Margot Lowe keeps records. For fifteen years she has logged every hour of her life in a series of plain black notebooks ? because there are gaps in her time, small and seamless, and a woman who loses hours had better be able to read back her own position by morning.
The system works. It is the reason she can take six-month contracts in cities she enters as a stranger and leaves as weather, owing nothing, accounted for.
In Edinburgh for the winter, she meets the woman who lives above her: Frances Doyle, a retired cataloger of maps, who reads people the way she once read the requests that came down to her reading room ? by what they seek, and what they withhold. Frances misses nothing.
And one cold morning, Frances calmly denies a conversation Margot is certain they had ? a conversation Margot can place to the minute, in Frances's own voice, on a stair where Frances swears she never stood.
It is the first crack in fifteen years of careful accounting. What comes through it is worse, and stranger, than a faulty memory. Someone has been keeping their own records in the hours Margot cannot see. Someone with her face and her hands and her habits has been visiting Frances in the dark, talking about a lake, asking the old woman to keep a secret.
And the secret leads back to a single Vermont summer, a death by still water, and a buried thing Margot's own hands once knew exactly how to hide.
A slow, hypnotic psychological thriller about memory, the self that keeps watch in the dark, and the terrible patience of a thing that has waited fifteen years to be found, The Neighboring House is the first novel in the Still Water Series.
