Marjorie liked Christmas Eve best when it did not insist on cheer.
From her armchair by the tall window, she watched the river slide past below—dark, slow, half-erased by fog. The day had never quite decided whether it was snow or rain; it hovered at that indecisive edge just above freezing, where the world feels held in suspension. She held her own small suspension in a cut-glass tumbler: Dry Sack sherry, poured carefully, the way she had learned to do everything carefully after a certain age.
The Pembroke Regional Hospital in Pembroke, Ontario is distinctly part of the Ottawa Valley, the former timber run down the Ottawa River most notably from Renfrew County where the lumber barons are reputed to have achieved immense wealth.
Chapter Eight — We leave to discover whence we come
What had begun as a matter of possession ended, as such things often do, as a matter of inheritance.
The painting did not so much arrive as consent to be seen. It stood where none of them remembered placing it, leaning slightly—as if tired—against the limewashed wall of Lavinia’s north room. Morning light found it without ceremony and revealed what candlelight had only suggested: gold laid thin as breath, lapis worn soft as dusk, a face rendered with such intimate restraint that none of them spoke for a long while.
Chapter 7
Across the Sea
The evening announced itself quietly. There was no ceremony to it beyond the way the last light slid off the fields and the candles were struck, one by one, along the long oak table. Lavinia had set it with a deliberate elegance—linen softened by use, glassware thin enough to sing when touched, plates whose imperfections were earned rather than designed. Rahim noticed these things, as he always did, but said nothing. He understood that the room itself would do the speaking.
Chapter 6 — Buried Treasure
The Ottawa River moved with studied indifference, broad and pewter-bright under a late afternoon sky, as if it had seen far worse moral dilemmas than those presently troubling two young people seated on its grassy bank. Lavinia had slipped off her shoes and pressed her toes into the cool earth. Rahim lay back on his elbows, eyes narrowed toward the opposite shore, where Gatineau rose without comment.
Chapter Five
Escaping the Noise
They arrived in Rosebank on a Tuesday that smelled of cut hay and wet cedar, the sort of place where time felt padded, deliberately slowed, as if the land itself disliked haste. Rahim drove the last kilometre with the windows down. Lavinia watched the lake flash silver between the trees and thought, not for the first time, that anonymity could be beautiful.
Chapter 4
Immersive Conduct
Weeks after the dinner party, Lavinia found that the townhouse no longer behaved itself.
Chapter 3
Mr. Chesnick and the hidden portrait
“Yes, I’ll hold”, replied Lavinia King, bolstering on her shoulder the receiver of her ancient landline telephone attached by a coiling cord to its absurd cradle on the oak filing cabinet of her study. While doing so she looked critically at her fingernails on her left hand, ensuring that the manicurist had done his work properly. The nails glistened with lustrous red paint, the perimeters finely polished. Mrs. King turned her fingers about for full examination from every possible perspective. She didn’t approve of compromise. At that same moment she caught a glimpse of herself in the hallway mirror. She turned her head as though preparing for a photograph. Good, she thought to herself. But before she could venture deeper into her personal assessment the response came on the telephone line, “Mrs. King, this is Jeffrey, sorry to have kept you waiting.”
Chapter 2
The Terms of Disguise
They did not sit at once. This was the first rule, unspoken but universally observed: standing conferred no advantage, yet it delayed concession. The men with the briefcases arranged themselves with studied informality, as though chance had placed them where intention ruled. The man in the red turban—who, it soon emerged, was called Rahim—inclined his head to Lavinia with a courtesy that was neither servile nor familiar. It was the bow of a man who understood hierarchy and had survived it.
Chapter 1
Greeting the other
Like music in the background she filtered into the hotel lobby unobtrusively but with the mystic allure of a theme recalled from long ago. It was an exclusive resort uncontaminated by numbers. She wore a diaphanous pallid gown. As she approached the front desk and was about to drop her ivory white hand upon the ringer, an attendant, struggling into his sport jacket, fully materialized and asked superfluously, “May I help you, ma’am?” Lavinia – for that was her name – turned and looked perishingly at the floor near the counter. She hadn’t spoken a word. The desk clerk knew enough to follow her gaze. Silently he stretched himself and peered over the counter onto the slate floor. Her silken white flats were covered in mud, red mud.