but he never left the property. He must be somewhere in the house. Ordinarily, he would have come running to greet her, a huge grin on that great golden face, his eyes shining with delight. He must have found a place to curl up and grieve.
Moving from the living room to the hall to the dining room, she called for him, but when he didn’t come at once, she stopped seeking him. She remembered how pitiable his whimpering sounded the previous night, when Dorothy passed. He was a keenly sensitive boy. He knew Rosa was here, and when he was ready for company in his mourning, he would come to her.
Now she found herself in front of the study door, across the hall from the library. During the eighteen months that she lived and worked in this splendid house, the study door was always locked. Mrs. Champlain, who came in to clean house three days a week, never set foot in the study. Dorothy dusted and swept that room herself until the last six weeks of her life, when she no longer had the energy for the job.
Of course I trust Mrs. Champlain and you entirely, Rosa dear, but that room is my most private place, where I keep all my deepest, darkest secrets. You may think I’m a foolish old lady who’s lived a pampered life, with no secrets darker than having shoplifted a tube of lipstick when I was sixteen, but I assure you that I once had a wild side. And if you don’t believe that’s true, at least give me the courtesy of assuming there’s a one percent chance I might not always have been as boring as I am now. Treat the study as if we’re in a Daphne du Maurier novel, as if this house is an alternate-universe version of Manderley, and I am keeping either the murdered and mummified corpse of Rebecca or Mrs. Danvers—or both!—behind that locked door, to spare myself from a long prison sentence.
From a pocket of her slacks, Rosa now withdrew the key to the study door. Dorothy had given it to her the previous afternoon, ten hours before the crisis came, and instructed that it be used within a day of her passing. Rosa had not been told what she would find in the room, other than a computer on which were stored video files that she must watch.
Although she knew there would be no dead bodies, mummified or otherwise, she hesitated. If indeed there were secrets in this room, and if they might alter her opinion of Dorothy, Rosa Leon didn’t want to know them. In the lonely struggle that had been her life to date, she had met few people she admired, none more so than Dorothy. In the unlikely event there had been a dark side to Arthur Hummel’s widow, some ugliness of spirit, that discovery would pierce Rosa hardly less than if an archer put an arrow through her breast.
Yet she had promised to view the files on the computer and do what her heart told her was the right thing. A promise made must be a promise kept.
Rosa unlocked the door and went into the study.
The large room measured perhaps twenty-six feet by thirty, with tall windows offering a view of the fabled lake through descending ranks of pines.
To the right stood an antique Biedermeier desk that was large for furniture of that period. Behind the desk, a wall-length work area had been built to match the desk. On it waited a computer, printer, scanner, and other equipment.
In the center of the room were a Biedermeier sofa and two Art Deco armchairs ordered around a large coffee table fashioned from a Chinese kang bed, on which stood an arrangement of antique Japanese bronze vases. Dorothy and Arthur had eclectic tastes and a talent for making a variety of periods and styles work together.
The most unusual thing was the alphabet painted on the wall to the left, twenty-six one-foot-tall black letters stenciled on a white background, plus a series of punctuation marks. There were also symbols: & and % and + and = among them. On the floor in front of that wall stood a low contraption for which she could not discern a purpose.
Rosa went around behind the desk and sat in the office chair and swiveled to face the computer. She switched it on.
During the weeks that Dorothy lacked the strength to clean the study, a light dust settled on