We headed straight down the servants’ stairwell and came out by a small door that led off one corner of the kitchen. Above us, something scratched the floor repeatedly. And then there was a thump, followed instantly by another from the other end.

We let ourselves out and followed the path along the back lawn as the sea grew still and quiet.

I took the keys I’d taken back from Desiree as we wound past the garden and the reconverted barn and stopped at my Porsche.

It was dark out, but there was a glow shining over the night from the stars above, and we stood by my car and looked up at it. Trevor Stone’s massive home shimmered in the glow, and I looked out at the flat swell of dark water to the place where it met the horizon and the sky.

“Look,” Angie said and pointed as a white asterisk of light shot across the dark sky, trailing embers, lunging toward a point beyond our view, but not making it. It shorted out two thirds of the way there and imploded into nothing as several stars around it seemed to watch without interest.

The wind that had been screaming off the ocean when I arrived had died. The night was impossibly still.

The first shot sounded like a firecracker.

The second sounded like communion.

We waited, but nothing replaced the gunshots but silence and the distant lapping of tired waves.

I opened Angie’s door and she climbed in, reached across, and pushed mine open as I came around.

We backed out and turned around, drove past the lighted fountain and the oak sentries, around the short minilawn with the frozen birdbath.

As the white gravel sucked under my grille, Angie produced a boxy remote control she’d taken from the house and pressed a button, and the great cast-iron gates with the family crest and the letters TS in the center parted like arms bidding us welcome or farewell, both gestures often seeming the same, depending on your perspective.

EPILOGUE

We didn’t hear what had happened until we got back from Maine.

The night we left Trevor’s we drove straight up the coast to Cape Elizabeth and checked into a small bungalow overlooking the ocean at a hotel that was surprised to see just about anyone up there before the spring thaw.

We didn’t read newspapers or watch TV or do much of anything except put up the Do Not Disturb sign and order room service and lie in bed in the morning and watch the late winter whitecaps churn in the Atlantic.

Desiree had shot her father in the stomach, and he’d fired a round through her chest. They lay there facing each other on the parquet floor as the blood leaked from their bodies and the surf lapped at the foundation of the home they’d shared for twenty-three years.