I reached for the baseball bat I keep on hand for nights when I feel like imitating High Pockets Kelly. Hellida lit a candle. We found no one on the first floor, and so we took to the stairs, hugging the wall. I went first, my shadow flickering tall and fearsome in the candlelight. At the sight of the missing bannister, Hellida shook her head and muttered something Swedish. I wasn’t sure what she said, but it sounded like disappointment.

To be fair, most of what she said sounded like disappointment.

The first thing I noticed was that the nail that had been sticking out of the second-floor landing had worked its way out of the wood and was lying flat on the floor. The second thing I saw was that my father’s office had disappeared.

There was no door. No door frame. No nothing. In its place was a curiously ugly print, a color rendering of Napoleon, dejected after his defeat at Waterloo. The emperor sits in the back of his tent, his maps crumpled, his generals ignoring him to watch the battle. They are still optimistic, but he knows the end has come. He slumps, knees spread apart, stomach hanging forward like raw dough sliding off a counter. I had no idea what the picture meant, but I suspected it meant nothing.

I slammed my fist against the wall. It was as solid as brick.

“This is insane,” I said. “This is my goddamned house!”

“Oh, Gilda,” said Hellida. “Gilda, I told you.”

I hitched up my skirt, raised my leg high, and kicked the wall as hard as I could. I did it again and again, scuffing the paint and cracking my heel and doing nothing to ease the fury and fear and pain that sat on my chest like a boulder. I kicked until the heel of my boot snapped off, then I sank to the floor, too exhausted to cry. Hellida was gone.

At the base of the wall was a strip of bare wood, where I once sat on rainy days and peeled paint. I peeled a little bit more and flicked the chip down the hallway to land, silently, in the dust.

Hellida returned with a bottle of aquavit. She sat me on the landing and poured a stiff drink into a grimy teacup.

“To Marguerite Fournier,” I said. “She deserved better than she got.”

“Skål,” she said, and I answered joylessly. The silence was filled by a vision of the single dead eye of Margie Fournier. I took another slug of liquor, and it helped not at all.

“I could have helped her,” I said. “It was my intention. If I’d just had another few seconds, she’d still be alive.”

“Or you’d be dead, for the sake of a stranger.”

“It just happened so fast. Or it happened very slowly, and I was frozen. What am I doing wrong?”