Chapter 11: Thirty-One Letters

Odile was waiting on the sidewalk outside the Saxon building when we came out.

She was leaning on her cane in the thin morning light, with a ring of old keys in her other hand.

"I assumed you'd be a while," she said. "Get in the car."

Kieran opened his mouth.

"Not you," she said to me. "You, dear. Him in the back."

We drove north through the city in a silence so thick the driver turned the radio off.

Kieran sat with his hands between his knees.

I looked out the window and did not ask.

I had one question, and I knew it would sound different once I had a room to say it in.

The Saxon house stood on a bluff in Madrona, three stories of gray shingle behind a wet green hedge.

I had been there four times in three years, always as a guest at Odile's table, always in the second chair from the end.

Odile unlocked the front door and led us up the main stairs, and along a corridor to the east wing.

She stopped at a white door at the end.

"Victoria's old room," she said. "She hasn't slept here in five years. She has never allowed anyone in."

"Then how do you have a key?"

"It's my house, dear."

She turned a small brass key in the lock, and the door swung in on a bedroom that looked like a showroom.

A white bed.

A white desk.

Not a book or a photograph or a pair of shoes anywhere.

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