Chapter 10: The Hatbox

The guest house stood at the back of the garden behind a wall of bare rose canes.

At seven the windows were dark.

Cissy's car had pulled out ten minutes earlier, and the taillights had turned toward the harbor.

Lydia put Henrietta's brass key into the lock.

It turned without a sound.

Inside, the cottage smelled of vanilla.

It was a small, tidy, pretty place, with a cream sofa and a vase of fresh tulips.

Hayden shut the door behind them and stood very still.

"I never came here," he said. "Not once in three years. She always came to the house."

"Where would she keep it?"

"Keep what?"

"Whatever she doesn't want found."

They went through the sitting room first.

They found a desk with bills in folders and a bookshelf.

On the mantel stood a row of framed photographs of the three of them as children.

Lydia stopped at the last one.

It showed herself at fourteen, squinting at the camera with Hayden's arm slung over her shoulders.

A smaller girl stood off to one side, cropped half out of the picture, watching them.

"I never noticed her in that," Lydia said.

"She's always been in the corner of it."

Lydia took a breath and opened the bedroom door.

It was a pale blue room.

On the dressing table, among Cissy's own bottles, stood a dozen of Lydia's old perfumes with their stoppers out.

Lydia's old hairbrush lay beside them.

There was a coat in the wardrobe that she had not seen since the week she left.

It was hers.

The tag was still inside the collar, with her name in her mother's handwriting.

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