She pulled her gaze back to the screen that read “Chapter 4” at the top. The rest of the page was blank. At the end of chapter three, a museum guard had found a corpse in the Monet Room. She shifted her gaze from the screen to the keyboard; she wondered if she were the only bestselling author who had never mastered typing without using the two-fingers-of-each-hand system, as if technology had surpassed her basic abilities.

And now a different kind of technology would determine the identity, or at least the ancestral origin, of the remains that might change her future.

She limbered her four typing fingers over the keyboard. “Focus,” she whispered. “Please, focus.”

She thought about the Monet Room in her fictitious museum, which led her to remember the Monet gallery in Paris where she’d been not once but half a dozen times when she was with Mark, though she’d rather not think about him, any more than she wanted to think about the skull she’d found. So she forced her mind to wander to the Paris gallery and Monet’s painting of buttercups that featured a beautiful woman in a white dress and white hat and carrying a white parasol; it was a bright summer day; the woman was resting in a field among the yellow flowers. The title of the painting was In the Meadow, and it had inspired Annie to include, in the landscaping plan around The Vineyard Inn, a large tract for a meadow that would be filled with buttercups.

The idea, Annie knew, had formed because of her mother—not Donna, but Ellen Sutton.

Every year in late spring, the Suttons had gone to the Vineyard for a weekend, ostensibly to pick out the cottage where they’d stay on their August vacation. (It took a long time before Annie figured out that those weekends had been an excuse for an early visit to the island, because they always wound up renting the same cottage in Edgartown.) One of those spring trips had been extra special. She knew that she’d been eight, because the following year her mother had left them for a while, and Annie had never fully trusted her again. Maybe that was why her memories of the weekend were so vivid. And good.

That Sunday morning, her dad had wanted to sit on the porch—the piazza, he’d always called it—of the old hotel where they were staying to smoke his pipe and read the Boston Globe. In an uncharacteristic move, her mother had suggested that the two “girls” go for a drive up island to Alley’s General Store in search of clever kitchen gadgets to bring back to the city. They had waved good-bye to Annie’s dad and climbed into the family’s Rambler, her mother pushing the push button that read “Drive,” and tooting the horn as they headed off toward West Tisbury.