“Norm Simpson called me—oh, two weeks ago. He thought I should know.”
Fiona blinked, her mind scrambling, trying to place the name. Her father knew so many people, it was impossible to keep track. “No one told me about it.”
“Well, people are sensitive, Fee. That’s all. What’s your story angle?” He was interested now, awake, looking at her from the corner of his eye as he plugged in the kettle.
“I want to talk to this Margaret Eden. And her son, Anthony. I want to know their endgame.”
“There’s going to be no money in it,” Malcolm said, turning and leaning on the counter, crossing his arms. “That place has always been a problem. City council has debated buying it from the Christophers three times since 2000, just so they can tear it down, but they never got up the gumption to do it. And now they’ve lost their chance.”
Fiona suppressed the triumph she felt—Yes! He agrees with me!—and turned to open the fridge. “That’s what I think. But I can’t get Anthony Eden to return my calls, even when I say I’m writing for Lively Vermont.”
The kettle whistled. Her father poured their tea and looked thoughtful. “I could make some calls,” he said.
“You don’t need to do that,” she replied automatically. “Dad, it’s—it’s okay with you that I’m writing this?”
For the first time, his face went hard, the expression closed down. “Your sister isn’t there. I told Norm Simpson the same thing. She’s gone. You sound like your mother, still worried every day that you’re making Deb unhappy.”
“I don’t—” But she did. Of course she did. Leave it to her father to get to the heart of it with his journalist’s precision. Her parents had divorced two years after the murder, unable to carry on together anymore. Her mother had gone to work at Walgreens after the divorce, even though she had a Ph.D. She’d said it was because she was tired of academia, but Fiona always knew it was because Deb had been embarrassed by what she referred to as her parents’ nerdiness. She’d been uncomfortable with Malcolm’s fame as a journalist and an activist—twenty-year-old Deb, who had wanted nothing more than to fit in, be popular, and have friends, had thought she had all the answers. She’d been so young, Fiona thought now. So terribly young. The attitude had affected their mother, yet no matter how Deb had scorned him, Malcolm refused to apologize for the way he led his life.
But when Fiona looked around their childhood home now, at the clutter and disorder that hadn’t been touched in years, she wondered if her father felt as guilty as the rest of them did. There had been arguments that year before Deb died—she’d been in college, barely passing her classes while she socialized and had fun. She’d been drinking, going to parties, and dating Tim, to their parents’ hurt confusion. Fiona, at seventeen, had watched the rift from the sidelines. And then, one November night, it had all been over.
Still, Malcolm Sheridan was Malcolm Sheridan. Two days after she’d visited him, Fiona received a phone call from Anthony Eden’s assistant, asking her to meet Eden at the gates of Idlewild Hall the next morning for a tour and an interview. “I can’t do it,” she said to Jamie that night, sitting on the couch in his small apartment, curled up against him and thinking about Deb again. “I can’t go.”
“Right,” he said. “You can’t go.”
Fiona pressed the palms of her hands over her eyes. “Yes, I can. I can go. I’m going.”
“This is the most ambitious thing you’ve ever written, isn’t it?” he asked. He’d finished a long shift, and they were sitting in the half-dark quiet, without even the TV on. She could feel his muscles slowly unknotting, as if his job kept him in some unbearable level of silent tension he could only now release.
“Is that a dig?” she asked him, though she knew it wasn’t.
“No,” he said. “But since I’ve known you, all you’ve written are those fluff pieces.” He paused, feeling his way. “I just get the feeling you’re a better writer than you let on.”
Fiona swallowed. She’d gone to journalism school—it had been second nature to follow in Malcolm’s footsteps, and she was incapable of doing anything else—but she’d freelanced her entire career instead of working in a newsroom. She told herself it was because she could do bigger and better things that way. But here she was. “Well, I guess I’ll find out. They say you’re supposed to do something that scares you every day, right?”
Jamie snorted. He was probably unaware she’d read that motto on a yoga bag. “It’s a good thing I’m a cop, then.”
“Oh, really?” It was one of her hobbies to test how far she could push Jamie. “Directing traffic at the Christmas parade? That must be pretty terrifying.”
In response, he dropped his head back, resting it on the back of the sofa and staring at the ceiling. “You are so dead,” he said with a straight face.
“Or that time they were fixing the bridge. You had to stand there for hours.” Fiona shook her head. “I don’t know how you handle it every day.”
“So dead,” Jamie said again.
“Or when we get a big snowfall, and you have to help all the cars in the ditch—”
She was fast, but he was faster. Before she could get away, he had pulled her down by the hips and pinned her to the sofa. “Take it back,” he said.
She leaned up and brushed her lips over his gorgeous mouth. “Make me,” she said.
He did. She took it back, eventually.
Fiona stood next to the tall black gates to Idlewild, leaning on her parked car, watching Old Barrons Road. It looked different in daylight, though it was still stark and lonely, the last dead leaves skittering across the road. There was no movement at the gas station, no one on the hill. Birds cried overhead as they gathered to go south before the brutal winter hit. Fiona turned up the collar of her parka and rubbed her hands.
A black Mercedes came over the hill, moving as slowly as a funeral procession, its engine soundless. Fiona watched as it pulled up next to her and the driver’s window whirred down, showing a man over fifty with a wide forehead, thinning brown hair, and a pair of sharp eyes that were trained on her, unblinking.
“Mr. Eden?” Fiona said.
He nodded once, briefly, from the warm leather interior of his car. “Please follow me,” he said.
He pressed a button somewhere—Fiona pictured a sleek console in there, like in a James Bond film—and the gates made a loud, ringing clang. An automatic lock—that was new. A motor purred and the gates swung open slowly, revealing an unpaved dirt driveway leading away, freshly dug like an open scar.
Fiona got in her car and followed. The drive was bumpy, and at first there was nothing to see but trees. But the trees thinned, and the driveway curved, and for the first time in twenty years she saw Idlewild Hall.
My God, she thought. This place. This place.
There was nothing like it—not in the Vermont countryside full of clapboard and Colonials, and perhaps not anywhere. Idlewild was a monster of a building, not high but massively long, rowed with windows that dully reflected the gray sky through a film of dirt. Brambles and weeds clotted the front lawn, and tangles of dead vines crawled the walls. Four of the windows on the far end of the building were broken, looking like eyes that had blinked closed. The rest of the windows grinned down the driveway at the approaching cars. All the better to eat you with, my dear.