Frances had spoken of him only once, three years ago at Sue’s house when their afternoon tea had bled into cocktails and Sue’s housekeeper had taken all the children up to the bath. They were talking about their parents’ marriages, how they were trying to do things differently. Upstairs the children were shrieking. Audrey worried about them getting too wound up and hitting their heads on the edge of the tub. Frances said that her parents were divorced. Audrey had never known anyone with divorced parents. They split before the war, Frances said. In ’39, when she was three. She had no memory of them together. How awful, Elinor said. And Frances said, No, it was for the best. Her father was dangerous. He had aliases. A spy, Frances said. A double agent. Maybe a triple agent. Audrey wondered if she was making that up. A triple agent? Frances had heard him one time on the phone when she was very young, she said, speaking a foreign language. She didn’t know which one. Just that her father had turned into a different person. He had no idea I was in the room watching. His whole face changed when he spoke. My mother hadn’t let my sister and me see him again till we turned thirteen. Then we were allowed once a year to have lunch with him in a park in Maryland, an hour from our house. My mother made the lunch. Always the same thing, tomatoes and cream cheese with chives. There was never a scene. He came down a path and left the same way. He came to my wedding reception, briefly. Stood in the back. Didn’t make a toast or ask me to dance. I haven’t seen him since, she said.

“Papa?” Frances said in the vestibule, if you could call it that. It was more like the lobby of a small museum. Her voice echoed from all directions, magnifying the panic.

“In here,” came a voice, quiet, with a lilt of anticipation. Audrey followed it. The others—even Frances, who should have known the way sound traveled in her own house—were uncertain where it had come from. The lobby branched off in four directions, like four legs of a spider. Audrey moved down the back right leg into a den she’d never seen before.

Frances always entertained in bright rooms, the formal living room or the dining room or the sunroom beyond the kitchen, but he had set up the bridge table in here, in this small dark room. Audrey was aware of clutching her clutch, of the two beads of the clasp boring holes in her finger and thumb. He was counting the deck. He glanced up, down, immediately up again. The cards kept flowing fast through his hands. He smiled, eyes back down, shaking his head. “You made me lose count,” he said, barely audible.

The others caught up behind her.