The stormfall drummed the earth and chattered like an infinite number of tumbling dice against the blacktop, and on a nearby hundred-year-old live oak, each of the thousands of stiff oval-shaped leaves was a tongue that gave voice to the rain, raising a chorus of whispers that together were like the roar of a distant crowd, all serving to mask the sound of an approaching engine.

Because the Shukla place was the last residence before the blacktop dead-ended in a turnaround, the light approaching from the south tweaked Tanuja’s curiosity. No visitor was expected. In the murk, the seemingly soundless conveyance appeared to be borne on a tide of mist that roiled off the pavement, headlights chasing before them flocks of shadows that winged across eucalyptus trees on the farther side of the two-lane road.

The vehicle halted at the gate, not facing inward but athwart the driveway, as though to block that exit from the property.

When doors were thrown open, interior lights came on, defining the proportions of a large SUV. The driver doused the headlights, and when the last door closed, the vehicle as good as vanished.

Tanuja had stood so long in the deluge that her eyes were fully dark adapted. Because the plank gate was painted white, she could see it even at that distance, less as a gate than as some pale and cryptic symbol, a mysterious hieroglyph floating portentously on the night. She also discerned three half-visible figures clambering over that barrier.

Outside of the gate stood a call box on a post. Visitors were meant to press a button and announce themselves, whereupon the gate could be opened from the house. That these new arrivals eschewed the call box and instead climbed the planking suggested they were not visitors, but intruders bent on mischief or worse.

In her dark clothes, with her black hair and maiden-of-Mumbai complexion, Tanuja would be difficult to spot as long as she avoided the outspill of light from the house. She turned and dashed to the massive oak, which gathered rain and channeled it along leafways, from which it drizzled in a hundred thick streams.

She paused and glanced back and saw three big men hurrying up the driveway, their hooded jackets and determined stride suggesting satanic monks abroad on some infernal task.

Hers was not a life of high drama, other than the scenarios that arose in her mind and found expression in her writing. She had not before experienced such hard pounding of the heart as shook her now, as if contained within her breast were both hammer and anvil.

She sprinted from the oak and around the south side of the house, staying clear of the light from the windows. Onto the back porch. Two doors. The first opened into the kitchen, the second into the mudroom, but of course both were locked.

She fumbled a key from a pocket, dropped it, snatched it from the porch floor, and let herself into the mudroom, where she had left her smartphone before venturing into the storm. Slender and athletic, Tanuja was usually as graceful as a dancer. But now, shedding rainwater, she slipped on the vinyl-tile flooring and fell.

A door on the left connected the mudroom to the kitchen, and one directly ahead accessed the downstairs hallway. She thrust to her feet, sodden shoes slipping as if she were a skater on ice, and opened the door and saw Sanjay. He had stepped out of his study and gone into the foyer at the farther end of the hallway, where he just now opened the front door.

Too late to call out a warning, Tanuja hoped that she had misread the situation, that her overactive imagination had invoked menace where none existed.

The first man at the door was known to her: Lincoln Crossley, who lived two houses south of them, a deputy with the sheriff’s department. Linc was married to Kendra, who worked as a bailiff at the county courthouse. They had a sixteen-year-old son, Jeff, and a Labrador retriever named Gustav. They were good people, and for a moment Tanuja was relieved.

Rather than wait for an invitation, however, Crossley and the two men behind him crossed the threshold the moment the door opened, crowding Sanjay backward, their boldness disturbing. None of them wore a uniform, and whoever the two strangers might be, Crossley’s behavior was not protocol for an officer of the law.

Tanuja couldn’t discern what Linc Crossley said or what Sanjay answered, though she heard the deputy speak her name. She eased the mudroom door almost shut, watching through a narrow gap, feeling like a child, a small uncomprehending girl who by accident stood witness to a mysterious and disquieting adult encounter.

Crossley put one arm around Sanjay’s shoulders, but in that move Tanuja read some quality darker than neighborly affection. He was much bigger than Sanjay.

One of Crossley’s associates drew a pistol, quickly crossed the foyer, and ascended the stairs, apparently with no concern that his boots and jacket streamed water on the carpet and the hardwood floor.

When the third man closed the front door, stepped out of the foyer, and disappeared into the parlor as though on a search, Tanuja opened a drawer in a mudroom cabinet, retrieved a flashlight, grabbed her phone from a countertop, and fled. She crossed the porch, vaulted the railing, and hurried across the backyard, into the wind and rain, not daring yet to switch on the light, her fertile imagination spawning terrors of extreme violence and rape and intolerable humiliation even as it also crafted desperate scenes in which she might by various means save herself and her brother.

4

Long-lingering resentment pinched Sara Holdsteck’s mouth and pinked her cheeks, the knuckles bone-white in her clenched fists, as she spoke about what she’d endured more than two years earlier, when she’d been sued by three clients in one week, which turned out to be the least of the assaults against her. Because the woman’s anguish at having been betrayed and played for a fool had not faded with time, Jane found it painful to watch her.

Sara’s attorney of fifteen years, Mary Wyatt, had assured her that those legal actions were frivolous, that among the accusers there was an appearance of collusion with intent to defame, and that she should not worry unduly. Three days later, with no explanation, Mary dropped her as a client and declined to accept her phone calls. Another attorney took her on—and the following day changed his mind. While a third lawyer tried to persuade her to settle the suits out of court, a six-unit apartment building that she owned appeared on an EPA list of structures standing on ground contaminated by highly toxic chemicals, and three days thereafter, she received a health-department summons to appear at a hearing into the dangers faced by tenants of her property. By this time, IRS auditors had been in the offices of her accountant for six business days, examining her books in search of evidence of money laundering.

Now she poked a finger at the photo of Simon Yegg on the table in front of her. “It was a Friday evening. This treacherous snake sat me down for what he called a ‘come-to-Jesus meeting.’ He claimed my problems were the work of friends of his who he wouldn’t name. The smug bastard wanted a divorce. He gave me a property-division ultimatum. He’d keep everything he brought into the marriage just eighteen months earlier…and take seventy percent of my assets, graciously leaving me start-over money. In return, he’d make the lawsuits go away, have the IRS audit conclude quickly in my favor, and get the apartments taken off the list of contaminated sites.”

“You believed he could do all that?” Jane asked.

“Everything happening to me was so bizarre, surreal. I didn’t know what to believe. The change in him was shocking. He’d always been so sweet, so…loving. Suddenly he was condescending, cruel, contemptuous of me. I told him to get out. I said it was my house before we were married and it would always be my house.”

“What happened to make you back down?”

Sara looked at one blinded window and then at the other, not because anything of the night could be seen, but perhaps because she was embarrassed to meet Jane’s eyes.

“I didn’t know he had three people with him. They came in from the garage. Two men and a woman. He gave me to them, and he left.”

“?‘Gave’ you to them?”