She exhaled through her nose. Her brow furrowed.

“I had a client once who called me after he committed a crime. Hit and run. He’d been drinking. He thought he’d killed the other driver.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him to tell me where he was. That way if he hung up, I could call 911 and tell them where to look for him. After that I tried talking him into turning himself in to the police immediately, that a couple years in jail was better than eternity in a grave. Thank God he listened.”

“Can you think of any other reason Father Murran might have called you?”

“Maybe,” she said.

“What?”

“I can’t say.”

“Can you give me a hint?”

“No.”

She hit a button on the keypad. The iron gate started to close.

She turned and walked back toward the house.

“Ms. Sutherlin? Nora? Nora?”

“I told you I was a sadist, Mr. Tremont. Do you believe me now?” she called to him without looking back. Then she was in the house with the door closed behind her. The queen was back in her castle, the knight-errant on the wrong side of the drawbridge.

He believed her.

Chapter Six

Nora kept a mental list of men who somehow managed to get even more handsome after turning fifty than they were before. George Clooney was on that list. Christopher Plummer, of course, her personal favorite. Two of the men on her list she’d had the pleasure of sleeping with. Alas, Captain von Trapp wasn’t one of the two.

Standing in the doorway of Céleste’s pretty pink ballet-themed bedroom, Nora watched as one of those men on her list read a bedtime story to his three-year-old daughter. A scene from a fairy tale: the handsome papa with the rakish dark hair only beginning to show the gray, and the little girl enraptured with the story or, far more likely, with her father and his tender voice.

The girl was small, and so was her room. But it was a work of art in miniature—pink-and-white striped wallpaper, white wainscoting, white princess bed, a barre and mirror on one wall because Papa could not tell his baby ballerina “no.” On the nightstand, a milk glass lamp with a lace lampshade was on, bathing the room in the softest gentlest light, and next to it sat a framed photograph of famed ballerina Misty Copland leaping like a gazelle in a white tutu, grace and power incarnate. Céleste’s idol right after her Papa.

“Maître Corbeau, sur un arbre perché, Tenait en son bec un fromage…” Kingsley read aloud.

The Fox and The Crow. An ancient story warning of the dangers of believing your own reviews. The consequences could be dire. One might lose one’s cheese, and Nora had enough German ancestry in her to consider this not a fable, but a horror story.

Anything but the cheese.

It would have been sublime—the handsome papa, the adoring little girl, the picture-perfect bedroom—except for one thing. Nora was in trouble. Again.