Chapter 2 - The Snow on the Porch
The stone flagstones of the porch were glazed with half an inch of clear rime.
I laid Piper down not on the bare rock, but across the cedar bench where Brooke usually kept her bronze garden urns. I stripped my trench coat off with one violent jerk of my shoulders, wrapping the wool lining around my daughter’s chest, tucking her hands against my own throat. Her skin was burning to the touch—that false, feverish heat of the poisoned—yet she was shivering so hard her teeth were clicking like dice in a leather cup.
"Breathe, Piper," I whispered, pressing my mouth to her ear. "Deep. Through the nose. It's cold air, baby. It's clean. Take it in."
She didn't open her eyes. Her fingers, stiff as dry twigs, hooked into the collar of my flannel shirt. "The... the shoes, Mama," she croaked. The sound was like two dry shingles rubbing together. "Mr. Henderson’s hunting boots. She said... she said if I didn't get the clay out of the welt, I couldn't have the broth. But the broth smelled like copper. It smelled like the basement."
"Hush," I said. "The shoes are done. Everything is done."
Beside us, the porch had become a triage ward for the blind.
Thorne had Marianne propped against the fieldstone wall. The old doctor had his fingers pressed into the groove of her neck, his own breath coming in ragged white plumes that smelled of tobacco and sour bile. "Eighty," he muttered, staring at the gray sky where the first flakes of the night storm were beginning to fall. "Pulse is eighty, but it's bounding. Like a water hammer. God in heaven... Clare, how long was that boiler running like that?"
"Since three," I said, looking through the open door where the smoke was now drifting out in gray, horizontal ribbons. "She called me at three from the landline. She said Piper was resting. She said she had built a fire in the hearth to keep the chill off the front rooms."
"There is no hearth in the front room," Thorne said, his voice dropping into the flat, gravelly register of his office. "Only the decorative gas logs. Those run on the auxiliary flue."
"I know," I said.
Down on the snow-covered gravel of the circular drive, four cars had their doors hanging open. Guests were vomiting into the drifts, their dark evening coats stained with gray slush. One man—a junior partner from the bank where Brooke kept her escrow accounts—had crawled into the back seat of his Lexus and was simply lying there with his feet hanging out into the snow, groaning every time he drew a breath.
Brooke came out onto the porch last.
She hadn't taken a coat. She had picked up a silver fox stole from the hall table, but she hadn't wrapped it around her shoulders; she held it by the snout, dragging the tail across the frozen flagstones behind her like a dead rodent. Her slippers were soaked through, the green velvet black with ice water.
"It was an accident," she said to Thorne. She didn't look at me. She addressed the doctor with that peculiar, shrill brightness she used when she was chairing the library committee. "The dampener must have slipped. The boy who came to clean the chimneys in October said the masonry was old. I told Richard to call the oil company on Tuesday, didn't I, Richard?"
Richard was sitting on the lowest step of the porch, his elbows on his knees, his forehead pressed against the iron railing. His spectacles had fallen into the rhododendrons. He didn't answer her. He was weeping, the tears freezing on his cheeks before they reached his chin.
"Richard!" Brooke’s voice rose an octave, sharp enough to cut lard. "Tell Dr. Thorne what the technician said about the draft!"
"The technician didn't tape the batteries, Brooke," I said.
The porch went very quiet, except for the long, low whistle of the wind through the hemlocks.
Thorne slowly turned his head. His eyes, still watery from the fumes, narrowed until the loose skin around them puckered. "What did you say, Clare?"
"The hallway unit," I said, holding Piper’s head against my ribs as she began to cough—a deep, wet, barking sound that brought up gray mucus onto the wool of my sleeve. "The Kidde digital unit by the pantry. The cover was unlatched. The cells were removed and set on the baseboard. Both terminals wrapped in two-inch electrical masking. The kind Richard keeps in the red metal cabinet behind the snowblower."
Brooke’s hand tightened on the fox stole until the little glass eyes of the pelt clicked against her signet ring. "She’s lying. She’s trying to build a case. She’s been trying to take this house since Father’s funeral."
"I have the photograph," I said, pulling my phone from my hip pocket with my free hand.
I had taken it before I touched Piper. I had learned that twelve years ago in the county probate court: If Brooke is in the room, document the floor before you look at the ceiling. The screen was cracked across the corner, but the image was clear enough in the gray porch light—the open white hatch, the empty red recess, and the two copper-topped cylinders resting in the dust below, the blue tape unmistakable against the yellowed pine.
Thorne reached out with a trembling hand, took the phone from my fingers, and held it three inches from his nose.
He didn't hand it back to me. He handed it to his wife, who had managed to pull her knees up to her chest.
"Brooke," Thorne said, his voice dropping below the wind until it sounded like a heavy iron wheel turning over stones. "You told me at five o'clock that the girl was delirious from an ear infection. You told me she was hallucinating about gas because her father died in an engine fire."
"She was!" Brooke screamed. The silk under her arms had ripped, a dark crescent of purple showing where the seam had given way. "She was screaming about a smell! She was trying to open the parlor windows while the caterers were setting the silver! She would have let twenty degrees of frost into the dining room! She was ruining everything!"
"She wasn't hallucinating," Thorne said. He stood up, using the stone balustrade to steady his old legs. His knees cracked with a dry pop. "My carboxyhemoglobin is at least twenty-five percent right now. If we had stayed for the roast, Clare would have found fourteen corpses in that dining room tomorrow morning."
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He looked down at Brooke, his face hardening into the gray expression he wore when he signed the blue death certificates at the county morgue.
"You didn't have an accident, Brooke," the doctor said. "You had a gathering."
