* * *
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t a modern masterpiece of glass and steel jutting from a steep rocky cliff, overlooking the ocean and surrounded on the other three sides by dense forest. Masculine, austere, and starkly beautiful, it’s straight out of Architectural Digest.
I swing shut the driver’s-side door, then slowly walk up the driveway toward the house, gravel crunching underfoot. The sea breeze is brisk, snapping my hair around my face. The sun shines glaringly bright. Set back about a hundred yards from the house is an old barn, out of place with its old-fashioned style and state of disrepair. It looks as if it’s been standing neglected in the same spot at the forest’s edge for a hundred years. If it wasn’t for the padlock and chain wound around the handles of
