“When I was little, my mother took me downtown. A day for just the girls, she called it. We had a picnic in the Common, went to museums, had tea at the Ritz, rode the swan boats in the Public Garden. It was a perfect day.” She looked out the window. “Around three o’clock, we came upon this child. He was my age—probably ten or eleven at the time. He was Chinese and crying because someone had thrown a rock from a passing school bus and hit him in the eye. And my mother, I’ll never forget this, held him to her chest and wept with him. Silently. The tears rolling off her cheekbones and the boy’s blood staining her blouse. That was my mother, Patrick.” She turned from the window. “She wept for strangers.”

“And you killed her because of that?”

“I didn’t kill her,” she hissed.

“No?”

“Her car broke down, you fuck! Get it? That wasn’t part of the plan. She wasn’t supposed to be with Trevor. She wasn’t supposed to die.”

She coughed loudly into her fist, sucked a harsh, liquid breath back into her body.

“It was a mistake,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You loved her.”

“Yes.”

“So her death hurt you,” I said.

“More than you could possibly imagine.”

“Good,” I said.

“Good that she died, or good that her dying hurt me?”

“Both,” I said.

The great cast-iron gates parted before us as we turned into Trevor Stone’s driveway. I drove through the opening, and the gates closed behind me and my lights arced up ahead of us through the carefully manicured bushes and shrubs, curled left as the white gravel driveway snaked around an oval lawn with an enormous birdbath in its center, then broke gracefully to the right onto the main drive. The house lay a hundred yards up, and we passed through a row of white oak on either side, the towering trees standing proud and unyielding like sentries spaced at five-yard intervals.

When we reached the cul-de-sac at the end of the road, Desiree said, “Keep going. There,” and pointed. I drove around the fountain and it lit up at the same time, yellow streams of light coursing through sudden eruptions of frothy water. A bronze nymph floated above it all, twisting in slow revolutions, dead eyes on a cherub’s face watching me as I passed.

The road doglegged at the corner of the house and I followed it back through a stretch of pine to a converted barn.

“Park it there,” Desiree said, and pointed at a clearing to the left of the barn.

I pulled over and shut off the engine.