Silence wafted through the air of their space on the twenty-first floor, the absence of sound a sound all its own. Compton prided herself on not thinking in clichés, but there was no better way to express it: normally, at this hour, all hell would be breaking loose in this particular smidgen of the Upper West Side. The two older children—seven-year-old Lawrence and four-year-old Rose—would be home, expressing at top volume their many urgent concerns, while Mildred, the sitter, juggled fat Baby Walter on one hip while blundering through the kitchen trying to throw together a snack. Mildred, a widowed woman in her sixties, was perhaps not the most fastidious of childcare providers, but she adored the children. An enthusiastic crafter, she engaged them in the kind of inventive home art projects touted by Pinterest devotees, using hot glue guns and googly eyes and little manipulatives like macaroni pieces and buttons. No discarded toilet paper tube ever went unutilized around here. The downside: Mildred’s talents did not extend to tidying up afterward, so the place normally resembled the aftermath of an explosion at a preschool.

The children’s afternoon urge to yip infected the two Maltipoos, Edgar and Horace, who would be performing gravity-defying backflips in a bid for attention. Ellis would be sequestered in his study, simultaneously drinking a scotch, working on his manuscript, and fuming at the soon-to-open financial markets in Asia, making a brave foray into the main body of the apartment from time to time with increasingly agitated demands for everyone to please bring it down a couple of notches. In short: bedlam.

Bedlam was the appropriate word. Compton had looked it up: the term derived from an old-school English lunatic asylum called Bethlem Royal Hospital, Bedlam for short, and it referred to a place of prevalent uproar and confusion, for which the Winfield-Compton residence certainly qualified. But it was also appropriate because, aside from her, everyone else in the home possessed an early-twentieth-century English-asylum-sounding name. Mildred, Edgar, Horace, Ellis, Lawrence, Walter, Rose. Even the doorman was named Frederick. You almost expected Noël Coward to burst through the door in a smoking jacket, spouting something cheeky.

“Mildred?” she called. “Lawrence? Rose?”

Silence.

Mindful of the time, Compton finished loading her carry-on and then trotted to Ellis’s study. Empty. A quick check of the kids’ rooms revealed them to be empty as well. She returned to the study, searching for the datebook Ellis sometimes still used. Had she forgotten he had a work event?