DEIRDRE

It was time to head into the lion’s den. In the days since Caro’s death, I’d seen Teddy exactly twice, including at the funeral. When I rang the doorbell, my heart was divided between a determination to do right by my sister and the crippling weight of guilt. It didn’t help that a pair of horned gargoyles snarled at me from the second story. I felt like they were onto my ulterior motives.

The nanny, Gloria Rivera, answered the door, smiling as she recognized me. “Deirdre! It’s good to see you.” She sounded genuinely delighted to find me on the doorstep. “Teddy will be so happy to see his auntie.”

“How’s the little guy doing?”

“Okay.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “He’s lonely, poor thing. His father’s away, and he doesn’t really understand that his mama isn’t coming back.”

“I have trouble believing she isn’t coming back, and I’m supposed to be a grown-up.”

“Deeeeee!” shouted Teddy from the top of the staircase. He ran down, stopping at the fourth step from the bottom and jumping, flinging himself onto the landing on all fours.

“Teddy! No crazy stunts!” Gloria scolded him.

“I’m a frog,” Teddy said. “Frogs jump.”

I hugged him. “Be careful, froggy.”

“I can jump from the fifth step,” he said. “Want to see?”

“He’s always pulling crazy stunts,” Gloria said.

Teddy let go of me and dashed up the stairs. “Come play, Deeeeee!”

“I’m going to make some lunch,” Gloria said. “It’s grilled cheese, because that’s all he’s eating right now. I can make something else for you.”

“Grilled cheese is great, thanks.” All the better for my purposes if she was busy in the kitchen. “Where are you, Teddy?” I called out as I climbed the stairs. The house was filled with beautiful archways and moldings, and I’d always wanted to explore it, but Caro usually insisted on meeting at her office or a restaurant. I’d hardly ever been in the house.

“Daddy’s room,” he answered. I followed his voice, then pushed a heavy wooden door open and found Teddy jumping on a king-sized four-poster bed. “Pirate Island!” Teddy announced.

Theo’s room had the dark, wood-paneled charm of a men’s club. It felt like there should be mounted stags’ heads staring down in disapproval and cigar smoke swirling overhead. The walls were covered in framed photographs that looked like expensively styled snapshots. Theo and Caro sitting on a sailboat. A pair of kids on skis—Theo and Juliet, I figured. Teddy crawling across a manicured lawn with a teddy bear dangling from his mouth by one furry ear.

“That’s me!” Teddy said.

A carved wood Jacobin chair with a tall back sat in front of the window, next to a small reading table. Otherwise, the room was disturbingly normal with its chest of drawers and opulently carved bedside tables. It wasn’t monastic, exactly, but it wasn’t fussy either.

“Does Daddy know you jump on his bed like that?” I quietly opened a drawer and found white undershirts. Another contained boxer briefs. I drifted across the room before checking out the closet. Inside were boring rows of shirts, suits, and shoes, all open shelving. So. Much. Space. I peered through the open door of the bathroom to find a whirlpool tub. The contents of the medicine cabinet had nothing more sinister than face wash and shaving oil.

“Sure. But I can’t jump on Mama’s bed.”

After Teddy was born, it was clear Caro was sleeping in her own room, but I’d never seen it. I’d been given exactly one full tour of the house, and that was three months after the wedding. Caro and I started seeing more of each other after our mother died.

Teddy leaped off the bed, thudding against the floor. There was no carpet in Theo’s room.

I heard frantic footsteps downstairs. “Is everything okay?” Gloria called.

“It’s fine!” I shouted back. To Teddy, I said, “Wow, I didn’t know frogs could be so loud.”

Teddy smiled. “You have to jump with me. Ready?”

We hopped out of the room. He bounded ahead of me, his leaps muffled by the carpeting in the hallway. He stopped in front of a closed door. “Mama’s room.” He touched the knob, but he didn’t turn it.

“Let’s go inside.”

“No.” He shook his head firmly, suddenly the world’s tiniest martinet. “Can’t go in.”

I crouched down next to him so we could talk, frog to frog. “Why not?”

“Mama,” he said. There was an ocean of heartbreak in those two syllables, a longing and a sorrow that brought tears to my eyes. Keeping the room sealed was like a magic spell, one that promised if everything were done right, Mama might one day return.

“I miss her too,” I told him.

His head hung forward so much that his chin touched his chest. He bumped the crown of his head against the door.

“Careful.” I put the palm of my hand against his skull. His dark hair was like a silk curtain. “Careful, okay?”

“When are you going to die, Dee?”

“Not for a really, really long time,” I told him.

“What about Daddy?”

“Not for a long time either.” I hoped Teddy didn’t notice my lack of enthusiasm on the subject of his father. I stretched my arms out. “Hug?”

He threw himself into my arms, pressing his face into my neck. There were so many things I wanted to tell him, but he was too young to hear them. Instead, we stayed like that, hugging for a long time.

“Would it be bad?” Teddy asked.

“What?”

“To go in Mama’s room?”

“No, sweetheart. Definitely not.” I felt like the devil, coaxing a three-and-a-half-year-old into breaking into his mother’s room, but I was dying to see inside. It wasn’t that I expected a clue to jump out at me. But if I’d learned anything over the past few days, it was that I didn’t know my sister the way I’d thought I had. I’d been fooled by the sheen of perfection that hovered around her. Not only had I missed the messiness hiding underneath; I’d never noticed it was there.

I stood and opened the door, instantly inhaling the scent of Caro’s floral perfume. Her room was as stereotypically feminine as Theo’s was masculine, with a plush bed drowning in pillows, a pair of chairs dressed in pale-rose velvet, and wooden furniture with painted flowers. Bizarrely, it reminded me of her bedroom when we were growing up. I recognized the antique chairs as ones our mother had picked up at a flea market, only re-covered with new fabric. The painted chest of drawers with climbing vines and pink flowers had been plucked directly from her childhood bedroom. The familiarity wasn’t comforting. If anything, it was the opposite. Maybe I’d run too far from my own pretty pink childhood room by living in a dark dungeon-like cell, but the fact Caro had re-created her bedroom did not feel emotionally healthy.

There were photographs in ornate frames around the room, and plaques mounted on the walls. One was from the New York City Mayor’s Office, another from the Diotima Civic Society. The latter looked more impressive—black lacquer etched with silver—and had a broken column with a female figure standing in front of it. Her appointment book was on her desk, and I sifted through it, but nothing important caught my eye.

Teddy stayed in the doorway, eyes wide like saucers as he took in the room. “Nothing changed,” he murmured.

“Did you think Mama’s room would be different?”

“Maybe.”

I was ransacking my sister’s room like a clumsy novice thief. There was no diary, of course. Nothing was ever that easy. But it wasn’t a challenge to plunder her cavernous walk-in closet with its ball gown wardrobe. I found a Bible under a shoe shelf. Inside were slips of paper. I grabbed them like winning lottery tickets. In my family, if it was important, it went into the Bible. The one on top was a gold-banded white card written in elegant cursive: “The glamour of inexperience is over your eyes,” Mr. Rochester answered; “and you see it through a charmed medium: you cannot discern that the gilding is slime and the silk draperies cobwebs; that the marble is sordid slate, and the polished woods mere refuse chips and scaly bark.”

By making the choice to stay you are participating in a crime.

I recognized the quotation from Jane Eyre, because my sister had forced me to read that book. The line underneath it was what took my breath away. It was unsigned and undated, but I assumed it had to have been from Theo. The spreadsheets Caro had sent me made it clear something was wrong with the family business. Ben had told me the Thraxtons were laundering money. Was that what Theo meant by a crime? Was he the only person in the family who wasn’t involved?

“You looking for it, Auntie Dee?” Teddy called out.

“For what?”

“The hiding place.”