She told me.

Raymond Wallace had been the first husband of Vivienne’s mother, Naomi, years and years ago, when Naomi was very young — and Raymond had owned the apple orchards, the old water mill, and the surrounding acres that would one day become Vivienne’s inheritance.

And Raymond had died suddenly, and strangely, in a fall from a cliffside that the authorities of the time had ruled an accident.

“But Naomi never believed it was an accident,” Mrs.