Chapter 2 House Rules

The Varga house stood at the end of a long drive in Lake Forest, behind a gate that closed with a sound like a held breath. It was a big stone house with too many windows, and every one of them seemed to be watching me arrive.

Elias did not carry me over the threshold. He did not touch me at all. He got out of the car, handed my suitcase to a man named Cole Brandt, and said, "Rules."

We stood in a front hall with a marble floor and a staircase wide enough for a parade. A grandfather clock ticked somewhere above us.

"One," Elias said. "You have your own room, east wing, second floor. I will not enter it. You will not enter mine."

"That's fine with me."

"Two. You do not leave this property without Cole or another man of mine. Not for groceries, not for church, not for air."

"I'm a prisoner."

"You're a guest with a very large security detail." He did not smile. I was beginning to suspect he could not. "Three. Your phone stays with Cole. You may call your father on the house line, and I will know when you do."

Cole Brandt held out his hand with a polite, tired expression, like a flight attendant collecting a seatbelt. He was broad and sandy-haired with an easy face I would have trusted on a train. I gave him my phone. I felt something small and important leave my life.

"Four," Elias said. "Dinner is at seven. You will be there."

"And five?"

He turned his head, finally, and looked at me. His eyes went to the left side of the hall, to a tall oak door at the end of a corridor, shut tight.

"The study is not yours. You do not open that door. You do not stand near that door. If you hear something behind that door, you did not hear it."

"What's behind it?"

"My father's things," Elias said. For one second something moved across his face, quick as a bird past a window. Then it was gone. "Good night, Mrs. Varga."

He walked away and did not look back, and I stood in that enormous hall holding a suitcase I had been told I would not need.

My room was beautiful, which made me angrier. White walls, a big bed with a green quilt, tall windows overlooking a garden that was dying politely into winter. Someone had put a vase of yellow tulips on the dresser. In November. I stared at them for a long time, because I could not decide whether they were a kindness or a joke.

"They're from me," said a voice at the door.

The woman in the doorway was short, round, and somewhere past sixty, with iron-grey hair pinned up in a bun and flour on her sleeve. She had a tray in her hands with a bowl of something steaming on it.

"Mrs. Ostrowski," she said. "I keep the kitchen. You are too thin, and you did not eat at the wedding. Nobody eats at those weddings. Here."

It was pierogi, potato and cheese, swimming in browned butter, and it was the best thing I had ever put in my mouth. I ate the whole bowl sitting on the edge of the bed while she watched me with her arms folded.

"He is not a monster," she said, when I finished. "People will tell you he is. He is a man who stopped sleeping at twenty-three. It is not the same."

"He told me he married me to watch my family burn."

She did not look surprised. She looked tired. "Yes," she said. "He would say that. He says what is easiest to say." She picked up the tray. "Eat breakfast at seven thirty. I will make eggs."

That night I lay awake listening to the house. Old houses talk when they think no one is listening. The pipes ticked. The wind found a loose shutter and made a lonely, rhythmic knocking. Somewhere in the walls a clock was running a minute behind all the others.

I told myself the rules were reasonable. I told myself a man who guards his father's study is not necessarily hiding anything. I told myself a lot of things, and none of them worked, so around two in the morning I did the thing I always did when I could not sleep. I got up and went looking for something to count.

I eased my door open. The east wing hall was dark except for a thin band of lamplight under a door at the far end of the main corridor. The study.

I should have gone back to bed. I took exactly four steps toward that light before I heard the lock turn.

I froze against the wall, barefoot, in the dark, with my heart going like a trapped sparrow.

The study door opened. Elias came out with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and his tie gone. He was shutting the door behind him, slowly, as if to keep something inside from waking, and the lamplight caught his right hand.

There was blood on his cuff. Not a lot. A bright, careful smear, as if he had wiped his hands and missed a spot.

He turned and saw me. He did not startle. He just stood there in the half dark, looking at me, and I could not read a single thing in his face.

"Go back to bed, Mrs. Varga," he said, very softly.

I went. I locked my door, which was a ridiculous thing to do, and I sat on the floor with my back against it until the sun came up, listening to a house that had decided not to tell me anything.