“If you have fears, as many do, around the gray areas of domicile and non-domicile tax obligations, then rest assured your father raises no concerns. There are no additional hidden funds, other than those disclosed in the wishes, so from a legal standpoint—and from a layman’s standpoint —everything is as it should be.”
I feel something inside me relax. That fear, at least, that my father was involved in something not quite legal, has been taken off the table.
It’s James’s turn to question me now. I see him teeing up.
“From my brief look into your father’s affairs and lifework I see he was an impressive man? A civil engineer? Is that correct?”
“Amongst other things, yes. He was a bit of a prodigy. Maths was his strong suit. Adapted some theories young, and yes, he built turbines, infrastructure. And other things.”
“And wrote the crossword?” James says now with a sly smile that I believe is intended to express the sentiment: Come now, don’t be modest.
“Well, he set them, yes. For a period. In The Times. Yes.” I try to lower my heart rate but I feel my rage building. Talking about Dad like this, to strangers, explaining him to them, is bizarre and awful and I shouldn’t have to do it. “He had a lot of passion projects. So—”
“Yes, I read an article,” James interrupts, his interest now truly piqued, and I have to squeeze my eyes shut to stop from grabbing his pompous BVI yacht club tie and throttling him. When I open my eyes he hasn’t noticed or cared. He continues unfazed. “Yes, The New York Times called him ‘the last of the true Renaissance men’: puzzles, codes, word games. And the wind farms, structures, mathematics. I didn’t even really understand certain aspects of what he did in the article but overall, very—”
“Yes, yes. Overall, very impressive. He was. Yes. Yes. He was,” I say, by rote, echoing James back to himself with a tone I hope expresses benevolent thanks for his opinion on a man he never met but was absolutely everything to me.
I look up to see the car has stopped in front of a gatehouse, the entrance to a walled property.
The gatehouse is shuttered up with no one present to let us in. James seems to snap out of his Renaissance-man-based reverie and I watch professional James, the James I actually prefer, reappears. He turns in the seat beside me.
“This is it. No security team employed at present but I’ve got a gate fob here.” He pulls it from his jacket pocket with an expectant smile. “Welcome to Anderssen’s Opening.”
For the second time this week I feel my jaw slacken and my mouth drop open. “Excuse me? What did you just say?” I ask, looking at James in disbelief. I sit up in my seat—every fiber in my being alive again for the first time since my father’s death.
“Gate fob? Anderssen’s Opening?” he hazards.
“You’re telling me this house is called Anderssen’s Opening?”
He frowns. “Yes, why?”
“Sorry, I must be misunderstanding this.” I take a breath before attempting to make sense of it. “That name, is it connected in some way to the area here, the bay, or—?”
“No, no. We’re between bays here. Pond Bay is that way,” he says, gesturing left. “Mahoe that way,” he adds, signaling right. “Anderssen has no significance to the island. It’s just a name. Perhaps it had significance to your father?”
I feel a tight knot form inside my stomach. It most definitely did. And it does to me. It is a message, a challenge. My dead father is communicating with me. To leave me a house and name it this—
James is staring at me.
I feel a hot flush in my cheeks as I formulate a response. How to explain—
“Anderssen’s Opening is a chess move. A challenge. A very strong, very rare opening move. Adolf Anderssen beat Paul Morphy with it in the 1800s. Anderssen’s Opening was sneaky. Is sneaky. You move your least important pawn one square forward and you wait to see what the opponent does next. It’s a non-move, a taunt almost. You put the ball in their court— and then you watch and wait to see what they do next.”
“Okay,” James says, his bottom lip curling. “And does that mean something?”
“Of course, it means something. Everything means something, James. I’m just not sure exactly what this means yet. What he means. But he wants me to find out.”
CHAPTER 6
MARIA
T he door, now open, reveals what lies beyond it: the room is very large, white, with smooth walls that are ambiently lit as if by daylight, though being beneath ground, there are no windows.
It is completely empty.
The lights change slightly in tone as Maria peers into the space, as if sensing her.
Maria steps back from the threshold quickly, instinctively, and the lighting returns to normal. She takes in the cavernous room from the safety of the hallway. A small metal plate just inside the hydraulic doorway reads: THE ATRIUM. But the room doesn’t look like one, at least not to Maria. She searches her mind for atriums and finds only remembered images from coffee-table books: old European courtyards, Italian vestibules, open-air cobbled sun-traps. But the space in front of her now is internal, a sealed room. Then Maria’s mind finds something else, the other meaning of the word: a word she recalls vividly from her days at Cornell. The atrium of a human heart. An anatomical cavity, or passage. The chamber of the human heart that receives blood from the veins and forces it on into ventricles and then on and on around the body. She shivers, the memory of cutting open a human cadaver suddenly flashing through her mind. Strange, it didn’t bother her at the time. And though she shelved medical school after the second year, it wasn’t for squeamish reasons. She wasn’t a delicate person; God knows she wouldn’t have lasted long in her life if she were. She worked her way up to Cornell the hard way, from nothing and nowhere.
