“She was so upset that she made herself sick. The emotion seemed to bring out the worst in her. Some . . . darkness. She got mean. She threatened to kill me, to kill our father. Her behavior turned erratic, and I began locking my door at night. Then, one day, she collapsed at school and had to be rushed to the emergency room. The doctors said there was something wrong with her brain.”

“Like Agatha’s?” I heard a note of probing defiance in my voice.

“Very like Agatha’s,” she said. If she was annoyed by my tone, she didn’t show it. “In fact, what I haven’t told you is that Agatha’s condition is not the result of a bacterial infection. It’s hereditary. She has what Lily had.” Then she took a deep, shaky breath. “I pray every night that treatment has advanced enough to save her from the fate that my sister met.”

We were following the path past all the grave sites.

“There have been advances, though, right?”

“Yes, but I’ll never stop being afraid,” Laura said. “And that’s why Agatha can’t be allowed to ‘wake up,’ as she did last night. I think sometimes the greatest tragedy of the disease isn’t that it killed Lily—it’s that it made her believe we were conspiring against her. She and Tom Albright were in love, you know. They were planning to be married after they graduated from high school. It was such a big deal, because to marry an Albright would have been unheard-of only a generation before mine. But Dad was convinced that it was a good match. Tom’s loyalty was absolute. He would have brought that into the family and done whatever he could to continue the legacy. It doesn’t do to stand on tradition for its own sake, Margot.”

Sure, sure, great advice. I’ll remember that the next time I know someone who’s about to sully the family name by marrying a mere business manager.

“Did Lily have a cat?” I asked. “I—I found something in the garden.”

“Oh, the cat,” Laura said ruefully. “That cat. A feral stray that Lily had basically kidnapped from a barn near our school. She clawed and bit and would leap out of the shadows, so I was afraid to walk across the room. She’d latch on to your ankle—” She laughed a little at the memory. “It was like living with a monster. I detested that cat.”

“What happened to it?”

She shot me a sideways glance, as if trying to gauge whether to say it. “Lily drowned it.”

I felt my shoulders tense up.