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of his head.
    Aunt Gretchen? Even the servants had pet names. I imagined a legion of gardeners, chauffeurs, housekeepers, and parlor maids eating below the stairs.
    O N THE WAY out, passing the painting of Nate Erikson over the fireplace, I said to Claude “Is that a self-portrait?”
    “No.”
    I waited to hear who the artist was, but he just kept on walking.
    Outside on the grass, Bianca attacked me. “Why didn’t you tell me you were married to Colin Fitzhugh? I just thought you were—” She stopped abruptly and looked over at the oak leaves that had started to turn color.
    What could she say? That she had assumed, from my shabby jeans and untamed hair, I was one of the great unwashed, one of the masses born to serve people like her? She must have thought she was in Merrie Olde England.
    I took advantage of her misstep. “You said that what happened to your father wasn’t an accident.”
    She opened her mouth, then closed it. Her coral lips were as vivid as they had been before lunch, and I realized there were some lipsticks that didn’t disappear as soon as you put them on. “Did I say that? I guess I did. I just get so frustrated with my family sometimes. Claude especially is ready to move on. He doesn’t seem to realize that when you lose a child you can’t just ‘move on.’ ”
    “She was your daughter?” I heard how shocked I sounded.
    “Morgan. That was her name.” She jerked her head toward the studio and we started walking. “This has been the worst year of my life. First my husband in March, and now this. Oh—shit.” I turned to see what had happened and saw streams of tears running down her pale face. “I’m like a goddamn sprinkler system. Everything sets me off. It’s a wonder I can even get out of bed in the morning.”
    “I’m so sorry.” I wanted to put my arm around her, hug her shoulder, let her know how much I felt for her. Yet I sensed she didn’t want to be touched.
    She pulled a tissue from her pants pocket and pressed it against one eye, then the other, the way you would try and keep a wound from bleeding. “You know my book of poems? I’m writing it in her memory. For her. I don’t usually write kids’ poems, but—it’s all that keeps me going these days.” She gave a sniff, loud in the stillness, and touched the tissue to her nose. “Nights are the worst. I’ll sit and go over and over it trying to figure out how it could have happened. Morgan hated water, we could never get her near the pool. I tried to put a bathing suit on her once and she screamed. It was as if she knew something terrible would happen.”
    Her words stirred an answering sadness in me, rattled the doorknob to a room that had been locked as firmly as Nate Erikson’s studio, but for a lot longer.
    “Do they think your father had a heart attack?”
    “No. Nothing like that showed up in the autopsy. He was sixty-seven, but he had a whole health regimen, lifting weights and swimming laps before anyone else was up. Morgan liked to get up early too. Aunt Gretchen would take her for a walk or let her help in the kitchen.”
    Aunt Gretchen was a busy lady.
    Bianca put the tissue back in her pocket. “The weirdest thing was this bruise on my father’s forehead.” She was more composed now, not talking about her child. “It was horrible the way—while we were waiting for the ambulance and Claude was trying to give him CPR—this dark mark started to spread across his forehead. It was like something supernatural, like a photo developing. It almost looked like a cross. ” Bianca shivered in a breeze that had kicked up out of nowhere.
    The mark of Cain. Or ashes from Ash Wednesday, the symbol of repentance and loss. “How did the police explain that?”
    “They didn’t. I mean, they said he must have crashed into the side of the pool. That something distracted him, maybe Morgan falling in.”
    We had reached the bottom of the hill and she turned toward her cottage. “I didn’t mean to dump all