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hill?”
    â€œNo, my dear, you told them they could stay up here, in their old family suite. They’re upstairs now.”
    â€œI did not. Did I? Why would I say that? Was I smiling?”
    â€œYes. So was he.” Claimayne raised one eyebrow. “I see a rapprochement .”
    â€œI don’t. And there was never anything to rapproche! He would have married that pie-wagon Louise if she . . . hadn’t had at least the minimal sense to cancel the engagement.”
    â€œIt’s unlikely to have been a real view of this upcoming Friday. Maybe your subconscious this evening decided, purely from pragmatism, to try to marry one of the imminent owners of Caveat.” He gave her a heavy-lidded look and smiled. “You’re not blood related, you recall.”
    â€œThen my subconscious is a masochist. I’d marry . . . you, first, and I don’t like you at all. Owners! That will is a joke.”
    â€œI do think a judge will agree with you about the will. Oh, and you told them to join us in here for dinner. Apparently Rita is going to make enchiladas. Will you feel up to it?”
    Ariel sat up straight with some evident effort and rolled her shoulders and flexed her fingers. “Just three days ahead, and into my own body,” she muttered, “and it feels like I dug ten ditches.”
    Her cousin spread his hands. “You’ve evidently forgotten what it’s like.”
    Ariel stood up unsteadily and moved her feet around till she was facing the hallway door. “Yes, I’ll be here for dinner. I want to see him get pig drunk.” She began walking carefully out of the room.
    â€œThat might help,” called Claimayne.

CHAPTER 2
    â€œARE YOU COMING?” ASKED Madeline. Scott had set down his bundle and one of her canvas bags halfway along the dim hallway that led to the three connecting bedrooms their family had once occupied.
    One wall of the corridor was paneled with a row of mismatched old doors; they had been salvaged from a number of long-demolished hotels and apartment buildings, and though there was only plaster behind them, he knocked at the one that was supposed to have come from the Garden of Allah bungalows on Sunset Boulevard, torn down in 1959.
    In the shadows he saw Madeline’s reluctant smile. “Aunt Amity always knocked on that one whenever she went by,” she said. “I remember.”
    He picked up the bags and walked up to where she stood. “And she always said, ‘When is a door not a door? When it’s a wainscot.’ That’s paneling. Which all these doors are, now that they’ve just got a wall behind them.”
    â€œIt was from that woman’s home, wasn’t it? That silent-movie actress.”
    â€œNazimova,” Scott agreed. “After she went broke and made her estate into bungalows so she could live in one of ’em.”
    He dropped the bags again to open the door of their parents’ old room. They shuffled in slowly.
    Madeline clicked the wall switch up, and the bare overhead bulb cast a harsh yellow glow over the bare floor and the cobwebbed shelves.
    The ceiling above the bed was mottled brown, and a foot-wide section of plaster had at some time fallen onto the mattress, which appeared to have been soaked by at least one winter’s leaked rains. Two short wires stuck out of the wall above the baseboard where the telephone had been connected.
    Scott wrestled open the north window to air out the mildew smell, though the breeze was cold.
    â€œGod,” whispered Madeline with a visible shiver, “they’re really gone now, aren’t they?”
    He knew what his sister meant; in the days when their parents’ room had still been regularly dusted and swept, it had been possible to imagine that their mother and father might one day return, with reassurances and unimaginable explanations. But Arthur and Irina Madden had disappeared in 1991, when Scott had been twelve