Gwen’s good boots are caked with mud and she’s freezing. “I can see why you and Dad never come back here. It’s disgusting.”

March’s shoulders hurt from carrying her suitcase, or maybe it’s just tension in her neck. This old dirt road is all uphill. Probably she should have taken Route 22 and made a left at what people in town call the devil’s corner. If Richard hadn’t been in the middle of a term and had come with her, she might have gone that way, but she’s not ready to face that piece of road with only Gwen for company. Not yet. She has told both Richard and herself that the past is the past-what happened once doesn’t matter anymore-but if this were true, would she feel as though someone had just run an ice cube down her skin in a straight line?

“I think I see the house,” Gwen announces.

Ken Helm, the handyman, was the one who found Mrs. Dale. He knocked at the door after delivering the bricks needed to repair the chimney early on Monday evening, when the sky was the color of a velvet ribbon falling over the hills. At first he’d thought no one was home, but then the wind had come up and pushed the door open, and there Judith was, in the chair by the fireplace, no longer with us. March’s father’s old friend and partner, Bill Justice, known throughout the commonwealth as the Judge, told March all of this when he phoned the next morning. At least there were no hospital stays, no pain, no heroic measures. And yet this information brings March no comfort, especially because she believes that Bill Justice, who has been an attorney for fifty years and a judge for thirty of those years, was covering the mouthpiece of his telephone in an attempt to conceal the fact that he was crying.

“That’s definitely a chimney.” Gwen squints against the darkness. “I see it now. And there’s a gate.”