She checked the cabinet over the built-in wine cooler, but the box of Pulmicort was empty, just as she had dreaded. She had to go down to the basement pantry. At the top of the curling, carpeted stairs, she paused and pulled from her bag her black enameled crucifix. She descended with it at her side just in case. From the bottom step, the basement appeared very dark for that time of day. She flipped up every switch on the panel and stood listening after the lights came on.

They called it the basement, but it was actually another fully appointed floor of their home. They had installed a home theater downstairs, complete with theater chairs and a reproduction popcorn cart. Another subroom was jammed with toys and game tables; another was the laundry where Mrs. Guild kept up with the family’s clothing and linens. There was also a fourth bathroom, the pantry, and a recently installed temperature-controlled wine cellar. It was European in style, the workers having broken through the basement foundation to create a pure dirt floor.

The heat came rumbling on with a sound like that of somebody kicking the furnace—the actual working guts of the basement were hidden behind a door somewhere—and the sound nearly sent Neeva through the ceiling. She turned back to the stairs, but the boy needed his nebulizer medicine, his color wasn’t good.

She crossed the basement determinedly, and was between two leather theater chairs, halfway to the folding door of the pantry, when she noticed the stuff stacked up against the windows. Why it had seemed so dark down there in the middle of the day: toys and old packing cartons were arranged in a tower up the wall, obscuring the small windows, with old clothes and newspapers snuffing out every ray of the day’s sun.

Neeva stared, wondering who had done this. She hurried to the pantry, finding Keene’s asthma medicine stacked on the same steel-wire shelf as Joan’s vitamins and tubs of candy-colored Tums. She pulled down two long boxes of the plastic vials, ignoring the rest of the food in her haste, rushing away without closing the door.

Starting back across the basement, she noticed that the door to the laundry room was ajar. Something about that door, which was never left open, represented the disruption of normal order that Neeva felt so palpably in this house.

She saw rich and dark dirt stains on the plush carpeting then, spaced almost like footprints. Her eye followed them to the wine cellar door she had to pass in order to reach the stairs. She saw soil smeared on the door handle.

Neeva felt it as she neared the wine cellar door. From that earthen room, a tomblike blackness. A soullessness. And yet—not a coldness. Instead, a contradictory warmth. A heat, lurking and seething.