Chapter 3
Siobhan came at noon on the fifteenth with a tray of something under foil and did not knock.
She came through the kitchen door the way she had come through it for six years, put the tray on the island, looked at the plywood over the morning room window and the glass still in the corners of the hall, and said, "Right. Get your coat."
"I'm not getting my coat."
"There's a bed over the kitchen. It's made. It's been made since July, I never took the sheets off it." Siobhan had her keys still in her hand. "Get your coat."
"Siobhan."
"Imogen. You slept in that room last night."
"I didn't sleep."
"That's my point," Siobhan said.
Imogen stood with her back to the sink and her hands around a mug of something Siobhan had made her without asking.
Outside, a man from the glass company was measuring the morning room window for the third time, because the first two numbers had been wrong, because nothing in that house was a standard size.
"If I leave," she said, "she wins."
"Who wins? Fiona's gone. Fiona left at eight this morning, you told me that on the phone."
"Not her."
Siobhan put the keys down.
"Say it, then."
"My mother," Imogen said.
Augusta had called at 7:40, which meant Augusta had heard from somebody by seven, which meant the whole thing had gone around the point before the glass company opened.
"I've had Hester on," her mother had said. "She had it from the Wetherills, who had it from somebody at the barracks. Is it true there were two of them?"
"Yes."
"In the house."
"Yes."
A pause with something in it.
"Your room is made up," Augusta said.
And Imogen had stood in the guest wing hallway in yesterday's sweater and heard, underneath four ordinary words, something she could not name and did not like — not concern, exactly.
Not triumph either; her mother did not do triumph.
Something more like a woman putting a long-planned thing into motion at last.
"I'm all right here," Imogen had said.
"Don't be absurd."
"I'm all right here, Mother."
"You are in a house with a broken window and a man who —" Augusta had stopped. Perfectly. A full stop, mid-sentence, the way she had been stopping mid-sentence for fifty years. "Your room is made up," she said again, and hung up.
"So don't go to your mother's," Siobhan said. "Come to mine. That's not a win for anybody, that's a mattress."
"It's eight minutes down the road."
"That's the beauty of it."
"It's eight minutes down the road and there's a dining room with forty people in it every night and by Thursday every one of them knows I'm sleeping over the kitchen." Imogen set the mug down. "And then it isn't a mattress. Then it's a statement. You know it is."
Siobhan looked at her for a while.
"You were in a pantry for four hours," she said.
"I'm aware."
"With your hand on a door."
"I was there, Siobhan."
"And you're going to sleep down the hall from the man who let the door shut. Tonight."
"He didn't let it shut." It came out fast, and Imogen heard it come out fast, and hated it. "It's automatic. Ninety seconds and it goes. It's not a — he was turning around."
"Okay."
"It's how the room is built."
"Okay," Siobhan said, "but I notice you're the one saying it."
The detective came back on the Monday and asked her to walk him through it.
He was about fifty, in a jacket that had been good eleven years ago, and he had a notebook he barely used. He said his name twice and Imogen did not retain it either time, which she found out later was a thing that happens.
"Whenever you're ready," he said. "Start where you started."
So she started at the sink.
That was the first surprise: how small it sounded. She had been living inside that night for seventy-two hours the way you live inside a house, and out loud, to a man with a notebook, the whole of it came to about ninety seconds of speech. I came down for water. I heard glass. The alarm went off.
"And then you went upstairs."
"I went for the front stairs. There was a man in the hall so I came back and went up the back way."
"You saw him."
"For about half a second."
"Anything about him?"
"A jacket," Imogen said. "Something long in one hand. I'm sorry."
"Don't do that," the detective said, without looking up. "Everybody does that. You were hiding from him in the dark, ma'am, you weren't taking a witness statement."
They went up the back stairs together. He asked her to stand where she had stood on the landing and she did it, and he stood beside her and looked at the pine panel for a while and said nothing about it at all.
Then they came back down and he asked to see the pantry.
"It's through there," Imogen said.
"Can you take me in?"
"It's the second door on the—"
"Mrs. Severin." He stopped in the middle of her kitchen. "You don't have to. I'll say that plain. But I've got to photograph the inside of that room and I'd rather you came in with me than stood out here listening to me do it."
Imogen stood with her back to the sink.
She had not been through that doorway since Saturday morning. She had told the housekeeper to leave the silver. She had walked past the opening perhaps forty times in three days and had developed, without noticing, a way of crossing the kitchen that took her wide of it.
"Yes," she said. "All right."
It was worse than she had prepared for and it was over faster.
The pantry was eleven feet by four and smelled of dust and the polish nobody had used, and the shelves were where the shelves were, and there was a mark at about shoulder height on the paint of the door where she had been leaning against it.
The detective photographed the latch. He took eleven pictures of a piece of brass that had been painted over before either of them was born.
"This doesn't lock," he said.
"No."
"Did you know that at the time?"
"Yes."
He wrote that down. It was one of about four things he wrote down all morning, and it would turn up, eighteen months later, in a courtroom in September, in a sentence that would take a jury apart.
At the door he stopped.
"Can I say something that isn't police business?"
"Go on."
"My mother-in-law's got one of these rooms," he said.
"Panic room, safe room, whatever they're calling them now.
Put it in after a thing on the news." He put his notebook away.
"I've never once been in a house with one of those where the person who ended up outside it wasn't the person who made the coffee. "
Imogen looked at him.
"That's a remarkable thing to say to a woman in her own kitchen."
"It is," the detective agreed. "My wife says I shouldn't. She's usually right."
He left at half eleven. She stood in the hall listening to the car go down the drive, and then went back into the kitchen and looked at the pantry doorway for a long moment, and did not go in, and did not go in again for twenty-nine days.
The lawyers started Tuesday.
Not Imogen's. She did not have a lawyer on Tuesday and had not thought about having one, which she would look back on later with a kind of wonder.
Cormac's started, because Cormac's always started, because there were four of them on a retainer that cost more per year than the institution paid her in six.
What they started with was a letter to her.
It came by courier at ten in the morning to a house where she was standing in the kitchen in her husband's sweater, which she thought was so stupid it was almost funny, and it was eleven pages, and the first two were the ones that mattered.
Winterbourne. The land, the house, the boathouse, the right-of-way. Conveyed to Imogen Severin, sole, outright, free of the marital estate and free of anything anyone might later try to attach to it.
Executed Monday. Recorded Monday afternoon at the town clerk's, which she confirmed herself on Wednesday because she did not believe it.
Seventy-two hours after the door closed. Less.
There was a second letter behind it, one page, from the senior partner, and it was addressed to her lawyer, a person who did not exist. It said that Mr. Severin had instructed the firm to take no adverse position on any matter she might raise, in any forum, at any time, and that they were not to seek reciprocal undertakings.
It said the firm had advised against this in the strongest possible terms and that the instruction stood.
Imogen read it twice and then took it out to the terrace in the cold and read it again.
He had not mentioned it.
That was the part. He had signed it Monday, and recorded it Monday, and on Monday evening he had carried the plywood in from the truck and asked her whether the boiler man should come before or after the glass, and had not said one word.
She sat on a cold stone bench for twenty minutes with eleven pages in her lap.
Then she went inside and found him in the study and said, "Why?"
He looked up. He had been on the phone and he put it face-down.
"Because I'm not going to be one of those men," he said.
"That isn't an answer."
"It's the whole answer."
"You gave me a house."
"I gave you back a house," Cormac said. "It's on your family's water. I bought it with money and you're the reason they sold it to me, and everybody on that point knows it. I've known it for six years."
He said it flatly. No performance in it. He looked, if anything, embarrassed.
"You should get a lawyer," he said. "A real one, not somebody's cousin. I'll pay for it and I'll have no contact with them."
"Cormac."
"Imogen, please get a lawyer."
She went back upstairs.
She would think about that conversation a great deal, later, from a long way away.
Not because he lied in it. He did not lie in it.
But because it was the first time she caught herself doing the arithmetic in the other direction — adding him up instead of subtracting — and she did not notice that she had started.
Her mother called it "very shrewd."
"It's a house," Imogen said.
"It is eleven acres of the Tillinghast point and a deed in your name and a firm on Weybosset Street instructed not to fight you," Augusta said. "Nobody does that."
"He did it."