A branch scraped against one of the shutters, and then, from the far end of the room, he heard a rustling of fabric and what sounded like a fart. Desmond peered down the narrow room to the shadowy far end where Lorna had dumped the furniture ousted from the living room during the floral makeover. He set down the cases and flipped a switch by the door. A coneshaped wall lamp cast a beam of faint, yellow light into the gloom and lit up the abandoned chairs and end tables. He heard another sound—a groan, he was almost certain. He adjusted the lamp so the light shone first on one of the windows and then on a high-backed chair. There, hunched over and mumbling, sat an old woman in a floral housedress. She straightened up, shielded her eyes against the light, and barked out two or three unintelligible words.

“Excuse me?” he said, hoping he didn’t sound as stunned as he felt.

“Lower it,” she commanded.

He readjusted the light and maneuvered his way to the back of the room. “I’m sorry,” he said, squatting down until they were at eye level. “I didn’t see you sitting here.”

She gazed at him through a pair of square eyeglasses. “Who?” she asked. “Who did?”

“Who did . . . what?”

Perhaps he’d woken her up. One of her hands was wrapped around a coffee mug she had resting on the arm of the chair. She lifted it to her mouth and took a sip. “What noise?” she asked.

“Noise?”

“What is it?”

“Ah. It’s rain,” he said. “There’s a storm on the way, and it’s started to rain.”

She nodded, and her whole body bobbed forward from the waist. “Oh, yeah. Sophia.”

Sophia? And then he remembered: the name of the storm.

“Same crap,” she said. “Can’t trust anyone.”

Whatever that meant. “No, you can’t. You know, you might be more comfortable in the house. I think Lorna’s baked some cookies for you.”

Margo—for surely this was Pauline Anderton’s senile sister—scoffed at this comment and stuck out her tongue. “She makes lousy cookies. I wanted pie, but she wasn’t in the mood for pie.”

There was a wooden folding chair leaning against the wall. Desmond opened it up and set it on the floor across from Margo. She would be in the neighborhood of eighty-three now. She looked tiny, sunk into the cushions of the chair, but her face was so smooth, her skin so pink and translucent, she appeared to have entered a second infancy. She was wearing a faded white and blue flowered housedress with a smock over it. Although “wearing” didn’t seem the most apt word, since it looked as if the clothes had been buttoned onto her with little thought as to whether or not they fit.

“We visited your old house,” Desmond said.

She opened her eyes a bit wider. “What old house?”