Evie pushed a pile of papers off the kitchen chair and sat. As far as she knew, her mother’s only sources of income were what she got as the widow of a firefighter—a pension and Social Security. So how could she afford expensive vodka and a brand-new high-def TV?

But before Evie could follow that thought, she heard a scrabbling overhead. Instinctively she ducked. Then she looked up at the stained, cracked ceiling. Above her was the slope-ceilinged bedroom she and Ginger had shared. As she stared she heard more sounds, like something hard rolling across a wood floor. More scrabbling.

Vermin—Evie shuddered—had to have gotten in upstairs. What she wanted to do was run out of the house screaming. Instead, she waded through the kitchen, pushed aside the bags stacked in front of the broom closet, and opened the door. Its orderly interior seemed to belong to a different house. Standing on the floor beside a bucket filled with cleaning supplies were a broom and a carpet sweeper. On the shelf over them, clean rags were folded beside a pocketed canvas bag filled with garden tools. In that bag Evie found a pair of leather work gloves.

Armed with the broom and the gloves, Evie returned to the front hall. She looked up into the dark stairwell. If only she could pawn this problem off on someone else.

Slowly, she climbed the stairs. In the near pitch-black of the upstairs landing, she stopped and pressed her ear to the closed bedroom door. She could hear movement on the other side. Rustling. A squeak. A rolling marble sound, again followed by the scrabbling. Then a thump.

Evie stomped hard on the floor. Silence followed. She imagined raccoons or squirrels or, God forbid, skunks on the other side of the door, frozen and waiting for her next move.

She groped for the doorknob, twisted it, and with a bravado she wasn’t sure she had, threw open the door. It slammed against the inside wall. She caught a flurry of movement in the sunny, slope-ceilinged room. A whirl of gray disappeared through the back window facing the water. Then another.

Evie stood in the middle of the room, her heart pounding, and took in the damage. All in all, it was not nearly as bad as she’d feared. The seat of the skirted chair at the dressing table was torn open, some of its stuffing mounded like massive dustballs on the floor. There were acorns and sticks on the floor. But the beds she and Ginger slept in, tucked under the eaves, were unmussed, still covered with the familiar pink-and-white chenille bedspreads.

It took her a moment to realize that the window wasn’t open. It was broken. The bottom pane was completely gone. But there seemed to be no glass on the floor of the room. She looked out through the broken window. Shards of glass glittered just outside on the porch’s sloping roof. Didn’t that mean that the window had been broken from the inside?

Chapter Six

Before Evie left the upstairs bedroom, she took down from the wall the framed Georgia O’Keeffe poster—a white camellia blooming out of a field of pale blue and turquoise—that she and Ginger had picked up at an after-Christmas sale at the Met. She found some duct tape in the kitchen and used it to secure the picture over the broken window. At least that would keep squirrels and wet weather out until she could get the window properly replaced.

Downstairs, she put away the broom and gloves. Her parents’ bedroom and bath were the only rooms left to assess.

She felt her way through the dark downstairs hallway to the tiny room tucked under the stairs, opened the door, and peered in. The familiar room, barely big enough for her parents’ double bed and two bureaus, smelled like a rank subway tunnel. Wrinkled clothing covered the bed. Evie recognized the pink terry-cloth robe she and Ginger had given their mother for a Mother’s Day years ago. More ashtrays on the bureaus overflowed with cigarette butts. Evie raised the window shades and tried to open the windows, but they wouldn’t budge.

Her mother’s bottle of Jean Naté sat on the bureau, as always. Evie unscrewed the top and poured a little into her hands. The scent reminded her of fresh laundry and lemon meringue pie. It was what her mother smelled like after a shower. And sometimes, her father had smelled of it, too.

Evie closed the bottle and put it back.

When she shifted the clothing on the bed, she realized that the bedding beneath was damp and smelled sour. She stripped the sheets. The mattress was wet, too.

Working quickly and trying not to gag, she balled the sheets up with the dirty clothes, hauled the bundle out through the front door, and dumped it by the side of the house. As she stood there, hands on her hips, taking great gulps of fresh air and girding herself for hauling out the mattress, a red sports car rolled up and pulled into the driveway across the street. That house was spruced up and freshly painted in shades of tan, maroon, and a deep green, the bushes in front sculpted into perfect spheres—all that tidiness a tacit rebuke to her mother’s house. A man Evie didn’t recognize got out and looked across the street. He gave her a puzzled look and raised his hand.

Evie turned away and went inside. She didn’t know him and had no desire to explain the mess her mother had made. By the time she’d wrestled the mattress off her mother’s bed, set it on end, and shoved it out the front door, the man had disappeared. She pushed, pulled, and dragged the mattress up the side of the house where she propped it under the bathroom window, leaning the nasty side, soiled and pitted with cigarette burns, against the house.

That’s when she heard a steady drip, drip, drip coming from beneath the house. Under the bathroom. She stooped and looked through a hole in the wood lattice paneling that covered the gap between the house and ground. She couldn’t see anything, but she could certainly smell it. Raw sewage.

Frustration welled up inside her. What next? Evie reached out and yanked on a nearby oak sapling that had already grown a foot tall. But it was too deeply rooted to budge, and all Evie had to show for her effort were fingers scraped raw. The rot in the house was deep rooted, too, nurtured by decades of unhappiness, fertilized with denial.

Evie heard a tentative throat clearing. She pivoted away from the house and the sapling, a little embarrassed to have been caught taking her frustrations out on a weed. Standing on neatly mowed grass beyond her mother’s scraggly yard was a diminutive elderly woman, leaning on a cane. She had on a pink cardigan and a collared blouse with a double strand of fat white pearls around her neck.

Evie brushed away tears she hadn’t even realized she’d shed. “Mrs. Yetner?” Amazing. The old woman was not only still alive but remarkably little changed aside from the cane and the back that was stooped rather than ramrod straight. Evie and Ginger had considered Mrs. Yetner ancient even when they were growing up.

“Ginger?” the woman said. She pulled a tissue from the wrist of her sweater sleeve and dabbed at her nose as she pinned Evie under her sharp, speculative gaze, magnified through thick glasses. “No, of course not. You’re the other one, aren’t you?”

Chapter Seven

“Right, I’m the other one.” The girl stood and collected herself.

She seemed to Mina to be so . . . vexed wasn’t quite the right word. More like at wit’s end. Well, who wouldn’t be, given the ungodly mess her mother’s house had turned into? And so fast.

When Mina first spotted the girl—or woman, as they liked to be called these days, though the reasoning escaped her—maneuvering a mattress up against the side of Sandra Ferrante’s house, she assumed it had to be Ginger. But the minute the girl looked up, Mina realized this was the younger sister. The taller, ganglier one. Not the one who sold Girl Scout cookies but the one who kicked around a soccer ball and skinned her knees.