Jared, recoiling from his aunt's words, glanced nervously at his mother, then tried again. "It's all right, Aunt Cora," he said, this time reaching out and placing his hand gently on her shoulder.

Cora twitched away, as if she had been pricked by a needle. "Go!" she rasped. "Go now!"

Jared glanced at his mother, who tilted her head almost imperceptibly toward the door. "I'm sorry," he said softly. "I didn't mean to…" His voice trailed off as he realized his aunt Cora had already shifted her attention back to his sister. "I'm sorry," he repeated once more, then quickly backed away from the bed, turned, and hurried from the room.

As soon as Jared was gone, Cora pulled herself up in the bed. Her hands fumbled with the chain around her neck. "Wear this," she said, her voice croaking as she struggled with the chain's tiny clasp.

"Let me help you," Janet offered, moving closer to the bed.

Cora shook her head. "Kimberley. Kimberley must do it!" Exhausted by her efforts, Cora dropped back against the pillows and lay still as her great-niece carefully unfastened the clasp and lifted the chain from the old woman's neck. As the tiny golden cross hung before her, Cora reached out for it, almost as if to take it back, but then dropped her hand onto the coverlet. "Put it on," she told Kim. She fell silent again, but her eyes missed nothing as Kim carefully put the chain around her own neck, fastened it, then touched the small gold cross. "There is another one," Cora said when she was satisfied that the cross was in place. "In the drawer." She waited as Kim opened the drawer, searched for a moment, then found a second cross, identical to the one that now hung around her neck. "For the little one," Cora whispered. Her eyes flicked away from Kim, fastening on the place where Jared had stood a few moments ago. She smiled, as if recognizing some person unseen by either Janet or Kim, and both mother and daughter could see the tension draining from the old woman's body. "It will protect you," she whispered. "Just as it protected me. Don't ever take it off."

Suddenly, she extended both arms, as if to welcome an embrace. Her smile broadened, her eyes cleared, and the years seemed to fall away from her.

Before either Janet or Kim could move toward her, Cora's hands dropped back to her sides. With a long sigh she relaxed into her pillows, her eyes closing as if she'd fallen into a deep sleep.

Her breathing stopped.

Then, in a flash so brief Kim would never be certain it had actually happened, she sensed the light in the room had changed, muted into a golden glow that suffused the air.

Beautiful, she thought. So beautiful.

"I'll take Molly's cross," Janet said quietly as she led Kim toward the door a moment later. "When she's old enough, we'll give it to her together, and tell her where it came from."

Kim barely heard the words, and as she was leaving, she turned to look back.

The soft, serene light had vanished as utterly as if it had never been there at all.

The golden glow-like her aunt Cora-had gone and now the room seemed dark and cold.

So cold it made Kim shudder.

I'm so sorry, Mr. Conway." The sympathetic expression in Beatrice LeBecque's eyes and the genuine sorrow in her voice told Ted what had happened far more clearly than the woman's words. He hadn't been too surprised when Jared came back into the reception area only a few minutes after he'd left with his mother and sister. Nor had his aunt's reaction to his son surprised him; indeed, it was her desire to see Jared at all that had caught him off guard. "Don't take it personally," he'd advised. "It doesn't have anything to do with you. It has to do with the fact that you're a male."

"If she's got a problem with men, how come she married your uncle?" Jared asked, relieving his father of Molly, who'd been squirming uncomfortably in Ted's lap.

"You got me on that one. Who knows? Maybe it was Uncle George killing himself that soured her in the first place. Anyway, she sure never got over it."

They'd fallen silent then, Ted leafing through a magazine as the last vestiges of his hangover finally lifted, while Jared played a game with Molly, the rules of which seemed far clearer to the toddler than to her big brother. When the phone on Bea LeBecque's desk rang, both of them looked up, sharply. Now even Molly was silent, sitting quietly on her brother's lap.

So, the old lady was finally gone. Ted tried to analyze what he felt:

Grief? How could you feel grief for someone you'd barely known, and from whom you'd never heard a friendly word, let alone a kind one?

Loss? Of what? Certainly not family, since he had no memory of ever having seen his aunt anywhere but here. The only family he knew-had ever known, really-was Janet. Janet, and their children.

Sympathy? A little. At least Cora Conway was finally released from whatever had tortured her for so long. And he felt relief. Relief that the ordeal was finally over. A twinge of guilt stabbed at him as he realized that most of the relief he felt was for himself rather than for his aunt. He tried to tell himself that he had no reason to feel guilty, that if she'd tried to be even halfway decent to him, he'd have come to see her more often, tried to do more to make her life a little easier. Except that now, with his hangover finally gone, he knew the truth: he could have ignored her treatment of him, could have risen above the invective she had poured over him. She'd been old, and ill in her mind as well as her body.

He'd ignored her very existence.

And now she was dead.

No loss, no sorrow, no sense that something valuable was gone out of his life.

Just guilt.

Well, at least I can take care of her now, he told himself. With his head finally clear-at least of alcohol-Ted's talent for organization, which had made him so good at his job before he'd started drinking, came to the fore, and he began making a mental checklist of things that would need to be dealt with.

As it turned out, though, all the arrangements had been made long ago. "She had some very good days, you know," Bea LeBecque explained as she gave him the letter in which all of his aunt's plans were laid out, and to which she'd attached the receipts indicating that Cora had paid her own funeral expenses in advance. "Really, all you need to do is contact Bruce Wilcox." The name meant nothing to Ted. "Your aunt's attorney," the receptionist explained. She picked up the phone on her desk and dialed the lawyer's number from memory, then handed the receiver to Ted.

Ten minutes later, with Janet and Kim back in the reception area, Ted repeated what the lawyer had told him.

"There's some kind of trust," he explained. "I'm not sure I understand it, but this guy Wilcox says Aunt Cora ' tried to break it a long time ago, and couldn't."

Janet's eyes clouded. "Why did she want to break it?"

"Wilcox said she wanted to get rid of the house. But apparently that was the whole point of the trust-to keep the house in the family."

"So we've inherited a house?" Janet asked.

Ted shook his head. "What we've got, the way Wilcox explained it, is the right to live in a house."

They gazed at it in silence. Their eyes moved over the massive structure that stood amidst an acre of land so overgrown with weeds that it was hard to tell where-or indeed if-gardens might ever have existed.

Besides the enormous gabled building that was the house, there was also a large carriage house-big enough for half a dozen cars, apparently with some kind of apartment above it.

Though most of the windows of both buildings were intact, the paint had peeled away from the clapboard siding, and the smashed roofing slates that lay around the perimeter of the house testified to the water damage they might expect inside.