Chapter 1 THE GATES

The first time Adesewa Agbodemu saw the house that would change her life, it was raining so hard that the world beyond the car window looked like a painting being washed away.

The driver, a thin man named Mr. Sule whom she had hired at the motor park in Ibadan, slowed the car beside a pair of rusted iron gates and refused to look at the mansion for more than a second.

“Madam,” he said, “are you sure this is where you want to go?”

Adesewa wiped fog from the window with her sleeve. Beyond the fence, three storeys of cracked cream plaster rose out of an overgrown compound. Carved wooden doors, black with age, sat under a veranda held up by pillars as thick as drums. The upstairs windows were dark.

“My uncle left it to me,” she said. “I have every right to be here.”

“People in this town say things about that house.”

“People in every town say things about every house.” She said it lightly, the way she said most things when she was nervous. She had been raised by an aunt who sold provisions in Surulere, and Aunty Bisi had taught her that fear was mostly rumour with a good voice. “Ghosts are stories adults tell to make children behave, Mr. Sule. I stopped believing in them when I was seven.”

He did not smile. He only turned off the wipers, as if even the sound bothered him.

Three days earlier, a lawyer in a grey suit had sat in Aunty Bisi’s cramped parlour in Lagos and announced that a man Adesewa had never met was dead. Chief Akinwale Agbodemu, eighty-one, had been found at the bottom of his own staircase. The police had called it a fall.

The lawyer, Barrister Okonkwo, had said the word fall the way a person holds a hot plate, quickly and with both hands.

Her parents’ family, she had been told all her life, was gone. Her mother and father had died in a car accident when she was two. There were no grandparents, no cousins, no photographs. Aunty Bisi, who was not even a blood relation but a neighbour who had taken the child in, would only say, “Some doors are better left shut, my dear.”

And now a stranger had left her a mansion.

The gates began to open on their own, groaning inward. Adesewa assumed there was a gateman somewhere in the rain. She reached for her purse to pay Mr. Sule, and her phone buzzed in her palm.

An unknown number. One message.

LEAVE BEFORE MIDNIGHT. THE HOUSE HAS BEEN WAITING FOR YOU.

She read it twice. Then, because she was the kind of person who needed to see a thing for herself, she looked up at the house.

A woman stood in an upstairs window.

She was a pale shape behind wet glass, too far to see clearly. She wore something light-coloured and her hair was tied up. Adesewa’s breath caught. The woman raised one hand and pressed it flat against the pane, as if testing whether the glass was real.

Then she stepped back and was gone.

“Did you see that?” Adesewa whispered.

Mr. Sule had gone very still. “I did not see anything, madam.”

“There was a woman in the window.”

“The house has been empty since the Chief died.”

“Then someone is in there who shouldn’t be.” She said it firmly, and it steadied her. A woman in a window was not a ghost. It was a trespasser, a relative, a maid. It was a problem with a solution. She had made a life out of problems with solutions.

She paid him, took her small suitcase and her laptop bag, and stepped into the rain. Before she had crossed ten steps of the cracked driveway, his car had reversed out through the gates and vanished down the red-earth road, taillights smearing in the downpour.

Adesewa stood alone with her heart going hard.

The woman had looked like her mother.

That was the thought she refused to finish. She had one photograph of her mother, a creased passport picture kept in her Bible, and the woman in the window had not been close enough to resemble anyone. It was the rain and her tired mind. Nothing more.

The front doors opened before she reached the veranda.

An old woman stood in the doorway holding a hurricane lamp, though the electric bulb in the hallway behind her was lit. She was small and bent, wrapped in a faded wrapper and a headtie the colour of rust, and her eyes went over Adesewa’s face the way a person reads a letter they have waited years to receive.

“E kaabo,” the old woman said softly. Welcome. Her voice cracked on it. “You have come.”

“Good evening, ma. I’m Adesewa Agbodemu.”

“I know who you are.” The old woman lowered the lamp. “I am Ronke. I have kept this house for forty-one years. Come in out of the rain before you catch cold.”

Adesewa stepped across the threshold into a hall that smelled of wax polish, damp stone, and something sweeter underneath, like old cloth kept in a cedar chest. A great staircase curved up into shadow. Portraits lined the walls, stern men in agbada and women in gele, but when she looked closer she saw gaps between them, pale rectangles where frames had hung and been removed.

“Mama Ronke,” she said, “who is upstairs?”

The old woman’s hand tightened on the lamp. “Nobody is upstairs.”

“I saw a woman in the window. Just now, from the gate.”

“Rain makes the glass play tricks.”

It was almost exactly what Mr. Sule had said, in almost the same tone, and Adesewa felt the first small cold finger of suspicion. People who told the truth did not all use the same sentence.

“Ma,” she said carefully, “I’m not a child. I don’t believe in spirits. If there is someone living in this house without permission, I would rather know now.”

Something crossed Mama Ronke’s face, quick and complicated, like fear and relief at once. She looked toward the staircase and back.

“Then you are a very unusual Agbodemu,” the old woman said.

“I was raised by a Saka,” Adesewa said. “Not an Agbodemu.”

A man’s voice spoke behind her. “Then you’ve been raised well.”

She turned. He stood in a side doorway, so quietly that she had not heard him arrive. He was tall and lean, in his late twenties, in a white shirt rolled to the elbows and dark trousers soaked at the hems. He held a folded black umbrella and looked at her with polite, careful attention, the look of someone memorising a face.

“Kolawole Adebayo,” he said. “Everyone calls me Kola. I manage the estate. I would have met you at the gate, but the lightning knocked out the intercom and I only heard the car as it left.”

“You opened the gates?”

“No.” His eyebrows drew together. “I thought Baba Gate did. He’s the gateman.”

“Is he here?”

“He’s been in the village since Sunday. His mother is ill.”

Adesewa looked back through the open door. The iron gates stood wide in the rain, and beyond them the road was empty.

“Then who opened them?” she asked.

Nobody answered. Mama Ronke looked at the floor. Kola looked at Mama Ronke.

The hurricane lamp flickered, though there was no draught.

Adesewa did what she had always done when afraid. She became very practical. “Fine,” she said. “Someone is playing games, and I intend to find out who. But first I’d like to see my room, and I’d like a plate of food, because I haven’t eaten since Lagos.”

For the first time since she’d arrived, Kola smiled. It changed his whole face. “That, I can do.”

She followed them up the curved staircase, her wet shoes squeaking on old marble. Halfway up she paused. A single portrait was still in its place at the landing, and it showed a young woman in a lace buba, laughing with her head thrown back and one hand raised to shield her eyes from the sun.

The brass plate beneath it had been scratched until the name was gone.

“Who is she?” Adesewa asked.

“Nobody knows,” said Mama Ronke, too quickly.

Adesewa looked at the woman’s smile for a long moment. Then she looked at her own hands, at the small crescent scar on her left thumb, and at the identical scar on the thumb of the laughing woman in the painting.

She said nothing. She climbed the rest of the stairs with her face carefully blank, and behind her Kola watched her the whole way up.