The Ferryman Files: Four Psychological Thrillers and the Memories She Lost

Book One, Chapter 1: The Glass House

Arthur Wynn had not slept a whole night through since the Carter administration, and he had stopped apologizing for it. At seventy-eight a man was entitled to his hours. His were the small ones, and he spent them walking.

Pickle did not mind. Pickle was a beagle of advanced years and low ambitions, and the bluff road at one in the morning was full of things worth smelling: the wet hedge at the Albrights', the drain grate where the raccoons met, the lamppost that every dog on Calder Bluff had signed. Arthur stood under his umbrella and let her read the news.

The rain had come in off the lake around midnight, thin and cold and sideways. It made the gravel hiss. Down below the cliff the water was black and loud, and the wind carried the smell of it up over the edge: iron and weed and something older.

The Crane house stood at the end of the road like a lantern somebody had forgotten to blow out. Arthur had hated it for nine years. He had hated it while they were building it, all those steel beams and those enormous sheets of glass going up past his kitchen window, and he had hated it on the night it was finished, when it lit up from inside and you could see every stick of furniture in it, every cushion, every bottle on the bar. A house was supposed to keep its people private. This one put them on a stage.

Tonight the stage was dark except for the porch, where a warm yellow light burned over the big front door, and one lamp somewhere deep inside. Arthur glanced at his watch, an old habit with no purpose. One-twelve.

The porch light went out.

It did not flicker. It did not fade the way a bulb fades when it is dying. It was simply on and then simply off, all at once, as clean as the end of a play when the house lights drop and the actors freeze in the dark. Arthur stood very still. Pickle lifted her head.

He waited for a door to open, a voice, a car. Nothing came. The rain ticked on his umbrella.

He looked again at the big ground floor windows, and that was the odd part, the part he would describe later to a tired policewoman with auburn hair and a paper cup full of seed shells. The glass was fogged. Not streaked with rain on the outside. Misted on the inside, a soft grey bloom across every pane, the way a bathroom mirror goes when somebody has run the shower too long. As if the whole house had a fever.

"Come on, Pickle," Arthur said, and found he was whispering. "Come on now. Home."

The beagle did not argue. She was old, but she was not stupid.

By the time Wren Halloway's grey Subaru crunched up the bluff road it was twenty to three, and every light in the glass house was blazing.

She killed the engine and sat for a moment with the wipers stopped and the rain sheeting down the windshield, letting the house blur into a smear of gold. Some people needed coffee before a scene. Wren needed ninety seconds of nothing. She had learned, a long time ago, that the first thing you saw at a death was the thing you would see forever, and she liked to choose when it started.

Patrol cars along the verge, lights turning slow. The van from the medical examiner. Yellow tape snapping in the wind between the gateposts. And, parked half on the grass with its nose to the hedge, a grey Ford pickup with a fogged window, behind which a large brown shape was curled on the bench seat, asleep.

So Pike was already here. Of course he was.

Wren got out into the rain, tugged ...