“Is it? Kiran says that Charlotte thought the house was suffering from its origins.”
“Well,” says Mr. Vanders. “We all suffer from our origins in one way or another, don’t you think?”
Jane thinks of her own story. Her father had been a high school science teacher. Her mother had been near the end of her dissertation on a new meteorological explanation for why it rains frogs. She’d been invited to speak at a weekend conference on Frog-Inspired Architecture in Barcelona and Jane’s parents, in love with their eighteen-month-old baby but exhausted, had decided to make a thing of it. They’d left Jane with her mother’s younger sister, Magnolia. This had been difficult for them, and for Jane’s mother in particular, who’d just weaned Jane. She’d almost canceled the trip at the last moment; she’d almost contrived to take Jane along. But Magnolia had told them, No, go, see the churches, eat paella, get some sun, spend some time alone. The plane, hit by lightning, had lost an engine, then crashed during landing. Jane didn’t remember them; she only remembered Aunt Magnolia, who had used to cry, sometimes, when it rained frogs.
It’s hard for Jane to miss something she can’t remember. Or does some part of her miss it? Might it be buried and unseen, but something on which the whole of her life rests, like the foundations of a building?
“What about a house?” Jane says to Mr. Vanders. “Can a house suffer from its origins?”
Mr. Vanders purses his lips at the house. “I guess if this house were a person, it’d be a reasonable candidate for an identity crisis. Poor house!” Mr. Vanders cries, holding his arms out suddenly, as if he’d like to embrace the house. He intones in a hearty voice, “You are our Tu Reviens!”
“Do you think that helped the house?” Jane asks, amused.
“Well,” says Mr. Vanders, “the more we accept our lack of cohesion, the better off we are.”
“Oh?”
“Let go of the illusion of containment and control!” he says, flinging out his arms.
“Good lord,” says Jane, trying to imagine Mr. and Mrs. Vanders having conversations like this at night while sitting in bed.
“If the house is distressed by its lack of cohesion,” says Mr. Vanders, “it’s because of society’s unreasonable expectations for integration.”
“I see,” says Jane, not seeing.
“The house could also be suffering from a diagnosable psychological disorder,” he says. “Why shouldn’t a house have dissociative disorder or even a severe narcissistic disorder? In a different universe, we would call in a house psychologist and get it the help it needs. Though presumably the house, being a house, isn’t suffering at all, except from clogged gutters.”
“What did you study at school, anyway?” asks Jane.
“Oh, this and that,” says Mr. Vanders.
The French doors of the back terrace distantly open and Kiran comes out. She wades toward Jane through tallish grass, then skirts the dirt piles at the north edge of the gardens. She seems distracted, her face closed and trapped someplace far away. Jasper, meanwhile, is bounding around in his now very deep hole, licking something and making frenzied yipping noises at Jane. He seems to be trying to get her attention. Jane crouches down, tucks her book into her lap, and attempts to wipe mud from his fur with her hands.
“Hey, Mr. V,” says Kiran vaguely. “How are you?”
“Decimated by pollen,” says Mr. Vanders, appraising her with a quick glance. “How are you feeling, Kiran, sweetheart?”
“Marvelous,” Kiran says, an obvious lie. “Come play bridge,” she says to Jane.
“I don’t know how to play bridge,” Jane tells Kiran, still making dubious attempts at wiping mud from Jasper. “And my hands are dirty.”
“I’ll teach you,” Kiran says. “Come on. Phoebe needs a partner.”
Phoebe. Jane saw Phoebe in the servants’ wing last night, with Patrick and Philip and a gun. She keeps forgetting about that. Should she tell someone? What if Phoebe stole the fish sculpture?
Jasper shoots out of his hole and rolls around in the grass, barking. He pops up again, shaking himself out, surprisingly clean. “All right,” Jane says, wiping her hands on the damp grass. “I’ll try bridge.”
She grasps Winnie-the-Pooh carefully between her wet thumb and forefinger and pushes herself to her feet. Maybe spending some time with Phoebe will clarify things.
Glancing into Jasper’s hole as she passes it, Jane notices something long, pale, and opalescent inside. “Nice talking to you, Mr. Vanders,” she says. “By the way, Jasper seems to have unearthed an interesting long, white rock.”
Mr. Vanders’s eyebrows rise slowly to his hairline. He watches Kiran, Jane, and Jasper as they pick their way across the gardens to the house.
*
Kiran leads Jane to a small door in the house’s back wall, through a dark corridor, then into a space flooded with moving light. Jane’s never seen this room before. It’s the indoor swimming pool, with gold tile floors and massive glass walls, one of which is an enormous fish tank. A lime-green eel stares straight through the glass at Jane with an almost human leer stretched across its face.
“Shark tank,” says Kiran in a bored voice, then heads along the edge of the pool toward a couple of doors at the room’s far end. “One of Charlotte’s design choices.”
“Sharks?” Jane says, then barely suppresses a gasp as a gigantic bull shark swims by. Bull sharks are predators. Jane used to have nightmares of Aunt Magnolia being eaten by one. The shark reaches the end of the tank, turns, and swims back the other way. The eel is still leering at Jane like some sort of terrible, crazed clown, but the shark neither knows nor cares that Jane exists.
Jasper nudges Jane’s leg to get her moving. As she follows Kiran, she’s certain the eel has its eyes on her back. It reminds her of the woman in the photo in the receiving hall; its expression is the same. Charlotte. Jane decides she’s not going to talk, or think, about Charlotte anymore. It makes the air feel charged.
Kiran rounds the pool, chooses a door in the narrow wall at the pool’s end, and leads Jane through a small, teak-paneled changing room that glows with the quality of its varnished wood. Teak is not cheap. Jane has made only one umbrella with a teak rod. Of course, maybe the first Octavian Thrash stole the teak from a monastery in Burma, which would’ve made it quite economical.
Another door brings Jane, without warning, into the library.
*
At the library’s west end, Jane sits at a card table facing her partner, the mysterious Phoebe Okada. Jasper’s tucked against Jane’s feet. Kiran and Colin make up the other team and Lucy St. George has curled herself up in a nearby armchair. Jane has lost her daffodil somewhere; it’s not behind her ear.
“I can’t stay long,” she says, because she’s promised herself not to spend time in the library. The problem is that the waves of color soothe her anxieties. When she entered, the blues and greens and golds swept her gently across the room. If the room is like being underwater, surely it can’t be the wrong place for Jane to be?
Phoebe, to her surprise, is an intuitive teacher. She can anticipate Jane’s bridge questions, then answers them so that she understands, and with no particular snobbishness. “It’s an elegant game once you get into the rhythm. Good,” she says as Jane trumps the ace of spades with the three of hearts. “You’re catching on.”
At the other end of the room, a toddler bolts through a doorway suddenly, then disappears through the door to the changing room. Jane can’t see the child’s face or skin, only a mop of dark hair and fast, sturdy little legs. A middle-aged, light-skinned black man bolts after the child, slowing only to look over a shoulder and assess the occupants of the library. He catches eyes, briefly, with Phoebe Okada, exchanging a significant, mysterious expression. He’s wearing a chef’s hat and checkered pants. Then he’s gone.
“Does your cook have a child?” Jane asks Kiran.
“Come on,” Phoebe says to Jane, with some impatience. “Focus on the game.”