Downstairs isn’t much better. Everything is clean, but Maggie creates clutter just by walking into a room. Her sweater lies on one chair, the newspaper articles she always means to read on another; books are piled by her easy chair; the shades she pulled up in the morning are always uneven; the slippers she can’t find are tucked between the chair and the hassock. It’s a real home.

Maggie wouldn’t meet Martha Stewart’s idea of good housekeeping, but she’s got plenty going for her. She retired from teaching to raise me, and still tutors three kids every week. As I found out through experience, she can make learning a joyful thing.

But when I went inside and told her my news, she let me down. I could see the look of disapproval on her face as soon as I mentioned the Carrington name.

“Kay, you never told me you were thinking of asking them to let you hold the literacy fund-raiser in that place.”

Maggie has lost a couple of inches in height in the last few years. She jokes that she’s disappearing, but as I looked down at her, she suddenly seemed very formidable. “Maggie, it’s a great idea,” I protested. “I’ve been to a couple of events in private homes, and they’ve been sellouts. The Carrington mansion is bound to be a big draw. We’re going to charge three hundred dollars a ticket. We wouldn’t get that anywhere else.”

Then I realized that Maggie was worried, genuinely worried. “Maggie, Peter Carrington couldn’t have been nicer when I met with him to talk about the event.”

“You didn’t tell me you saw him.”

Why hadn’t I told her? Maybe because I knew instinctively that she would not approve of my going there, and then, when he turned me down, there was no need to talk about it. Maggie was convinced that Peter Carrington was responsible for Susan Althorp’s disappearance, and that he may very well have been involved in his wife’s drowning. “Maybe he didn’t push his wife into the pool, Kay,” she had told me, “but I bet if he saw her fall in, he didn’t make it his business to save her. And as for Susan, he was the one who drove her home. I’d bet anything she sneaked out and met him after her parents thought she was going to bed.”