The Grants’ country house was a couple of miles east of the small town of Campbellville, a roomy, two-story place set in an acre of evergreen woodland. White-graveled driveway at the front, a wildflower garden with a few dwarf apple trees at the back. At the rear of the garden a grand sycamore with a rope swing, the pleasures of which Elspeth had probably long since traded for inane hours on her cell phone or iPad.
Inside, the house was a smaller and more homely cousin to the one in the city. Appliances and furnishings still displayed West Coast professional wealth (as did the mere ownership of a second home, obviously), but without the urban residence’s visible straining for minimalist chic. It looked, in other words, comfortable. Original stripped-oak floors and a kitchen in which you could actually imagine someone cooking. The common denominator was books. The smallest of the downstairs rooms (with a view into the backyard) was walled in them, an eclectic selection ranging from classics to popular science, with a lot of what Valerie assumed (she had to assume, since she didn’t read anything these days) was serious or “literary” fiction in between. Rachel’s domain, she figured, recalling Vincent Lyle and the insomniacs’ reading club he and Rachel shared, waving to each other in the small hours.
In gloves and shoe guards Valerie spent three hours going through the place, top to bottom. It satisfied her insatiable snooper’s appetite—but she found nothing. No locked drawers, no hidden photographs, no diaries (although there was a desktop computer that would have to be trawled), no evidence that Dwight Jenner, or Sophia, for that matter, had ever been in the place. She hadn’t expected any other result. There was, naturally, an alarm system (Rachel had given her the entry code) linked to the security company, but it was unsupported by CCTV. If Jenner had been inside he’d either had the code or been let in. The only way to know for sure would be to get a team up here and dust for prints. Should have done that in the first place. But there would have been a wait, and she was impatient. Impatient and (let’s be honest, Valerie) overinvested in her own occult intuitions, her ability to pick up what patrol officer Niall Fox would have called the Vibe.
Well, she thought, closing the front door behind her, so much for that.
She checked the time. 6:18 P.M. Traffic on I-5 would be moving like molasses. Fuck it. There was an acre around the place and more than an hour of daylight. Might as well take a stroll.
In the rest stop footage, Jenner had bought a pack of Marlboros, so Valerie kept her eyes trained on the ground for a telltale butt. Movie-inherited optimism. She found none. Tire tracks in the drive she told herself would only turn out to belong to the Grants’ vehicles. Away to the right a rough, narrow trail led into the trees. She followed it.
Daylight didn’t count for much in here. The dry smell of the evergreens was pleasant, like an old wardrobe. Again she thought of Elspeth. This place would’ve been an enchantment to her a few years back, bottle-green light, fairies in the ferns, adventures beckoning. Valerie’s own childhood had been imaginatively rich, courtesy of mild Catholicism and her grandfather’s penchant for cooking up outlandish and religiously incorrect mythologies. The Pope, he’d told her, was visited by the Holy Spirit, who told him what rules to make for the Church. To Valerie the Holy Spirit was the white dove of traditional iconography. According to her grandfather there was a secret dumbwaiter in the Pope’s bedroom in the Vatican, a narrow shaft that reached all the way up to heaven. Sometimes His Holiness woke to the sound of beating wings. A message from the Dove! It had all made perfect sense to her. Unfortunately it had also made perfect sense to her that, as further according to her grandfather, a deformed goblin lived in their hot water tank, and that the occasional noises emanating from there were sounds of him trying desperately to get out and come for her. She had no clue what this creature could have against her, but it didn’t stop her living in fear of its eventual escape and her own mysteriously deserved destruction.
She smiled, remembering. She’d been awed and terrified by her grandfather’s revelations, but always went back for more. Grown-ups were compelled to frighten children, she theorized now (as the trees thinned ahead of her), a narrative inoculation to lay the psychological groundwork for the realities of adulthood, in which the world would sooner or later turn out to be a frightening place. Get used to fear now, kiddo, because there’s plenty to be afraid of coming your way.
Would she do that if she had a child of her own?
She stepped out of the undergrowth into fresher air—and found herself on the shore of a small lake. The path, apparently, circled it. Maybe fifteen minutes to walk around. Annoyed that her mind had wandered (back to children again, parenthood, for Christ’s sake give me a break), she set off with renewed dedication to scouring the ground, a rationalization she was well aware was growing more risible by the second.
More than fifteen minutes, it turned out. The lake’s circumference was deceptive. Nonetheless she found herself back where she’d started with nothing to show for her walk.
The sun was lowering toward the tree line on the opposite bank, but a shaft of late light fell on the turf and shingle around her. She lifted her chin and closed her eyes, enjoying the warmth. Then she turned to head back to the house.
Something glinting in the short grass caught her eye.
Without any expectation (she’d resigned herself to the fruitlessness of this sojourn) she stepped over to see what it was.
At the last instant, excitement having almost eclipsed the protocols, she remembered to pull on fresh gloves.
Then she bent and picked it up, carefully.
It was a man’s wristwatch.