The Hopkinton house, now owned by Gardener Young

The door opened reluctantly. Allen had to force it before it finally skittered across the cracked and peeling linoleum floor, dragging a ribbon of gray felt weather-stripping with it as it went. He could tell it was a door that had not been used much. But that was hardly a surprise. For all her ambivalence about her aristocratic upbringing, for all her efforts to be perceived as something other than the heiress that she was, Cam Lyman was still the sort who always used the front door. If he hadn't already known that — and he did — Allen could feel it the instant he stepped into the lonely old kitchen.

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Lonely old kitchens love to gossip. Give a lonely old kitchen a chance and it'll show you the rings on the contact paper in the cabinet under the sink where the brandy used to be stashed. It will tell you all about the poison that was used on the mice after they gnawed through the bottom of the wainscoting. And it will show you the traps that were set out when the poison didn't work.

The lonelier the kitchen the more willing it is to share its secrets.

Cam Lyman's kitchen was a terribly lonely place, Allen thought. It was cold and empty. There wasn't so much as a burn mark or a coffee ring on the plain Formica countertop. All the Fresh Scent Clorox in the world couldn't mask the unmistakable smell of its slow decay.

It had been at least three years since Cam had last made coffee or fried an egg in that kitchen, Allen knew. But even when she still lived in the old house in Hopkinton and spent her days sleeping and her nights prowling its expansive rooms, the kitchen was one room where Cam never really felt comfortable.

Not long after she moved in, in one of those all-night manic bursts of energy she was known for, she painted everything — the walls, the cabinets, the door jambs and window sills — the same dull shade of blue. For weeks afterward, she had splotches of pale blue paint on her hair and eyebrows and even now, years later, there were still drops of paint on the cracked linoleum floor.

And still, despite the warm sunlight of an early autumn afternoon streaming through the windows over the rust-stained sink, the room seemed icy and bleak, Allen thought. How much colder it must have seemed during Camilla's long nights, when it was lit by nothing more than a single frosted fixture in the center of the ceiling.

Who knows? Maybe it was a vestigial reminder of her upbringing; a childhood of ponies, private schools and privileges at the Massachusetts mansion her family dubbed Ricefields. Maybe that's why Cam could never come to terms with the kitchen. Maybe it was another of her mannish affectations. Or maybe it was just that in the chaos that was Cam there was just no room for the warmth of a cozy kitchen.

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