for fun.”

“All right,” says Patrick, with a touch of weariness, gesturing toward the dumbwaiter. “Get in.”

“Put the dog in first,” says Grace.

“You think I’m going to trick you and send you down without the dog?”

“Yes.”

Patrick chuckles once, briefly, then cuts himself off. He crouches down to Jasper. Once Jasper is standing cheerfully in the dumbwaiter carriage, looking like some sort of strange wall ornament, Grace climbs in around him. She grabs on to him and shoots Patrick one last expression of loathing.

“Good luck, Grace,” Patrick says, then shuts the dumbwaiter door. He hauls at the cables in the narrow side cabinet for some time, then slows his pulling and stops. Leaning back against the dumbwaiter door, he closes his eyes and releases an enormous sigh.

“I love that kid,” he says.

“Do you?” says Kiran, not looking at him. “That explains why you’re so awful to her.”

An amused bitterness twists Patrick’s mouth. “And you’ve always been so wonderful to me,” he says. “How’s your fancy boyfriend?”

“Don’t you even pretend that this conversation is that conversation,” Kiran says. “At least you know all my secrets.”

“Kiran,” says Mrs. Vanders. “Patrick has wanted to tell you his secrets for some time. Mr. Vanders and I absolutely forbade it, because they aren’t just his secrets, they’re ours, and many other people’s too.”

“My mother forbade me to tell anyone her secrets too,” Kiran says hotly. “Guess who I told anyway? Patrick.”

“We’re not going to discuss your mother’s secrets,” says Mrs. Vanders.

“You know why?” says Kiran. “Because I trusted him. Because I wanted him to know me and all the places I’ve been!”

Mrs. Vanders stands so quickly that her chair shudders back across the floor. “I forbid any talk of your mother and her magic in this room,” she says in a voice that reaches into the roots of Jane’s teeth. “We’re trying to do good, simple, natural work here!”

“Oh my god,” says Kiran, suddenly sounding exhausted. Pulling out a chair, she slumps into it, rubbing her face. “Listen to yourself, Vanny. My mother isn’t a witch, she’s a scientist.”

Jane doesn’t understand this turn in the conversation, but she finds she doesn’t much care. She’s watching Ivy lower the Brancusi, then the Rembrandt, into crates.

Mrs. Vanders sits down again, clasps her hands together, and directs her steely expression at Kiran. “I’ll explain everything, as long as you swear there’ll be no more talk of your mother.”

“All right!” says Kiran, flapping an impatient hand. “I swear! Jeez!”

“Very well,” says Mrs. Vanders. “Victoria and Giuseppe Panzavecchia are microbiologists.”

“I know that,” says Kiran. “Apparently they’re also secret agents.”

“The Panzavecchias are not agents,” Mrs. Vanders says. “They’re contractors. They’ve been working under the auspices of a special CIA research and development grant for the purposes of discovering whether it’s possible to develop an immediately contagious strain of smallpox, the indicative symptoms of which manifest late in the course of infection.”

Kiran freezes, then speaks in a tone of pure disgust. “You mean a smallpox that wouldn’t be recognized as smallpox until it had already spread far and wide.”

“Yes,” says Mrs. Vanders, “precisely. They’ve been contracted to experiment with forms of smallpox that could serve as effective biological weapons.”

“This is your good, simple, natural work? Genetically modified smallpox?”

“In case you’re wondering why I want out,” Ivy mutters from her end of the table, where she’s now pouring an avalanche of packing peanuts into the crate containing the Brancusi. They make a tinkling sound, like ice. Patrick walks over to her and gathers up the ones that hit the floor, plowing them with his boots.

“We don’t work with biological weapons ourselves,” says Mrs. Vanders. “And our understanding is that the CIA runs these experiments not with the intention of using the weapons themselves, but rather to be better prepared should an enemy to the United States develop the same strain and attack with it.”

“Oh, right, I’ve never heard that one before!” Kiran practically yells.

“Think what you will. Their intentions don’t matter to Espions Sans Frontières. We’re nonpartisan.”

“Another word for complicit.”

“A couple of weeks back,” Mrs. Vanders continues, ignoring this, “Giuseppe and Victoria had a breakthrough. They discovered something unexpected, I’ve no idea how. But the fruit of their discovery was pretty much what they’d been directed to develop, a strain of smallpox that’s highly contagious long before the carrier can begin to suspect it’s smallpox. And then one odd thing and one terrible thing happened. The odd thing is that when they informed their research director at the CIA of their success, that man became afflicted suddenly with a different experimental strain of smallpox, an opposite sort of strain in which the indicative symptoms manifest very quickly. A week or so later, he died, and ‘A Smallpox Case in New York’ became headline news.”

“That’s the odd thing?” Jane says numbly. “That’s the odd thing? What’s the terrible thing?”

“No, wait,” says Kiran. “I heard about the smallpox guy, of course, but not that it was some sort of experimental strain of smallpox. They said he was a suicidal guy who used to work for the World Health Organization and had broken into the laboratories of the CDC in Atlanta. Which we’ve all been assured,” Kiran says, her voice growing harder, “is one of only two places in the world where the smallpox virus is kept, the other being a closely monitored lab in Russia. Smallpox,” she says in a voice now verging on shrill, “is no longer supposed to be a danger anywhere in the world.”

“Have your little hissy fit, Kiran,” says Mrs. Vanders, “then return yourself to reason. Your brother wears rose-colored glasses, but you’ve never been naïve.”

“How did that guy get smallpox?” Kiran demands.

“We don’t know,” says Mrs. Vanders. “He certainly never broke into any lab in Atlanta. The Panzavecchias believe he was infected with a strain they kept in their lab in New York, which means that someone got access to a part of that lab no one but they and a few particular people with CIA connections should have had access to. Which suggests a traitor.”

“Okay,” says Kiran. “Why did the guy get smallpox?”

“We don’t know that either,” says Mrs. Vanders. “But we think it’s likely he was infected as a message to the United States from some other state.”

“What’s the message?” Kiran asks.

“‘We know what you’re doing,’” says Mrs. Vanders. “‘We can get in anywhere. We’re one step ahead of you, you can’t protect yourself, and by the way, thanks for inventing all this nifty smallpox.’”

“Okay, that’s terrifying,” says Kiran. “But why infect the guy with some random strain? Why not the new, successful strain?”

“Two reasons,” says Mrs. Vanders. “One, the strain they chose was one unlikely to create an epidemic. It’s a message, not an act of war, you understand? The man suspected almost immediately what disease he had. He was able to quarantine himself. He called the hospital, sent them pictures of his mouth and skin, and told them his made-up CDC story, so that only vaccinated health workers would be sent to care for him. Two, the Panzavecchias’ new strain wasn’t available, because once they realized what they had, they got scared. They brought it, and all their notes about it, home, where they could control who had access to it. Which leads us to the terrible thing.”

“Home!” cries Kiran. “Oh god. Oh god! Please tell me Baby Leo doesn’t have smallpox!”

“Of course he doesn’t have smallpox,” says Mrs. Vanders. “What do you think they did, left vials of it in his crib? Baby Leo has chicken pox.”

“How do you know?”

“Because one of the cousins who attended Grace’s eighth birthday party two weeks ago had chicken pox. Don’t worry about Baby Leo. Espions Sans Frontières has engaged a doctor to care for him personally.”

“Philip Okada,” Jane says flatly.

“Philip Okada?” Kiran says. “Philip Okada is a spy?”

“He’s a doctor,” says Mrs. Vanders, “and a British asset who’s helping us out. Not a spy. You need to stop throwing these words around. In our circles, spy is a rather derogatory term.”

“Well, forgive me for the gap in my education. You’re the one who could’ve taught me the vocabulary. What’s the terrible thing that happened?”

“It relates to Grace,” says Mrs. Vanders.

“Grace?” says Kiran. “Obviously she doesn’t have smallpox or she wouldn’t be in this house.”

“Will you get it out of your head that someone has smallpox?” says Mrs. Vanders.

“You’ve made it clear that anyone could!” Kiran fires back. “We all could tomorrow!”

“Oh, everything could happen tomorrow!” says Mrs. Vanders. “If you can’t cope with all the awful things that are always on the verge of happening, then this isn’t the work for you!”

“Whoever said it was?” says Kiran. “Fucking hell, Vanny!”

Mrs. Vanders glares at Kiran with her hallmark enigmatic aggression. Kiran glares back. Jane has no idea where everyone’s getting all this energy.

“Grace doesn’t have smallpox,” says Mrs. Vanders. “Her problem is that she’s a natural-born snoop with an extraordinary affinity for mnemonic devices.”

“Are you going to tell me that Grace found the notes on the weaponized smallpox and now she could make up a batch from memory?”

Mrs. Vanders looks practically pleased. “Very good, Kiran,” she says. “Though she couldn’t, in fact, create it herself. The notes are ciphered and contain formulas and instructions she couldn’t understand. But it’s possible she could tell key parts to someone, and maybe that person could figure out how to make sense of it.”

“And somehow, people know she got into the notes,” Kiran says, “and now they want the information in Grace’s head.”

“Yes. She might not understand the information she’s memorized, but she’s plenty smart enough to sense when her parents are worried and lying to her, which makes her angry, so she snoops and disobeys as a kind of leverage. When her parents forbade her to talk about it, she wouldn’t stop screaming about it, even when there were ominous-looking strangers in her house. And by this point, the research director was infected and Victoria and Giuseppe were terrified. They began withholding the details of their discovery from everyone, even the CIA people who began showing up at their front door. They destroyed their digital notes, with Ivy’s help. They burned their paper notes and destroyed the living strain. They told the CIA they had no intention of sharing the details of the discovery with anyone, ever, because it was no longer possible to know whom to trust.”

“And now they’re blacklisted by the CIA?” says Kiran. “Considered non-compliant? Rogue assets?”

Mrs. Vanders is pleased again. Jane is kind of starting to hate her. Where is the pleasure in all of this awfulness? “Essentially,” says Mrs. Vanders, “yes. The CIA is furious. They’ve decided to force Victoria and Giuseppe to hand over their research, and treat them as threats if they don’t comply. And in the meantime, other states have also taken an interest.”

“In Victoria and Giuseppe, and in Grace,” Kiran says.

“At this point,” says Mrs. Vanders, “it’s impossible to know how many people or states they need to be hidden from. Only that they need to be hidden, and that Grace, being a child, is in particular danger.”

“I think the lesson here is that when someone offers you a job creating new and exciting strains of smallpox, say no,” says Kiran.

“Very funny,” says Mrs. Vanders.

“Was I joking?” says Kiran. “Why’d they try to rob a bank?”

“So we could plant the Mafia story,” says Mrs. Vanders. “If you take someone with an Italian name, have them break the law, then make them disappear, then add the words Sicilian Mafia, everyone loves to talk about it, but no one digs very deep into where they went or why. It’s not fair to Italians, but it’s effective.”

“That’s ridiculous. The police must dig deeper than that.”

“We have a couple friends in the police,” says Mrs. Vanders, “and a couple friends in the press. Most importantly, we have a couple friends in the Sicilian Mafia.”

“That’s so nice,” Kiran says. “How I wish Ravi could hear all this. He’d get such a warm, fuzzy feeling about his Vanny.”

“Ravi couldn’t handle this,” Mrs. Vanders says, “as I think you know.”

“He really has no idea?” says Kiran. “Nor does Octavian? Truly nothing?”

“Not Octavian, not Ravi, not your mother,” says Mrs. Vanders. “You’re the only Thrash who’s ever had the slightest inkling, Kiran. This is all yours.”

“That’s an interesting choice of words.”

“Have you ever had anything that’s all yours, Kiran?”

Kiran considers Mrs. Vanders. Then she flicks her eyes nastily to Patrick. He makes his mouth hard and insolent.

“Good thing I caught Patrick in the act,” Kiran says.

“That forced our hand,” says Mrs. Vanders, “but we monitor the dumbwaiter with cameras. We know if the path is clear. I wouldn’t have let it happen if I hadn’t been willing to risk the consequences. Have you worked out why?”

Another of those silences sits in the space between Kiran and Mrs. Vanders. Finally, Kiran crosses her arms. “What else do you do?”

“A lot of things,” says Mrs. Vanders crisply. “This house is a neutral meeting place, during galas usually, for opposing sides. We give representation referrals to agents and operatives under prosecution. Also, Mr. Vanders is a psychologist. The man you saw in the dumbwaiter had just completed a session.”

“Spy therapy?” says Kiran incredulously.

“Stop saying ‘spy,’” says Mrs. Vanders. “Surely you can see that there might be a need. Our clients have very high-pressure jobs.”

“Since when does Mr. Vanders speak Arabic?”

“He speaks Arabic, Farsi, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Mandarin, and Korean,” says Mrs. Vanders.

“I don’t believe you,” says Kiran.

“Why shouldn’t he?” says Mrs. Vanders with an affronted air. “He’s a very popular therapist.”

Kiran begins to giggle.

“I’m rather offended that you find that funny,” says Mrs. Vanders.

Now Kiran is shrieking with laughter. Tears are streaming down her face. “I don’t,” she says. “I can totally see it. He’s always talking psychobabble and looking at me like he’s diagnosed me with something. It’s just—” She pauses for another gale of laughter. “It’s funny!” she cries. “I’m dying here! Mr. Vanders is a secret spy therapist! Oh, lordy, maybe I’m having a shock reaction.” Taking a deep breath, Kiran wipes her face. “So,” she says, “are you going to explain why Ivy has been packing up the house Rembrandt and the famous missing Brancusi?”

Mrs. Vanders sighs. “You’re not going to like this part.”

“And the rest has been so delightful.”

“It’s about leverage, power, and payment for services rendered,” says Mrs. Vanders.

Kiran’s eyebrows rise to her hairline. Jane knows this part. She doesn’t need to listen. Over at Ivy’s end of the table, Patrick is now engaged in the alarming activity of helping Ivy strap a gun holster over her black dress. Then he helps her into a long black coat. Where is Ivy going?

“You steal the family art!” Kiran says. “Over and over again! Oh, if Ravi only knew!”

“We borrow the family art,” says Mrs. Vanders, but she’s doesn’t sound as if she expects anyone to believe her.

“You’ve lied about your degrees!” Kiran says. “About the cleaning you do and the restoration! I know you told Ravi you needed that Rembrandt so you could clean it. He told me so!”

“I haven’t lied!” Mrs. Vanders says. “I do care about the art, deeply! I do clean it, I do study it. I have never failed to recover a piece! I take its well-being and its authenticity very seriously and I’m committed to cultural restitution!”

“Oh, spare me,” says Kiran. “If you care so much, why did you break the Brancusi in half?”

“Grace did that,” says Patrick proudly.

“Yes,” says Mrs. Vanders. “That child has fought us at every turn. We’ve been moving the family piecemeal, you see, and with the help of different parties. First Victoria, then Giuseppe, then Leo the other night with his doctor. Grace, being a natural snoop, figured out that we needed the Brancusi in order to pay for her transportation. And she’s smart as a whip, and she’s eight, and all she wants in the world is to go home. So she slipped past Cook one night—Cook has been our child-minder, in addition to arranging all four exchanges. The poor dear is exhausted. Grace stole the sculpture, then hid it. Then, when we reacted with a calm, systematic search rather than the panic she was looking for, she popped the fish off the base, buried the fish in the backyard, waited until poor Cook nodded off again, and stuck the base back in the receiving hall. Which certainly accomplished her purpose. I felt like the top of my head was coming off when Ravi showed me that empty base. I dread to think what she would’ve done next if Ravi weren’t such a drama queen.”

“Oh, she would’ve taken a mallet to it,” says Patrick, “and thrown it into the fountain.”

“I’m not so sure,” says Mrs. Vanders, studying him keenly. “I think she has a well-honed sense of where the line is, and, ultimately, she wants to be with her family. She’s just registering her protest.”

“What about the Vermeer?” Jane asks.

“Yes, what are you doing with the priceless family Vermeer?” Kiran says.

“The Vermeer has actually been stolen,” says Mrs. Vanders.

Kiran lets out a short laugh. “You’re kidding.”

“I wish it with all my heart,” says Mrs. Vanders, “but no, someone in this house has stolen that dear picture and replaced it with an excellent forgery.”

“Wow,” says Kiran, still laughing. “And Ravi’s filled the house with FBI agents, Interpol, and police, on the very night you’re trying to get Grace, Christopher, a Rembrandt, and a Brancusi away.”

“Yes,” says Mrs. Vanders, not sounding particularly troubled. “Even Christopher’s given Cook the slip a couple of times, which is quite frightening in a house with a swimming pool. He’s two years old!”

“People were starting to notice the crying fits too,” says Patrick. “‘Is there something wrong with the plumbing in this house? Or the air vents?’”

Kiran is watching them intently. “Is this normal, then?” she asks. “This level of drama?”

Mrs. Vanders purses her mouth and shrugs. “I guess,” she says. “Everyone we deal with is a person of great conviction.”

Patrick has strapped a cord around the Rembrandt crate and is carrying it to the freight elevator. He props the doors open, then returns for the Brancusi crate. Without meaning to, Jane has locked eyes with Ivy.

“I speak Bengali and a little Hindi,” says Kiran. “Also French, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, and some Hebrew. And I can pass as several ethnicities.”

“Yes,” says Mrs. Vanders. “We’re well aware of that.”

“This job must give you a stunning comprehensive view of the workings of nations,” says Kiran.

“It does,” says Mrs. Vanders. “And now it’s time for you to return to the gala, Kiran. People will be wondering what’s happened to the lady of the house.”

Patrick is standing at the freight elevator, sending the two crates down somewhere by themselves. Then he walks to the dumbwaiter and turns to Ivy, who’s put on a large backpack. Ivy takes a balaclava out of her coat pocket and pulls it over her head and glasses. It’s like she’s faceless suddenly.

Jane walks to her. “Where are you going?”

“There’s a hidden trapdoor in the cellar,” Ivy says. “It opens to a tunnel that leads to a hidden bay in the ramble at the other end of the island. That’s where the pickup is happening, of the kids and the art. Cook and the kids are waiting for me downstairs. I’m joining them.”

“How far are you going with them?”

“All the way to their parents. Then I’m going to Geneva.”

“Will you be okay?”

She considers the question, then nods. “Will you?”

Jane considers the question too, then shrugs.

Ivy grasps her hands tightly, then lets them go and climbs into the dumbwaiter. Jane forces herself back to Kiran. Her arms and legs are made of wet cement. Mrs. Vanders is staring at her.

“When you were very young,” Mrs. Vanders says to Jane, “your aunt was just exactly what you thought. She took pictures of animals underwater and studied marine ecology. That was all.”

“Her aunt?” says Kiran. “Magnolia? What are you talking about now? Magnolia wasn’t—oh,” Kiran says. “She was, wasn’t she. Jesus.”

“Then, one day, she came upon the wreckage of a sunken submarine,” says Mrs. Vanders, “hidden in a cavern on the floor of the Pacific.”

In Jane’s peripheral vision, Patrick closes the dumbwaiter door and starts pulling on the cables.

Kiran touches Jane’s arm gently, the place where, under her skin, the jellyfish tentacles reach for her elbow.

“It was a North Korean submarine,” says Mrs. Vanders. “The Pentagon, North Korea, and a few other states had their own divers searching for the wreck in various places elsewhere, but they were looking in the wrong area, and in the meantime, Magnolia found it by accident.”

Kiran’s hand on Jane’s tattoo is a comfort.

“She was diving from a Venezuelan vessel with an international crew of divers,” says Mrs. Vanders, “and she understood what she’d found. She had a hunch that one of her university colleagues would be able to advise her on what to do about it. So she came back aboard, told no one else in her group what she’d found, and called him. A few days later, she told her diving party she’d been hired for another job, then crossed over onto a highly equipped salvage vessel, American, passing as a mining ship, that came along to pick her up. Magnolia brought them to the wreck and, when they asked her to, helped them salvage it. A nuclear missile. Cryptological information. It was a jackpot.”

“Why would she do that?” Jane whispers. “Why would she keep it secret? Why not just tell everyone on the Venezuelan ship what she’d found?”

“She didn’t know what to do,” says Mrs. Vanders. “She had enough imagination to know it was a political discovery, and relations between the USA and Venezuela were suffering at the time. She did what she thought best.”

Mrs. Vanders swipes a small black object—a walkie-talkie—from a nearby table and tosses it to Patrick, who’s strapping on his own gun. “Send that down to Ivy-bean,” she says, nodding at the dumbwaiter. “Then I think you should take the long way down, Patrick, to give us an extra eye on the party. You’ll have to take the aboveground route across the lawn anyway, with the art.”

“She wouldn’t,” Jane says. “My aunt wouldn’t have lied to me like that.”

“You were seven,” Mrs. Vanders says. “She couldn’t just come back and tell you all about it, no matter how much she wanted to. It’s exciting work, once you’ve started. It’s important work, and those who do it are paid according to the risks they take. Your aunt had bank accounts in the Caymans and in Switzerland that we can help you access, now that you know the truth. This is why I’ve been wanting to talk to you ever since you came to Tu Reviens. Your aunt made me promise that if anything ever happened to her, I’d help you access her bank accounts.”

Jane doesn’t care about bank accounts. All she can think of is seven, seven. She pushes toward the stairs.

“Magnolia also asked me to pass on a message,” Mrs. Vanders says to Jane’s back. “‘Tell my niece to reach for the umbrella,’ she said. She thought of you always, and she wanted to get out. Magnolia was never suited to the work. She came to hate it. She hated to lie; none of us likes to lie. She was going to retire, and we were going to help her.”

Kiran has taken Jane into the warm fold of her arm and is helping her to the stairs. Jane is shivering. “Leave her alone, Vanny,” Kiran says. “You’d think, the way all of you talk, that no one who’s been lied to has any right to feel betrayed.”

*   *   *

It’s surreal to be spat back into the party. Jane sticks to Kiran, who’s in a strange, elated state. It’s easy to be her shadow. I’m not entirely certain I’m awake, thinks Jane.

Kiran takes Jane’s arm as they move around the ballroom, whispering bright, cutting remarks in her ear. “Look at all these people,” she says. “I wonder how many of our family friends became our family friends so they could get invitations to the galas and come visit their real friends. The servants! Is anyone ever who they seem?”

Yes, Jane thinks. We are. You and I, Kiran.

“Think of our guests,” Kiran goes on. “Can you believe it about the Okadas?”

“No,” Jane says, not really paying attention.

“Colin is too much of a dildo to be a political operative,” Kiran says, “but Lucy St. George could have hidden depths, given the whole private investigator thing. Don’t you think?”

“Yes.”

“Charlotte,” Kiran says, stopping to consider.

“Charlotte?” Jane repeats obediently.

“My stepmother. She was redesigning the house.”

“Was she?” says Jane, suddenly remembering she never wished Ivy a proper good-bye. Wasn’t this the kind of trip that killed Ivy’s parents?

“But has anyone told you the details of how Charlotte mysteriously disappeared?” asks Kiran, scanning the dancers in the ballroom as if Charlotte might suddenly appear among them. The music is suffocating. Jane rubs her ears. “Could she have been a spy?” Kiran says. “She vanished into thin air, just like the Panzavecchias seemed to, and just like your aunt.”

“My aunt didn’t vanish into thin air,” says Jane. “She froze to death in a blizzard. Someone called me from the Antarctic Peninsula. And Ivy told me it was real.” Reach for the umbrella. What the hell does that mean, Aunt Magnolia? I’ve reached for all the stupid, pointless umbrellas. Why?

“I wonder where they send people,” Kiran says. “Where on earth could two infamous adults and three infamous children live and never be found? It would have to be someplace either depressingly isolated or depressingly crowded.”

Jasper appears through the shifting crowd then, comes to her, and leans against her feet. Jane wonders if it means Ivy and the kids have departed through the tunnel in the cellar.

“They’re right, you know,” Kiran goes on, her eyes following her brother, who’s managing a sort of half dance, half conversation with both the male and the female FBI agent at the edge of the dance floor. “Ravi isn’t suited for the kind of work Espions Sans Frontières does. He’d be livid about the secrets they’ve been keeping from him. Like the secret trapdoor in the cellar, and the underground tunnel to the ramble. We played hide-and-seek in that cellar. They were always so hard to find. I wonder how young they were when they were initiated into the secret of the hidden passage.”

Jane rubs Jasper’s side, not responding.

“He’s too honest,” says Kiran, then rolls her eyes as Ravi stoops and whispers something into the ear of one of the FBI agents. “And he’d blow a fuse about the art. He’d never forgive Vanny. I mean literally, never.”

“What about you, Kiran?” says Jane. “Are you going to join them?”

Kiran is capable of an impressive range of unpleasant smiles. “It depends on whether I can do so without ever having to talk to Patrick.”

“Did you know that this work killed his parents?”

Kiran is stunned. A wave of something—comprehension, horror—passes across her face before she’s able to build her wall back up again. “No,” she says. “I did not know that.”

“Ivy told me.”

Ravi appears suddenly, pushes between Jane and Kiran and wraps an arm around each of them. “Hello, beautiful darlings,” he says. “Having fun?”

“Not like the fun you’re having,” Kiran says dryly.

“I’m going for a walk,” Ravi says. “You’ll have to stay here and be the representative Thrash.”

“I don’t have to do anything,” Kiran says, slurring her words ever so slightly. “I’ll go with you if that’s what I want to do. You can’t boss me around. Where are you going?”

“Bratty twin sister,” Ravi says fondly, kissing her on the forehead. “To the bay in the ramble. The lovely FBI special agents have been asking me about alternate places for boats to dock. They want to see if someone could’ve snuck the art off the island that way.”

Instantly, Jane’s weariness flares to panic. Ivy! Grace and Christopher! They’re waiting for their pickup at that bay. “Kiran?” she squeaks, but Kiran talks over her.

“Both of the FBI agents, Ravi?” she says. “Seriously? Do they know what you’re up to? Or do they actually think you guys are going to look for clues in the dark? Do you have a preference between them?”

Kiran is just barely swaying against her brother’s chest. Kiran, Jane realizes, is pretending to be drunk.

“The answer to all your questions is, I don’t know yet,” says Ravi, grinning. “Not knowing is part of the fun.”

“I’m going with you,” says Kiran.

“Like hell you are,” says Ravi.

“I am,” says Kiran. “It’s fun to ruin your things.”

Ravi kisses her forehead again, chuckling. “No more Pimm’s for you,” he says. Then he releases them both and goes off to find his FBI special agents.

Kiran wraps her hand over Jane’s arm and is walking calmly with her toward the banquet hall before Ravi has even taken three steps. “You understand that we need to warn someone,” she says, “right?”

“Of course,” Jane says, “but how?”

“I know how to get to the bay through the ramble,” Kiran says, pulling Jane past the long table in the banquet hall, “so I’ll go that way. I’ll go after them and try to stall them. You need to find Mrs. Vanders and tell her to warn Ivy and Patrick.” She’s pulled Jane into the kitchen now. Jane realizes that Kiran intends to send her up to the attics in the dumbwaiter.

She’s hardly aware of climbing in. She has a vague sense that Kiran has stuffed her into it like a jack-in-the-box. On the floor, Jasper is hopping and yipping, distressed not to be joining her.

“Good luck,” Kiran says, then shuts the door.

The dumbwaiter starts ascending, slowly. The sounds, from inside the carriage, are a cavernous underwater music. Too slow, Jane thinks. Move faster! How do the cameras work? Will Mrs. Vanders know who’s arriving in the dumbwaiter? As the carriage comes to a halt, Jane calls out, “It’s me! It’s me! Don’t shoot!”

Someone yanks the door open and Jane is astonished to find herself staring into the face of Ji-hoon, the South Korean “cleaner.”

“All right,” says Phoebe’s voice. “Now get back.”

Ji-hoon backs away with his hands raised.

“What’s going on?” Jane squeaks. “Don’t shoot me!”

“I’m not going to shoot you, Janie,” says Phoebe’s voice, sounding amused. “What the hell do you want?”

“I need to tell Mrs. Vanders something,” Jane says, then sticks her head cautiously into the room. Phoebe is holding Ji-hoon at gunpoint.

“Is Ji-hoon a South Korean spy?” Jane asks, then, with a small shock, “Is he a North Korean spy?”

“Ji-hoon’s as American as you are. He’s the Panzavecchias’ research director at the CIA,” says Phoebe flatly. “The new one, obviously, not the dead one.”

“Oh! What are you going to do with him?”

“Nothing at all,” says Phoebe. “Ji-hoon and I are going to stand like this in friendly meditation until various things happen elsewhere, at which point I’m going to escort him from the island.”

“Okay,” Jane says. “I need Mrs. Vanders. It’s urgent.”

“I believe she’s in a meeting in the wine cellars,” says Phoebe. “Ji-hoon will send you down, won’t you, Ji-hoon? Go on, move along, and make sure I can see your hands.”

Ji-hoon glides carefully to Jane again and reaches for the dumbwaiter door. His eyes bore into hers. “I’m not the bad guy here, you know,” he says. “I’m just as committed to protecting those children as any of the rest of you, and without breaking the law.”

“Hurry up,” says Phoebe, bored.

Ji-hoon shoves the door shut with his elbow and a moment later Jane is slowly descending through darkness and a smell of metal and dust and cold. The smell changes to something like wet wood that’s been lying in a pond for a long time. Sweet and sour. Jane recognizes the wine cellars, even though she’s never been in a wine cellar before. When the dumbwaiter stops, she fumbles for the door handle and propels the door open. Mr. Vanders is standing ten feet away aiming a pistol at her.

“Don’t shoot me!” Jane squeaks again, but he’s already returned the gun to the holster at his hip. He comes up to Jane and glares at her.

“Why are you here?” he demands.

“Ravi is bringing the FBI agents to the bay through the ramble,” says Jane. “Someone needs to warn Ivy right away.”

“Hm,” says Mr. Vanders, pursing his lips, thinking this over.

“Call her!” Jane says, frustrated with him for wasting time. “On her walkie-talkie!”

“She doesn’t have it,” he says, jutting his chin at a nearby table, where the walkie-talkie sits. “She’d left by the time it arrived.”

“Call her phone!”

“Phones don’t work at the other end of the island,” he says. “Mrs. V is in a meeting and I’m with a patient. Phoebe’s watching Ji-hoon—not that we could ask any more of the Brits at this point—and Ivy, Patrick, and Cook are already at the bay. I’ll have to cancel my session and go myself.”

“No,” Jane says. “Let me go.”

“Absolutely not,” says Mr. Vanders. “You are a novice and a civilian.”

“I’m not a child,” Jane says, pushing herself out of the dumbwaiter one leg at a time. “I can carry a message. I have common sense. I’m my aunt’s niece,” she says.

Mr. Vanders’s eyebrows rise the tiniest smidge.

“Please,” Jane says, standing tall to face him. “It’s my fault the FBI is here, and there’s no time for this. Please, please, let me go.”

Mr. Vanders lets out a sigh that’s almost a growl. “Come on,” he says, grabbing Jane and pulling her down an aisle of wines so abruptly that she almost falls. He eyes her outfit. “Those look like sensible boots. Can you run in them?”

“Yes.”

He rounds a corner and launches down another aisle, towing Jane with him, shoving a flashlight at her. He’s very strong for a man who seems old. “The door at the bay looks like a rock, but it’s got a leather handle on the left that opens toward you,” he says, turning another corner. “Turn off the flashlight before you open the door, and open it slowly. Step out slowly and call Ivy’s name quietly until you get her attention. She’ll still be on lookout while Patrick deals with the kids and the cargo. The water can be noisy but she’ll be close. Are you getting all this?”

“Yes.”

He reaches for his holster. “Have you ever shot a gun?”

“No!” Jane says. “I don’t want it! I wouldn’t even know who to shoot!”

“Calm down,” says Mr. Vanders. “No one’s going to shoot anybody.”

“It’s not reasonable to assume that when everyone has a gun! I’m not taking it.”

Mr. Vanders draws his bushy eyebrows into a fierce V. “You sound like your aunt,” he says. Then he moves to a shadowy place where a rug is pushed back and there seems to be a square gap in the brick floor. It’s barely big enough to fit a human form.

“There are four steps,” Mr. Vanders tells her, “then a pole you’ll slide down. Don’t miss the pole; the floor beneath is stone. Wrap your legs around the pole as soon as the steps disappear.”

Jane stares at him incredulously.

“Come now, do we have time for gawking?” he cries impatiently, taking the flashlight from her and hooking it somehow to the belt of her sweater dress so that it’s bumping against her hip. Then he grabs her arm and yanks her toward the opening.

“I’m scared,” Jane says.

“That’s very sensible of you,” he says. “Now go.”

It’s the stupidest design Jane has ever encountered for the entrance to anything. The four “steps” are impossibly narrow and very deep and wound in a circle, so that she feels as if she’s screwing herself into the hole as she clumsily descends them, bending and twisting. Beyond the fourth step is empty space and—yes, she can touch it with her boot—a pole. She hooks her ankle around it, grabs on with her hands, and pushes off the steps with her other foot.

There’s a moment of utter lack of control and a scream, then rock comes barreling upward and crashes into her. She tastes blood in her mouth.

Mr. Vanders’s voice comes down the hole. “You okay?”

“Just dandy,” she says, lying in a heap.

The steps shift; the hole closes. Jane is left in darkness.

Patting around at her middle, she finds the flashlight and flicks the switch. A narrow stone passage stretches before her. It leads downhill and is reasonably straight.

Aching in every bone, hands smarting and bleeding from scrapes, and one of her ankles not feeling entirely trustworthy, Jane pushes herself to her feet and begins to run.

*   *   *

It’s just as Mr. Vanders said. The passage ends abruptly at what seems like an impassable boulder, but Jane finds a handle and pulls. With a groan, the enormous heavy door swings open. There’s so much noise—the voice of a wailing child, waves crashing, shouts, then the roar of an engine—that she’s certain she’s too late, the FBI has found the children, Grace will be tortured, and Ivy and Patrick will spend the rest of their lives in jail for treason and kidnapping.

Then there’s a disturbance in the scrub brush to one side, followed by a small, moving circle of light. Ivy shoves her way through branches to Jane, her balaclava pushed back above her glasses so that Jane can see her face.

“Hi,” she says calmly. “I heard the door. Is something wrong?”

“Ravi’s bringing FBI agents to look at the bay,” Jane says, gasping.

Ivy’s face sharpens. “When?”

“Now.”

Reaching behind Jane, Ivy hauls the door shut. Then she pushes out of the scrub. Jane follows her into a spitting rain, squinting, adjusting to the dim darkness. They’re at the edge of a tiny, crescent-shaped patch of beach. In the water bobs a small, wooden boat, attached by a rope to a half-submerged post, its engine running. Patrick stands in the water beside the boat. An adult, presumably Cook, sits in the boat, as does Grace, who’s holding Christopher, who’s screaming to wake the dead. Ivy’s flashlight washes over them irregularly several times and Jane reads the boat’s name on the stern: The Ivy.

What Ivy’s done with the flashlight must be a signal to the people at the boat, because several things happen at once. The boat engine cuts out; Patrick reaches to Christopher and Christopher stops crying; Grace yells something in outrage and Patrick yells something back; then Patrick wades out of the water and begins to run across the sand toward Jane and Ivy.

“I have to go,” Ivy says to Jane, grabbing on to her hand roughly. “I’m sorry. I’ll be gone at least a week. Will you still be here when I get back?”

“Yes.”

“Did Mrs. Vanders tell you the rest of what we know about your aunt’s death?”

“Her death? What about it?”

“Ask Patrick,” says Ivy, tugging on her hand. “Promise me you’ll ask Patrick.”

“I promise,” Jane says, her breath ragged, almost full of tears.

Ivy pulls her close suddenly, holds her tight, smashes her lips against Jane’s. Then in an instant she’s gone, flying across the sand. At the water, she unhitches the rope from the post, climbs into the rocking boat. She sits beside Cook and says something to Grace that makes Grace scramble to the floor of the boat with Christopher in her arms, hiding both of them from sight. There’s a clatter of wood on wood and Cook has produced oars. He passes one to Ivy and steadily they begin to row the boat toward the open sea.

Patrick grabs Jane’s arm and pulls her back into the brush. He pulls her down so that the two of them are crouching with their backs to the rock door. His pants and the bottom of his coat are soaked and the rain is spitting harder. Jane, coatless and bare-legged, shivers violently.

“I’d give you my coat,” Patrick whispers, “but it wouldn’t warm you.”

“It’s okay,” Jane whispers. “I’m okay.”

“What’s happening?” Patrick says. “Who’s coming?”

“Ravi’s bringing FBI agents to look at the bay,” Jane says. “Kiran’s going to try to stall them.”

Somewhere in the ramble, Kiran is shrieking with laughter. A moment later, arcs of light swoop across the sky, then Jane hears the voices of the others. Ravi, quiet, chuckling, and a woman’s voice Jane doesn’t recognize. A second man shouting in laughter; Kiran, giggling, still emitting the occasional high shriek. Twigs break and leaves rustle as they slide down from the ramble onto the beach. Jane can’t see them, but someone is practically putting on a light show with a flashlight.

“What are we looking for, anyway?” Kiran calls. “Footprints? Fin prints! Brancusi fish fin prints!” she yells, then giggles at her own comedy. The FBI man chuckles too, then says something indistinct but cheerful. He sounds drunk.

“We’re not likely to find anything at all,” says the FBI lady in obvious annoyance, “with you running around in figure eights and trampling everything.”

“Ouch! Or shining the light in our eyes!” says Ravi. “Watch it, Kir! I can’t see a thing.”

“This is not the walk I’d envisioned,” says the FBI lady.

“True,” says Ravi, “but I like seeing my sister laugh.”

“She’s drunk,” the FBI lady says sharply. “Would you please take that flashlight from her? I’m going blind.”

“Kiran,” Ravi begins. Whatever he intends to say is drowned out by Kiran’s screeches of delight, then splashing sounds as she apparently runs headlong into the water. She turns the light back to shore and shines it deliberately on her companions. Jane can see the brightness swishing back and forth, she can hear Ravi and the FBI man laughing, the FBI lady cursing, and she understands what Kiran is doing. Kiran’s making it impossible for them to isolate the silhouette of the rowboat on the water behind her. She’s good at this, isn’t she?

“Your sister is a child,” the female agent says in a scathing voice. “An absolute pollywog. And it’s raining.”

Ravi’s voice is hearty. “Kiran,” he shouts, “we’re going back now.”

“Did I mess up your fun?” Kiran shouts back.

“Yes!”

“I win!” Kiran shouts.

“Congratulations, you pain in the ass!” yells Ravi.

A few more splashes and flashes of light. Then the sound of cracking twigs and shifting leaves as the four of them climb back into the ramble.

Finally, only the roar of the ocean, coming, going, and the patters of rain.

Jane’s senses are full of Ivy’s kiss. Ivy’s mouth was soft, her gun halter palpable through her coat. Nothing is quite how Jane imagined it would be. And it’s possible she’s never been so tired.

“What now?” she says.

“Now we wait for Cook to come back in the boat with Philip Okada,” Patrick says.

“Philip Okada?”

“When the lady who’s helping us picks Ivy and the kids up,” Patrick says, “she’s dropping Philip off. We owe you, you know. Maybe we would’ve seen Kiran’s light in time—well, we probably would’ve seen Kiran’s light in time,” Patrick amends, “because Kiran was very smart about it.” He stops, looking vague and miserable.

“So you don’t owe me after all?”

“Sorry,” he says. “No, we do owe you, because even if we’d been able to get the boat away, we wouldn’t have gotten Ivy to it in time. I’d probably have had to go in her place, which would’ve been inconvenient for me, and really inconvenient for Ivy. After she delivers the kids to their parents she’s expected in Geneva. Breaking things off with HQ is a long procedure.”

“Is it like she’s retiring?”

“Yeah,” Patrick says, “pretty much, except she’ll be in possession of some sensitive secrets when she retires. HQ needs to put her through the wringer about that before they’ll let her go. She needs to prove she’s trustworthy.”

“Will they really let her go?”

“I’m not worried,” he says. “You shouldn’t worry.”

“They’re not going to make her move to some horrible, remote place, are they?”

“Nah. She’ll be allowed to live wherever she wants. She’ll just have to take a trip to Geneva every couple years for follow-up.”

“Why does Mrs. Vanders let her have dangerous information?” Jane says indignantly. “Why does Ivy need to know where the Panzavecchias are going?”

“She doesn’t know,” says Patrick, “and she still won’t know when she gets there. I don’t know either. Mr. and Mrs. Vanders do a good job of keeping things from us. Even from their son, Cook.”

“I bet they do,” Jane says, thinking of Aunt Magnolia.

“Hey. Knowing the truth in this business is really dangerous. People die.” The words are punching themselves out of his mouth.

“Like your parents,” Jane says.

“People die,” he says simply.

She studies him in the darkness.

“I don’t know Kiran very well,” Jane says. “But I can relate to how she’s feeling. It’s . . . confusing. Horribly. It’s like having everything ripped away from you and then thrown back at you all sharp and unrecognizable. But I can see you had a not-too-terrible reason for your lies. You didn’t do it out of selfishness, or maliciousness, or cowardice.”

“I still shouldn’t have lied,” says Patrick, choking over the words. “She trusted me, and she was always honest with me. She knows me better than anyone, and I lied to her. What was I thinking? If she never forgives me, I don’t blame her.”

Patrick turns his face from Jane, because he’s crying. It takes Jane a moment to realize she’s crying too. This is Aunt Magnolia’s apology, these words coming out of Patrick’s mouth. Aunt Magnolia can’t say them herself. She’s gone. But she made Jane promise to come to this house.

It was all she’d been able to do.

The rain seems to be clearing away. Clouds push across the sky, revealing stars and obscuring them again. Jane rests a hand on her own shoulder, where the bell of her jellyfish tattoo sits under her sleeve. It’s the visible proof that Aunt Magnolia is a part of her. “How long do you think we’ll be waiting?” she asks.

Patrick wipes at his face with the back of his hand and squints at the sky above the water. “Not too much longer,” he says. “You don’t have to wait, you know. There’s no reason for you to get pneumonia.”

“I’ll wait,” Jane says, not certain why she doesn’t want to leave him. “Will you tell me what happened to Charlotte?”

“Charlotte?”

“Kiran’s stepmother.”

“I know who she is,” Patrick says. “I don’t think anyone knows what happened to her.”

“So she wasn’t tied up in this spy stuff?”

“Oh,” he says. “I see why you’re asking. No. Charlotte was an interior designer. She had no connection to any of this. Mrs. Vanders even made some serious inquiries—discreetly—after she went away, but nothing came of it. Charlotte’s departure is a mystery.”

“Okay,” Jane says, then swallows. She pushes the words out. “What about my aunt?”

“Your aunt?”

“Ivy told me to ask you for some sort of information about her.”

Patrick pauses. “You mean the part where she died?”

Jane breathes in.

“Yeah,” she says. “The part where she died.” She breathes out.

“You’re right to ask,” says Patrick. “Just before the Antarctica trip, she came to a gala. At some point during the night, she left us without saying good-bye, which was unusual for Magnolia. We knew she was headed to Antarctica to take pictures of whales and penguins; it wasn’t a CIA trip. Then we saw the news about how she got lost in a storm on the peninsula. She was well-regarded as a photographer, so it got picked up, and we pay attention to the news. How did you learn about it? Did you get a call?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember who called you?”

“The connection was terrible,” Jane says. “His name was John Something but I couldn’t hear straight. Someone from the research station; he didn’t really know her. Then we got cut off, and I kept hoping the whole thing was some sort of mistake, until someone from the university came to talk to me. They mailed me her things from Ushuaia. They never found her body.”

“Right,” says Patrick. “Well, whenever an operative dies, we do some digging as a matter of course. When we dug deeper about Magnolia, our sources in Argentina told us she had the flu when her ship crossed the Drake Passage and she never left her cabin. Our other sources told us that she had the flu in Antarctica at the research station too, and never left her room. Next thing we know, she went out, got caught in the storm, and died.”

“But—why would she go out if she had the flu?”

“You’re missing my point,” says Patrick. “What I’m saying is that none of the people we’ve talked to ever actually laid eyes on her. No one can confirm seeing her on the ship or on the peninsula. She was always ‘in her room,’ but we haven’t been able to figure out who was initiating that story. And we can’t find any records of her flying from any American airport to any airport in South America, either. You see what I’m saying? We’re not convinced Magnolia ever went to Antarctica. The CIA has her categorized as a fallen operative, but we haven’t been able to confirm how or where she actually died.”

Jane’s body is an ocean, removed from feeling and from any consciousness of time. She knew, Jane thinks. She had a plan. She left her wool hat behind for me. She made me promise to come to this house. She left me a message.

Jane sits up straight and stares at Patrick in the dark.

What if . . .

“Oh, for the love of god,” Patrick says with sudden violence. He’s staring out to sea.

“What is it?”

“That woman is a piece of work,” he says, pointing to the sky above the water.

Jane turns to see what he’s looking at and is met with the vision of an oblong shape barely visible against the night sky. It’s like a whale in the sky, with a few flashing lights where she imagines its belly to be. “Is that . . . a blimp?”

“It’s a freaking zeppelin,” Patrick says.

“A zeppelin!”

“She owns a helicopter, this lady, and a seaplane, but she decides to pick up the children, the art, and my sister in her zeppelin. That means long ropes, and Ivy having to deal with the stress of not dropping Christopher or Grace or a Brancusi or a Rembrandt into the ocean. It’s unnecessary!” he says.

“It’s surreal,” Jane says.

“It’s romantic,” Patrick says scornfully, “coming to the rescue in a zeppelin. Poor Philip. He’s got to drop out of the zeppelin and there’s no way he’s not going into the drink.”

“I didn’t know anyone actually said ‘the drink,’” Jane says.

“It seemed like the right term to describe the water under a zeppelin,” Patrick says, still disgusted.

Jane snorts, and Patrick snickers despite himself.

It’s too dark to see what’s going on out there. After what feels like a long time, the zeppelin moves off into the clouds. Patrick pushes to his feet. “Stay here,” he says, then runs out to the beach with his flashlight and flashes it a few times toward the water in a rhythmic pattern.

Before too long, Jane sees The Ivy returning to shore, then hears the purr of its engine. When the boat gets close, someone climbs out, drops into the water, and begins to move toward shore. The boat zips away again, perhaps to be moored on some other part of the island.

Patrick returns to the brush with the new person, who turns out to be Philip Okada, soaked through and shivering.

“Hi,” Jane says.

“Hi,” says Philip, running a hand through wet hair, not seeming particularly surprised to see her. He’s wearing all black with his orange Chuck Taylors.

“Did Ivy and the kids make it into the zeppelin okay?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

Patrick pushes through branches, reaches for the big stone door, and hauls it open. Philip ducks through.

“You coming?” says Patrick to Jane.

“I’ll catch up,” Jane says.

“You sure?”

“Go ahead,” she says. “I won’t be long.”

Jane is left alone, to soak in the night. The clouds are drifting fast and the waves are crashing hard on shore. Her own shivering has calmed.

Jane has things rooting her to the earth. She has her anger; she has her grief. She’s awake now, and centered in these things. And she’s not alone. There’s a friend out there in a zeppelin. There’s a dog back in the house. There are people in the house, who have resources. There’s an umbrella she intends to rebuild. There’s a message from Aunt Magnolia. And there’s the seed of a new question—just the seed, which will grow as Jane feels able to nurture it—about whether maybe—just maybe—what was lost could be found.