I came home unexpectedly for christmas. I found my daughter sleeping on the floor by the door, wearing torn, worn-out clothes. My sister had used her to clean shoes and told the guests, "that's our crazy servant." I didn't scream. I just stepped forward and said six words... the room suddenly fell silent.

The volunteer fire department didn't arrive with sirens; they arrived with the heavy, low-gear growl of their Mack pumper grinding up the three-mile incline from the hollow.

The red lights didn't flash—Chief Miller had cut the beacons at the gate because the hill was black ice and he didn't want his rear end sliding into the stone pillars Brooke had installed to keep the milk trucks out. The truck’s headlamps cut through the gray swirling snow, illuminating the garden like an empty stage: the frozen boxwoods, the guests huddled under wool blankets fetched from the trunk of Thorne’s Cadillac, and the steady, greasy plume of yellow-gray smoke still pouring from the open front door of the estate.

Two EMTs in orange parkas came up the porch steps carrying an aluminum stretcher and an orange canvas bag of oxygen bottles. The younger one—a boy named Jesse whose mother had gone to school with me—dropped to his knees beside Piper without asking who she was.

The brass regulator on the green tank hissed. A clear plastic mask, wide enough to cover her chin and nose, came down over Piper’s face.

"Don't fight it, little bird," Jesse said, his fingers checking her radial pulse with a light, practiced touch. "Deep drinks. Just like you're sucking down a milk shake."

Piper’s hands came up, her gray fingernails clawing at the clear vinyl. "No... no, the closet. She'll put me back in the fruit cellar. Mom... the key is in her pocket. She has the brass key."

I knelt in the snow beside Jesse, my bare knees sinking through the crust until they hit the frozen stone. "I’m here, Piper. Look at my coat. Look at the buttons."

I had five horn buttons on my jacket, each one carved with an anchor—an old navy surplus coat my father had given me when I took the job at the logistics yard. Piper’s fingers found the bottom one, her thumb running over the scratched horn until her breathing began to slow, the plastic mask fogging and clearing with a regular, wet rhythm: huff, shhh, huff, shhh.

"Eighty-four percent on room air," the second EMT called out, his thumb on the portable pulse-oximeter. "Pulse is one-thirty. We need to transport. Now. The county hospital has the hyperbaric unit running for the furnace fire down in the hollow, but they’ve only got two tubes."

"Take her," I said.

"Clare," Jesse muttered, looking over his shoulder at the main house. "The chief is inside with the four-gas meter. He said the basement is over twelve hundred parts per million. That’s... that’s instant knockdown territory."

"I know," I said.

Down at the bottom of the steps, two state police cruisers had pulled in behind the pumper, their studded tires crunching over the gravel. Trooper Vance—a tall, lean man from the barracks at high crossing who had known our family since we were girls—climbed out of the lead car. He had his Stetson pulled low against the wind, his heavy leather coat creaking as he stepped onto the flagstones.

He didn't look at the house first. He looked at Thorne.

"Aris," Vance said, touching the brim of his hat with one gloved knuckle. "Dispatch said we had a mass-casualty call. What are we looking at?"

"Attempted homicide," Thorne said. He didn't blink. He didn't lower his voice. He stood with his hands deep in his coat pockets, his breath rising in gray clouds that mingled with the smoke from the roof. "Twelve counts. Maybe thirteen if you count the girl on the bench, and she’s the one who took the brunt of it."

Brooke took three steps across the ice, her hands reaching for the trooper’s sleeve. Her green silk was soaked to the hips now, clinging to her thighs like pond weed.

"Tommy," she cried, using his childhood name, the name only people who had grown up on the river used. "Tommy, don't listen to them! Clare has been sick for months! She left this child with me because she was living out of her station wagon in Jersey! I took Piper in! I gave her a room! I gave her clothes!"

I stood up from the bench, my back creaking like an old gate.

"The clothes are in the well-house, Tommy," I said.

Vance looked at me. His eyes were cold, gray, and very small under the brim of his hat. "What’s that, Clare?"

"Her boots. Her down jacket. Her winter skirts," I said. "Brooke took them on Monday. She told Piper that girls who live on charity don't wear L.L. Bean. She put them in the galvanized wash-tub behind the water pump and poured five gallons of kerosene over them so the girl couldn't leave the house. If you go back there with a lantern, you can smell the fuel on the snow right now."

Brooke didn't scream this time. A strange, small rattle came from her throat—a dry, clicking sound like a beetle behind wallpaper.

"She’s an ungrateful little beast," Brooke whispered. Her face had lost all its color now; it was the color of pork fat left out on a counter. "I spent four thousand dollars on the catering. I had the crab canapés driven up from the city. I had the strings coming from the college. She was supposed to stand by the coats and take the wraps. She was supposed to show people where the powder room was. And she sat on the bottom step and told Mrs. Thorne that the cellar smelled like rotten eggs."

"It does smell like rotten eggs," Vance said. He looked through the open door where Chief Miller was coming back down the central hall, his yellow turnout coat black with soot across the shoulders.

Miller took his helmet off, spit a dark glob of phlegm into the snow, and looked at the trooper.

"Flue’s plugged with three bags of quick-lime and an old burlap grain sack," Miller said. "Tied off with baling wire. Someone went up on the roof with a ladder and dropped them down the secondary stack. The gas had nowhere to go but the floor registers. Whoever did it knew the house. They knew the old hot-air gravity system runs straight into the parlor and the hall before it ever hits the kitchen."

Vance turned his head back toward Brooke. He didn't reach for his cuffs yet. He just unbuttoned the leather flap of his holster with a quiet click that was louder than the fire truck’s diesel.

"Brooke," Vance said. "Put your hands inside your stole."