filled with water.
I said, “The first time I ran into them was in the stable, this morning, about half an hour after dawn.”
He picked up another spud and went at it as though he despised everything Idahoan and was particularly infuriated by potatoes.
“The second time,” I said, “was just twenty minutes ago, in a grove of oak trees, where it got so dark I thought there must be an eclipse.”
“That doesn’t make sense, Mr. Thomas.”
“It didn’t make sense to me, either.”
“There was no eclipse.”
“No, sir, I guess not. But there was something.”
Watching him, I finished the slice of cheesecake.
Dropping the second potato in the pot, putting down the peeler, Chef Shilshom said, “My medication.”
“Sir?”
“I forgot to take it,” he said, and he left the kitchen by the hallway door.
At the back sink, I rinsed my plate, fork, and glass. I put them in the dishwasher.
The food lay heavy in my stomach, and I felt as if I had eaten my last meal.
Mentally reciting Annamaria’s words, hoping to engage my psychic magnetism as I had tried to do before I’d been warned into the tree by the mute rider on the spirit horse, I wandered across the kitchen and left it by one of the two swinging doors that served the butler’s pantry.
I passed through the formal dining room, the cozy informal drawing room that was a fraction the size of the main drawing room, and along a paneled hallway, past closed doors that I had no impulse to open.
More than once in the past couple of days, the layout of the great house had confused me, not merely because of its size but also because its architect seemed to have invented a new geometry with a previously unknown dimension that frustrated my memory. Rooms proved to be connected in ways that repeatedly surprised me.
By the time I arrived at the library, by a route that I would not have thought could bring me there, two things puzzled me: the depth of the silence in the great house, and the absence of staff. No vacuum cleaner in a distant room. No voices. No one mopping limestone floors or polishing mahogany floors, or dusting furniture.
The previous day, I had for the first time availed myself of the invitation to treat the ground level of the house as my own home, and had spent some time in both the card room and the fully equipped gym. I had encountered only the head housekeeper, Mrs. Tameed, and a maid named Victoria Mors.
Now, as I stood on the threshold of the library, wondering at the stillness in the house, I realized that neither the housekeeper nor the maid had been engaged in any obvious labor when I had come upon them. They had been standing in the card room, in the middle of an intense conversation. Although I apologized for interrupting them in their work and intended to leave, they assured me that they had finished the task at hand and had chores elsewhere. They had left at once, but I hadn’t considered, until this moment, that neither had with her any cleaning supplies or even as much as a dust rag.
A house as large as this one — with its ornate moldings, carved-marble fireplaces, richness of architectural details, and room after room of antique furnishings — should keep Mrs. Tameed and half a dozen maids bustling from morning till night. Yet although the house was immaculate, I had encountered only the two of them, and I had yet to see either woman working.
Crossing the threshold, I found the library deserted. The large, rectangular room was wrapped by laden bookshelves except for a few windows covered with heavy brocade draperies. I didn’t pause to read the titles on any of the thousands of spines, didn’t settle in an armchair. Guided by psychic magnetism, I went directly to the open staircase in the middle of the room.
Twenty feet overhead, the mahogany ceiling was deeply coffered. A five-foot-wide mezzanine encircled the room twelve feet above the floor.
The bronze spiral staircase featured a railing in which the balusters were wound through by beautifully wrought vines with gilded leaves. Perhaps it was meant to represent the tree of knowledge.
At the top of the stairs, a bridge connected the two longest sides of the mezzanine. Without hesitation, I went to the left. Upon reaching the end of the bridge, I turned right.
In the southwest corner of the mezzanine, set at an angle between the bookshelves, a heavy wooden door stood under a pediment surmounted by a bronze torch with a gilded flame. I passed through the door into a junction of second-floor hallways.
The invitation to enjoy the public rooms of the main house did not include the second floor. I was abusing the privilege granted to me. I didn’t hesitate to do so. I don’t think I’m really bad, but I’ll admit to being naughty.
Considering that the head of security, Paulie Sempiterno, had so recently expressed the sincere desire to put a bullet in my face, my violation of Mr. Wolflaw’s privacy might result in something worse than a stern lecture about good manners. Caution seemed essential.
As if the very thought of Sempiterno conjured him, his rough voice rose from behind one of the closed doors along the west wing, to my right.
Another voice, more worried and less angry than the security chief’s, was unquestionably that of Chef Shilshom. He evidently had not gone to fetch a forgotten medication in his little apartment in the servants’ wing on the ground floor.
A third voice, quieter than the other two, might have been that of Noah Wolflaw. His bedroom suite lay in the west wing.
I was able to hear only the louder words, but the tenor of the conversation was clearly argumentative. I imagined that Sempiterno wanted to grind me up in a wood-chipper, Shilshom wanted to roast me with onions and carrots before serving me as a peace offering to whatever red-eyed animals prowled Roseland, and Wolflaw couldn’t bring himself to assent to my being either chipped or cooked because he was still enchanted by Annamaria for reasons that even he could not explain.
Although I was tempted to listen at the door, prudence and psychic magnetism turned me away from the voices. I proceeded along the south hallway, in the first half of which all the doors were on the right. Staying on the carpet runner, treading quietly, I was grateful that whatever power guided my feet had never required me to break into a lively dance.
Just before the south wing met the south end of the east wing, I was compelled to a door on the right. I hesitated with my hand on the knob, listening, but I heard no slightest sound beyond.
Entering, I discovered a parlor that was part of a bedroom suite. In a wingback chair sat a boy with wide, staring, all-white eyes that seemed blinded by thick cataracts.
Fifteen
When the child did not react to me in any way, I quietly closed the door to the hall and stepped farther into the room.
His hands lay in his lap, palms upturned. His lips were slightly parted. Motionless, silent, he might have been dead or comatose.
The parlor and the connecting bedroom that I glimpsed through an open door were not furnished or decorated to the taste of a young boy of eight or nine. A white ceiling of ornate plaster medallions depicting clusters of bristling arrows, walls hung with tapestries featuring complexly patterned borders around scenes of stag hunts, English furniture of a period I couldn’t identify, numerous bronzes of hunting dogs on tables and consoles, and a Persian rug in rich shades of gold and red and brown were decidedly masculine but better suited to a man with decades of sporting pursuits behind him than to a boy of tender years.
The draperies were closed over the windows, and the light came from a table lamp by the sofa and a floor lamp beside the armchair, both with pleated silk shades. Shadows gathered in the corners, but I was confident that the child was alone.
I approached him without eliciting a response and stood staring down at him, wondering about his
