Chapter 1

The pruners left Hollis's grip before his brain caught up with his hand. One moment he was mid-snip on a tired bloom, the crown of the rose bush level with his chest as he crouched on the gravel path. The next, Claudia Barrett-Reyes's right hand came down like a striking bird and the worn wooden handles spun out of his fingers. The tool flipped once in the bright air and landed blade-first in the stones at his boot, the metal ringing sharp and thin in the late-morning quiet.

The sound carried. The garden club's long table sat under the wisteria twenty feet up the terrace, a dozen faces turning toward the gravel path where the new groundskeeper knelt in his faded sage-green work shirt.

Hollis stayed where he was. He watched the pruners lie still in the gravel, the taped wooden handle catching the sun, the hairline crack in the left grip visible even from this angle. He had taped that handle himself three nights ago in the potting shed, using the roll of electrician's tape his aunt kept in the second drawer. The tape was the same shade of green as the stems he'd been cutting.

"Those are mine," Claudia said.

She hadn't raised her voice. She didn't need to. She stood at the top of the terrace steps in her pressed pale yellow linen blazer, silver-blonde bob sharp against the green of the wisteria, and looked down at him the way a person looks at a weed that has come up through a crack in a good patio.

Her right heel came down on the flat of the blade. The pruners shifted against the gravel. Then she lifted her foot and tapped his boot toe twice, light and quick, the way you'd nudge a dog that had wandered where it shouldn't.

She laughed first. A clear, practiced laugh, bright as glass. Priya Nadkarni, standing one step behind her in her periwinkle cardigan, laughed a beat later, on cue, then suddenly found her gold reading glasses on their beaded chain deeply interesting and looked down at them.

At the far end of the long table, Warren Ellery tipped his charcoal flat cap down over his eyes and said nothing at all. He was seventy-one years old and had been a member of this garden club since before Claudia had married into the Barrett name. He did not move.

Hollis looked at the pruners. He looked at the blade under Claudia's heel. Then he reached down and picked the tool up out of the stones, dusted the gravel off the metal with his fingers, and wiped the flat of the blade once across his sleeve.

"They are good roses," he said. His voice came out low and unhurried, the way it always did. He had been at Willowmere for nine days, and in nine days nobody at this table had heard him raise it.

Claudia's chin came up. "Excuse me?"