It is getting colder now—an arctic breeze insinuates itself through the coarsely woven throw blanket I wear like a cape.

“Her husband just let her do that?”

“He was preoccupied with work. Or maybe he didn’t care.” I shrug. “Or maybe he did, but she overruled him.”

Don laughs—a mean sound. “Right,” he says. “So what about the trouble, then?”

“Over the course of the construction, which lasted for some eighteen years, three men died,” I tell him.

“Damn,” he says, sounding impressed. “What happened?”

“One was crushed by falling timber, which broke his back but didn’t immediately kill him, because the ground was so soft; instead, it pushed his face into the earth until he suffocated, or drowned, in the wet soil. The next death, however, was what really set Catherine off.”

“Set her off how?” Don asks, and I am pleased by the interest in his voice. It is a story I don’t often get to tell.

“They were adding on the third level, which hadn’t been planned in the original blueprints, and one of the men came down the stairs babbling about how they shouldn’t have built here, that they’d gone too far. It seemed obvious—they already knew this was bad land to build on, being so wet and soft and prone to flooding. But the man insisted there was another reason. He suggested that in all their building, they had hammered a hole through the world. Then, according to the accounts of the other men, he took up his hammer and bashed his own brains in.”

Don looks at me with a measure of amused disbelief. “Gruesome.”

“Yes.”

We wend our way through the darkness, turning and turning until the cold hits with a bitter, shark-tooth bite, and I push open the door to the laundry room. My breath exhales as a faint mist in the moonlight.

Here is the culprit: the tarp I taped over the broken window has blown aside, flapping gently and letting in the outdoors through the gaping, jagged hole in the glass. Winter air frosts the tiny room.

“That’ll be it,” says Don.

“Well done, detective.”

“What happened?” He approaches the window to inspect it. “Didn’t anybody ever tell you not to play ball in the house?”

“My mother and I can get very rowdy.”

He pulls the tarp back over the window and fixes the tape securely in place. “Should hold for now. I’d better measure this window, go get a new pane. Can’t just leave it like this through the winter. Jesus, what would you people do without me?”

I ignore the question. “I’m sure my mother would appreciate that.”

He finishes pressing the tape into place.

Satisfied, I turn to leave, but Don grabs me by the wrist, forcibly keeping me in place. His grip digs into my bones. He is too close; I can smell his stale breath. “You didn’t explain why they destroyed her portrait. Why they called her Mad Catherine.”

I twist my wrist free and hold it to my chest with my other hand. He doesn’t seem at all bothered or contrite. I think if I try to walk away now, he’ll grab me again, harder this time. Don is used to getting what he wants.