The last guest of the season came in out of the rain at twenty minutes to midnight, and afterward Nell Brody would remember that she had been thinking about pie.

Specifically, about the last slice of cherry pie under the glass dome in the dining room, and whether anybody would notice if the night clerk ate it at two in the morning on the final Saturday the Aldrich House would ever be open. Nobody had said ever. Mrs. Aldrich had said "for the season," the way she had said it every Labor Day for fifty-one years. But there was a realtor's sign leaning against the inside wall of the boathouse, face turned in so the guests wouldn't see it, and Nell had seen it.

The front door opened. The rain came in first, a cold gust that lifted the corner of the register, and then the man.

He was older, near seventy, in a tan raincoat that had been a good one once. He carried a small brown suitcase, the old hard kind with brass latches, and he set it down on the lobby carpet very gently, as if it held eggs.

"I'm sorry to come so late," he said. "Would you have a room?"

The Aldrich House had thirty-four rooms, and on Labor Day weekend thirty-three of them were full. Nell didn't need to look. "Just the one, I'm afraid. Thirty-one. It's on the third floor at the very end of the hall, and the elevator only goes to two."

Something happened in his face then, a small tightening, like a man who has stepped on a stair that isn't there. "Thirty-one," he said. "That will be fine."

He signed the register in a careful, looping hand. R. Castle. On the line for his address he wrote nothing at all. He paid in cash, two twenties and a ten, and when Nell slid the key across the desk, the heavy brass one on its diamond-shaped fob, he held it in his open palm for a moment as if he were weighing it.

"Is Vera Aldrich still the owner here?"

"Yes, sir. She's turned in for the night. Should I tell her you asked after her?"

"No," he said, too quickly. And then, more gently: "No. Please don't trouble her. Could I have a call at six?"

Nell wrote 31 — WAKE 6:00 on the pad beside the switchboard. She would have had Gus carry the suitcase up, but Gus had gone home at ten, and the man said he could manage. She watched him climb the main staircase, slowing on the landing, one hand on the rail. He didn't stop to look at the old regatta photographs along the wall the way new guests always did. He didn't look at anything. He climbed like a man who knew exactly where he was going.

*

The storm went on. Nell did not eat the pie. At a quarter past two the switchboard buzzed, and the little lamp for Room 31 lit up amber.

She put on the headset. "Front desk."

Nothing. No voice, no breathing. Only a sound she couldn't place at first, a soft, steady rushing, like water running into a tub somewhere far away. Then a click, and the lamp went dark.

She sat with the headset in her lap for a long time. Old wiring, she told herself. The storm. The Aldrich House had been built in 1911 and its switchboard put in sometime before the war, and neither one had ever been entirely reliable.

At six o'clock she rang Room 31. It rang eleven times.

At ten past six she took the pass key from its hook under the desk and went up. The third-floor hall smelled of cedar and wet carpet. She knocked. She said, "Mr. Castle?" and then, "Front desk, sir, it's after six," and then she unlocked the door.

It opened three inches and stopped hard. The chain was on. From the inside.

"Mr. Castle?"

Through the gap she could see a slice of the room: the foot of the bed, still made, the white spread smooth as a tablecloth. The little brown suitcase on the luggage rack. The window beyond it, gray with morning.

No one answered. Nothing moved.

*

Gus Molnar lived in the cottage behind the boathouse. He came up in his rubber boots with a pair of bolt cutters in one hand and his coffee in the other, and he didn't ask a single question, which was one of the things Nell liked about Gus. He cut the chain in one bite. They went in together.

The room was empty.

The bed had not been slept in. The bathroom was dry: dry tub, dry sink, the towels still folded in thirds on the rack the way the maids folded them. The window was shut and latched, and when Gus put his shoulder to the sash it didn't move so much as a hair. Painted shut, he said, since before Nixon. There was no fire escape on that side of the building. There was nothing outside that window but three stories of air and the flat gray lake.

The suitcase was closed. Nell looked at Gus, and Gus shrugged, and she opened it.

It was empty except for a single postcard, the old linen kind, with a picture of the Aldrich House in bright, impossible colors and a white sailboat on a lake bluer than any lake had ever been. On the back, in faded blue ink, someone had written one line:

The room is just as you left it.

There was no signature. The postmark said September 14, 1962.

Nell carried it to the window to see it better. Down in the parking lot, in the steady rain, a green Buick sat by itself at the far end, where the gravel met the pines. It had not been there when she came on shift. It was still there now.

Behind her, Gus said quietly, "Somebody ought to tell Mrs. Aldrich."

And Nell, holding the postcard, found that she didn't want to.

END OF CHAPTER ONE