Chapter 6

The next three days had a shape to them, the shape of a house waiting.

Dana moved into the guest room — the one Marcus had always kept ready, the one she'd slept in as a girl. She didn't open the dresser drawers; the clothes in them were still hers, mothballed and folded, from the summers she'd spent here before the Army took her elsewhere. She set the scuffed canvas duffel on the floor by the bed, and she laid the framed photograph of the two kids on the dock on the nightstand, and she didn't unpack anything else.

Carla went up the stairs Thursday morning and didn't come down again that day. On Friday, at nine, she came down carrying two suitcases covered in dust, set them on the porch, and went back up. She made three such trips over the weekend, and each time she passed the great room where the relatives sat in small clusters, eating cold cereal and coffee cake from the bakery in town, she did not look at them. She did not look at Dana. She did not look at the strongbox, which had taken up residence on the kitchen counter as if it had always belonged there.

The relatives had not left. Some of them had tried — the man in the polo shirt had announced plans to head home Friday afternoon, and another couple had packed their car — but the lake house road was long, and the kitchen was warm, and the promise of the reading of the will had a gravity that pulled them back. They rearranged themselves around the house like weather systems, waiting.

All of them waited. The young cousin, whose name turned out to be Maya, started helping with the dishes, a quiet girl who asked Dana two questions over the weekend and never asked a third. The woman in the linen dress, whose name was Elena, became the unofficial cook. The man in the polo shirt, whose name was Warren, became the unofficial silence.

And Uncle Pete sat on the porch.

He sat on the porch for long hours in the late September sun, in a folding chair he'd found in the workshop, with the reading glasses on his nose and a paperback novel open in his lap. He wasn't reading. He was watching the road. He was keeping a kind of vigil, and the family understood it without being told, and they left him to it.

It was on Saturday afternoon, when the sun had begun to fall toward the pines and the light had gone amber, that Uncle Pete saw a vehicle he didn't recognize come down the road.

It was a dark sedan, and it rolled slowly, the way rental cars roll when the driver is reading signs. It pulled into the gravel circle and stopped, and a man in a suit got out, middle-aged, carrying a leather briefcase, with the careful look of a person who has made a business of being the bearer of news.

Uncle Pete watched him come up the walk.

"Can I help you?" Uncle Pete asked.

The man stopped at the bottom of the porch steps. He looked at Uncle Pete, then at the house, then at the vehicle behind him.