Page 1 of The Gallagher Place
PROLOGUE
Saturday, June 6, 1998
Marlowe hissed as the tip of her pencil snapped. She cast it aside and shoved at her sketch, lifting her head to look out at the cloudless night. From her room, she had a view of the wide front yard and the red barn across the street. She bit down hard on her lip as she stared at the solid structure darkened by shadows.
Her bedroom door was open, and she could hear voices downstairs. Her father’s somber murmur, her mother’s quick response. She was supposed to be sleeping. As if that were possible. She had been up all night. Her whole family had been up, crisscrossing their acres of land, searching. A heavy exhaustion had settled over her, but she felt like she would never sleep again.
Marlowe grabbed a new pencil from the expensive drawing set she’d been given for her sixteenth birthday and flipped to a new page in her sketchbook. The charcoal tip flew over the thick, creamy stock. She had sketched the single birch tree in her front yard a hundred times, gradually layering light and dark strokes for the texture of the bark—more black than you would think—with sharp flicks to angle the serrated curve of a leaf. It was a simple one-point perspective that she’d mastered. But she’d yet to produce a sketch of the woods that captured what it felt like to stand among the dizzying trees.
Her heavy pencil strokes filled the page. She drew tree after tree in rapid succession, the woods becoming an impenetrable wall of black. The forest surrounding her family’s country home often gave her a feeling she couldn’t place, like there was something just out of frame, like a taunt that dared her to look closer. She felt it every time she heard a twig snap or the faint sound of footsteps in the layers upon layers of fallen leaves. Even the thought of it made the back of her neck prickle.
“It’s just your imagination,” her older brother, Nate, always explained. “We’re the only ones out here,” he would say. He didn’t understand her frustration.
She ripped the drawing out of her sketchbook and threw it onto the pile in her trash can. It was no use; she would never be able to capture the feeling correctly. Not now.
Instead, she forced her trembling fingers into a firm grip and etched out the first few lines of the old barn, its doors wide open. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t see the details at this time of night; she knew from memory exactly what it looked like—its walls becoming a little more warped with every snowfall, every windy autumn, and every summer’s round of hay loaded into the loft.
She slanted her pencil to shade in the yawning darkness within the barn, and farther back, near the ladder, she tried for a shape. Broad but sloping shoulders, legs and boots shrouded in shadow. A nameless figure tucked away in the corner of the barn. She imagined him stalking through the open doors, over the hayfield, and into the thickest part of the woods. Marlowe felt a sob rattle in her chest as she took a breath, and fresh tears fell onto the page, watering down the pencil marks, making everything blurry and gray.
It didn’t matter. She couldn’t even attempt to sketch the stranger’s face, because she had never seen him.
But he wasn’t in her head. He was out there. He had to be.
FRIDAY
NOVEMBER 23, 2018
ONE
Marlowe woke to the tread of feet in the kitchen and the muffled chatter of her nieces. Slowly opening her eyes, she glanced out the transom window above her bed, where a cloud bank scattered the late autumn sun and the frozen lawn glowed faintly. She guessed it was well past eight, the breakfast hour her mother, Glory, insisted upon seven days a week. The house was in full swing above her basement bedroom, which she’d taken over in her twenties, when her nieces encroached on her childhood room upstairs. She didn’t mind retreating—she preferred her privacy, especially during these annual Fisher family holiday weeks at the Gray House.
Pleased that her head had only a dull ache and no searing pain, Marlowe swung her legs over the side of the bed. Last night, along with her brothers, Nate and Henry, she had stayed up until the small hours, cracking open bottles of wine and trading old stories. That was the routine this time of year, when they were all back under one roof at their cherished upstate home. She had been visiting the country house in Dutchess County since she was five years old. Memories from their childhood weekends fleeing New York City and running wild always felt fresher around the holidays, probably because Nate and Henry had their own kids now and came back only for special occasions.
Although she kept an apartment on the Upper West Side, Marlowe had spent increasingly more time in the country over the past few years. She was used to the silence now, and it made weeks like this one feel loud and overwhelming. Marlowe tried to be a kind and attentive aunt, but she often found herself counting down the hours until it would be quiet again.
She ran back through what she remembered of the previous night—the Thanksgiving meal that hadn’t changed since she was a child, the wine by the fire—but she winced as she recalled her nieces bounding down from their baths in matching pajamas, looking cherubic as they hugged their parents good night. Nate had glanced at Marlowe with concern, and Henry had actually reached out and patted her hand. She could read their minds:How awful to be a single woman in her thirties without any prospect of children on the horizon. Marlowe’s only response was to take a large gulp of chardonnay. Never mind that Marlowe had plenty to fill her life. She had friends and her painting and her travels and her burgeoning career as an illustrator. Despite her brothers’ fears that Marlowe must feel left behind, thirty-six was hardly ancient. And she had always been patient. Better to wait forever than settle for less than what she wanted. Although not even she could say exactly what that was.
Marlowe tiptoed over to the French doors that opened to a small back patio, flinching with every step across the cold floorboards. She pushed the sheer curtain aside and peered out at the grass tipped with frost and the silent sentinels of apple trees, drab and colorless now that their riotous autumn was ending. All the apples had fallen into patches of brown leaves and rotted in sweet-smelling clumps. Even with the doors closed, she caught the scent of bonfires in the November air. The Fisher men had made a massive one yesterday, filled with all the dead branches Henry was so diligent aboutcollecting. Marlowe wondered if her younger brother would ever love practicing law as much as he loved his time-honored exercise of picking up sticks.
Once she was dressed, Marlowe ran a brush through her dark hair before heading upstairs. Crossing the spacious living room, she felt a flicker of relief as the empty kitchen came into view. Of course, it was spotless. An hour earlier, the children had probably turned the countertop into a chaotic, sticky land mine, but Marlowe’s mother had already swept in behind them to clean up the mess. Holiday or not, Glory never left a single dish unwashed before bed or after a meal.
It was also Glory’s habit to rise at five every morning and brew a massive pot of coffee. It was nearly nine. The coffee would be cold. Marlowe poured herself a cup anyway, just as the side door off the kitchen opened and Nate strode in, a pile of logs in his arms.
“Mom and Dad are in town getting the papers.” Nate spoke as he unloaded the logs. He brushed off his coat, always in motion and poised for action. “Walk?”
Marlowe nodded and set her mug down on the counter.
Nate grinned, his eyes crinkling up. Nothing seemed to make him happier than rallying his siblings for a walk, as if it was a pleasant surprise and not something they had done hundreds of times. That was the charm of her older brother. His smile could convince you that a river runs uphill.
Henry entered with another armful of logs. Marlowe noted he moved slower than he used to after a late night.
“Marlowe is in,” Nate said to Henry. “Come for a walk with us?”
“Just us three?” Henry smiled. “Sneaking off to the Bend for old times’ sake.”
It was a joke now that they were adults, but the Bend had once been their most cherished secret. As children, they were forbiddento swim without parental supervision. They swam anyway and vowed never to tell.
Nate led them to the door, and Marlowe buttoned up her coat as they stepped out into the frigid cold. She followed her brothers across the wide front lawn, the grass flat and faded to a yellowish green. She glanced back at her home. Even with its boxy proportions, the Gray House stood elegant and alluring. The sky was overcast to match the house’s somber tone, but the Gray House was far from drab. The shutters were painted dark green, contrasting its namesake clapboard color. It was cozy, yet regal, and lovingly maintained by regular visits from a house cleaner, painters who applied a fresh coat every other spring, and a fleet of lawn mowers in the summer, all arranged long ago and directed by Enzo, the wizened Italian handyman who’d become like a second father to Marlowe and the boys.
