He would never set foot outside Faerwood again.

1987

IT WAS A YEAR of transformation for both Joseph Swann and Faerwood. As the exterior continued to fall into ruin, the interior went through many renovations, changes to which Joseph was not privy. He entered through the kitchen, ate his meals and studied in the dining room, slept on a cot in one of the many rooms in the warren-like basement. Month after month the cacophony was endless—sawing, sanding, nailing, demolition, construction.

Finally, in September, the canvases and temporary partitions came down, and what Joseph saw both excited and confused him. Where there had once been a wall there was now a mirror, a silvered glass panel that turned on a central pivot. Cabinets opened into other rooms. In one of the bedrooms, the switch plate set the walls in motion, forming a separate room, bringing up electric lights outside the frosted windows, giving the room the appearance of being at a seashore, complete with the recorded sounds of gently crashing waves just beyond the glass. In yet another room on the third floor, the movement of a lamp opened a portal in the floor; the movement of a sconce lowered a panel, revealing a round window.

Faerwood had become an echo of the fury swirling inside Karl Swann. On that day Joseph saw his father standing at the top of the stairs, wearing his stage costume for the first time in years. Karl Swann looked like a ghost—his pale skin and dyed hair giving him a funereal look that young Joseph had only seen in horror films.

ON HIS EIGHTEENTH BIRTHDAY, with news of his acceptance to college in hand, Joseph returned to Faerwood to find his father in the attic, hanging from the roof beam. He had used the same noose Artemus Coleridge used nearly eighty years earlier.

Joseph cut his father down, then took a secret staircase to the kitchen.

Faerwood was his.

IT TURNED OUT that his apprenticeship to Karl Swann, building finely crafted magic boxes, served Joseph well. After college he began a small business building one of a kind custom cabinets and furniture. He worked with the finest materials, sometimes not emerging from the workshop for weeks on end. He soon found that his passion for cabinetry and furniture making sprang from his obsession with puzzles, that the elements of joinery—from dovetails to mortise and tenon to dowel joints—all fed his passion for the solving of conundrums, and yet he knew all the while that there was within him a magnum opus, a great and terrible creation yet to come.

JANUARY 2008

NOW IN HIS LATE THIRTIES, the dark exhortations of Joseph Swann’s youth had passed into the realm of sporadic flame, but he had not forgotten the fascination of that day so many years ago, the shimmering chimera of Molly Proffitt and all who came after her. There were small patches of brown grass and mounded earth on the Faerwood grounds that would attest to this.

In late January, while cleaning the attic, he came across a box he had not seen in many years. Among the books on magic and illusions, beneath his father’s many notebooks of gibberish, he found the old eight-millimeter film The Magic Bricks. He ran the movie in the attic at Faerwood, not far from where his father had thrown a rope over a roof beam. Tears streamed down his face as he was coaxed down a long corridor of remembrance.

The seminal film had been made in 1908. One hundred years, Swann thought. The significance of this centenary was lost on him until, just before dinnertime, the doorbell rang. On the way downstairs he made himself presentable.

On the porch was a girl, a maiden of sixteen or so, soliciting for a nonprofit human-rights group. She had short brown hair and roan eyes. She talked to him, trusted him. They always did. Her name was Elise Beausoleil.

When she stepped inside Faerwood, Joseph Swann saw it all in his mind.

She would be the first of the Seven Wonders.

AUGUST 2008

SWANN’S SHOWROOM was in the Marketplace Design Center at Twenty-Fourth and Market Streets. The building was home to a number of showrooms for the design professional, including Roche-Bobois, Beatrice & Martin, Vita DeBellis.

Swann’s small, elegant space on the fourth floor was called Galerie Cygne.

From the moment he had leased the space, eight months earlier, he knew he had found a home here. It was part of the vibrancy that was downtown Philadelphia, but not quite in the beating heart of Center City. It was easily accessible from every city on the eastern corridor of the United States—Boston, New York, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Atlanta. Most important, Marketplace Design Center was just across the Schuylkill River from the Thirtieth Street train station, the hub of Philadelphia’s rail traffic, the home of Amtrak.

Elise, Monica, Caitlin, Katja. He needed just three more pieces to his puzzle.

One day after the woman was found buried in Fairmount Park, Joseph Swann stood in the gallery, looking out the window, thinking of all the lost children, the night children. They came to the city by the hundreds, filled with hope and fear and promise.

They arrived every hour.

SEVENTEEN

JESSICA LOOKED at the file. It was thin, but that was to be expected. The Eve Galvez case had just a day earlier gone from missing person to homicide. It would be a while until they even had a cause of death, if ever.

It wasn’t their case, but right now Jessica’s curiosity was outrunning her priorities. Especially now that she knew Kevin Byrne had a past with the woman.

Jessica got onto the PPD website and checked the Missing Persons pages. The section was divided into four parts: Missing Children, Other Jurisdiction Missing Persons, Unidentified Persons, and Long-Term Missing Adults. On the Missing Adults page Jessica found a dozen entries, almost half being elderly residents suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s. A few people on the page were missing since 1999. Nearly a decade. Jessica considered the strength needed for family members and loved ones to hold out hope for that long. Maybe strength wasn’t the word. Maybe it was something more akin to faith.

Eve Galvez’s entry was halfway down the web page. The picture was of a striking, exotic woman with dark eyes and hair. Jessica knew the entry would soon be removed, only to be replaced with another mystery, another case number.

She wondered if Eve Galvez’s killer had ever visited this web page. She wondered if he came here to see if his handiwork was still a puzzle to the police. She wondered if he scanned the daily newspapers looking for a headline that told him his secret had been uncovered, that a new game was afoot, that a body had been discovered buried in Fairmount Park, and that authorities “had not yet identified the remains,” that a new set of adversaries had been conscripted.

Jessica wondered if he wondered whether or not he had left a clue behind, a hair or fiber or fingerprint, trace evidence that would bring a knock on his door in the middle of the night, or a phalanx of 9 mm pistols to his car windows as he sat at a red light in Center City, daydreaming of his wretched life.

AT 8:00 AM Kevin Byrne entered the duty room. Jessica walked right by him, through the maze of corridors, into the hallway, not even sparing him a glance or a “good morning.” Byrne knew what it meant. He followed. When they were out of earshot of everyone in the room, alone in the hall, Jessica pointed an accusatory finger, said, “We have to talk about this.” They had left Fairmount Park around three o’clock that morning, neither having said a word.

Byrne looked at the floor for a moment, then back into her eyes.