The living room was foolishly quiet. The antique armchair was tilted toward the bookshelf at a rakish angle. The old etchings of the Swithin School, commissioned by Sylvie’s grandfather and handed down to her when she had inherited this house, were at perfect right angles on the walls. Sylvie looked at the framed photograph of her grandparents that sat on the top of the sideboard. Her grandfather’s cunning, sepia-toned eyes seemed more narrowed than usual, as though he’d heard both sides of the phone conversation.
Oh, how she’d cared for everything in this house. How she’d taken pride in all its details, preserved it to the letter, thinking that keeping everything exactly the same would embalm the spirit and ideals of her grandfather forever. After all, this house essentially was her grandfather—the local press had dubbed it Roderick, the middle name he often went by. But the resemblance didn’t stop there. The old leather books on the shelves were like the wrinkled tops of her grandfather’s hands. The curled vines that climbed the stone walls were his thick mass of hair. The scalloped cornices on the porch resembled his mustache. Sometimes when Sylvie walked through certain rooms, she could still smell her grandfather—spicy yet clean, like tobacco and books and linen. She sometimes glimpsed a flicker out of the corner of her eye, a glimmer in a mirror, the wattage in a lightbulb adjusting—all signs, maybe, that he was watching.
Hazing. She couldn’t quite connect it to the meaning the new headmaster had given. She saw a fogged window instead, fresh with dew. A method used by pastry chefs to brown the top of a crème br?lée. Hazing. It was too artful a word to have such a connotation.
“Well,” she said aloud, and brushed her already-clean hands on her pants.
She climbed up the staircase and stood in front of James’s office door. It had become her ritual to linger there for a moment before going in. Sometimes she even knocked, as if he were still inside. The room was colder and darker than the rest of the house. James had only been gone for two months, but the office had lost his essence—the general chaos of his papers, the constantly illuminated message light on his office line’s phone. All the books had been put away on the old bookshelves. James’s desk—a clean, modern thing of glass and metal that had long ago replaced Sylvie’s grandfather’s old, mahogany mammoth—had been wiped down weeks ago, not a fingerprint marring its surface.
A month ago, Sylvie finally found the key to James’s filing cabinet nestled behind one of the books on the shelves. It now rested at the base of the lamp, waiting. Sylvie could easily imagine sliding it into the lock on the filing cabinet. She could almost hear the click of the barrel releasing, the metallic hiss of the drawer opening. Knowing James, she guessed that he saved the most significant documents of his life in paper hard copy, not stored on his computer’s hard drive. All she had to do was unlock the drawer, riffle through a folder, and finally have a name to connect with her hurt. That would be all it took to know.
She remained in the office for a minute or so, daring herself. Then, as always, when things began to seem too close, she turned around and left the room, leaving the key behind.
Part I
Chapter One
Joanna Bates-McAllister—née Farrow—had heard from the very start that her husband Charles’s adopted brother, Scott, was an asshole. An ungrateful asshole, were the precise words. Needless to say, they’d never been close.
According to her husband, Charles’s delivery had been so painful and dangerous that the doctors had told the Bates-McAllisters that it wouldn’t be safe to conceive again, so they had chosen to adopt. They’d gone through all kinds of hoops to bring Scott into their home. And look how that turned out, was what the entire family seemed to think, though no one ever said it aloud.
Recently, the Bates-McAllisters had willingly converted a whole section of their estate into a bachelor pad for Scott, furnishing it with high-tech electronics, a kitchenette, and even a separate entrance, never encouraging him to leave, even though he was twenty-nine years old. Charles told Joanna that Scott didn’t hang out with a single student that went to their private school, Swithin, but instead with kids from public school. And not the public schools in the suburbs, either; Scott gravitated toward kids without parents, kids whose fathers were in jail, kids whose siblings dealt meth.