Her face—angular and intent, with dark eyes and a narrow mouth—strummed a chord of recognition in Keegan. It was another of those Hollywood sightings, where the commonplace and the celebrated could sometimes be hard to distinguish. He’d seen this woman before, he knew, but he couldn’t say when or where. He might have sat across from her at the bar at Jacob’s or she might play Opie Taylor’s schoolmarm on channel two. There was no way to know who she was, only that he knew her face from somewhere.

While the young woman painted, Keegan stretched out his back and took in Ormsby’s elaborate garden: the box-edged flower beds, the emerald lawn, the sculpted hedges. Water burbled from a mossy, brick-skirted fountain. The whole scene seemed overly vivid and contrived—like a garishly colored antique postcard.

Keegan swirled the cooling Folgers in his mug and took another sip.

The woman below him dabbed at a tray of paints with her brush, blending the colors, and then she tried a small daub on the paper’s edge to test the color. Satisfied, she went about streaking long horizontal lines of verdant green down near the bottom of the paper. From what Keegan could see, she’d mixed the right shade for Ormsby’s vigorously fertilized lawn.

The woman was so intent, so unaware, that Keegan felt a stab of voyeuristic guilt for standing there. How long should he linger without announcing his presence? He cleared his throat and called down to her. “If I stand here long enough, will I end up in the picture?”

At the sound of his voice, the woman jumped, streaking a green diagonal across her painting. She looked up wide-eyed at Keegan and then down at her ruined work. Her reaction was so overwrought—like some silent-movie damsel—that Keegan didn’t know whether to laugh at her or pelt her with apologies.

“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“No, no,” the woman said in a good-natured fluster. She pressed her left hand below her throat and laughed raggedly while she caught her breath. With her right hand, she held the paintbrush off to one side, where it wouldn’t drip pigment on her painting or on her clothes. “It’s okay,” she said. “I just wasn’t expecting…” She let the sentence trail off and looked up at Keegan more keenly. “I’m a little jumpy these days.”

“It’s the weather,” Keegan told her. “Everybody’s jumpy. It’s not just you.” He took a step closer to the edge, so he’d be more visible to her, in all his harmlessness. “I’m staying in the cottage up here,” he told her. “Just for a few days.”