Mail? What mail? I check my phone but find no new e-mail. I go out of the house and down to the mailbox outside the gate. Next to a flyer for a sushi-delivery place, I find a thick blue envelope that reminds me of the love letters she used to send a lifetime ago. There are no stamps. I tear open the envelope. Annabelle might have put it there herself yesterday afternoon, though more likely it was delivered by messenger. I read the first sentence: Richard, if you are reading this letter, it means that Alexis DeVille has killed me.

It takes me an inordinate length of time to read the three pages. The contents leave me shocked and upset. It is a postmortem confession. And, in her inimitable way, it is also a love letter. It ends: Now you have the fate of our family in your hands. You are the only one left with the strength and the courage to protect it, to save our son.

18

Night and the Maiden

1.

The moped’s engine had conked out. Looking over the handlebars, I was pedaling furiously, standing on the pedals as though I were competing in the Tour de France carrying a fifty-kilo weight.

From the street, Villa Fitzgerald looked like a bunker. Despite the name, F. Scott Fitzgerald had never lived there, but old myths die hard. Fifty meters before I reached the house, I abandoned the moped on the pavement and stepped over the railing that ran along the shore. In this part of Cap d’Antibes, the golden sandy beaches gave way to a rugged, inaccessible coastline—steep rocky bluffs sculpted by the mistral, cliffs that tumbled into the sea. I scrabbled over the rocks, risking life and limb, and climbed the steep ridge that backed up to the garden of the villa.

I stepped onto the polished-concrete deck that surrounded the long cobalt-blue swimming pool. It extended as far as the steep staircase carved into the rock face that led down to a small pier. Clinging to the cliff, the Villa Fitzgerald almost literally had its toes in the water; it was one of the modernist houses built during the Roaring Twenties, with art deco and Mediterranean touches. The lime-washed geometric façade was surmounted by a flat roof terrace that was sheltered by a pergola. At this hour of the day, sky and sea merged in a single, shimmering blue.

Beneath an arcade was a covered patio. I crept around the villa until I found a half-open patio door, then slipped into the house.

Except for the fact that the view was of the Mediterranean rather than the Hudson River, the living room looked much like my loft in Tribeca, a minimalist space where every detail was carefully curated. The kind of interior you might see in Architectural Digest. The library contained many of the same books that mine did, reflecting the same breadth of culture—classical, literary, international.