In truth, no outsider even came close until the night a teenage girl with a long black ponytail and bright blue eyes drove through the town and down the narrow, two-lane blacktop. For them, it was enough just to imagine what a hundred million dollars might look like, hanging on a wall in the middle of the woods.Īnd yet no one ever saw it. Sure, most of the town gossips knew only the most basic facts about Claude Monet. (The one-way ride in the back of a squad car and the stern call to their parents, however, always went unmentioned.)īut more than anything, people talked about the painting. Every so often, one teenager would dare another to climb the fence and wander through the grounds to get a look at the house, and the trespasser would show up at school the following day with tales of armed guards, Doberman pinschers, and a narrow escape through a tunnel lined with barbed wire. The bathroom faucets are made of solid gold. The ceilings are forty feet high, some people would say. Occasionally, someone from town would be summoned through the tall gates and down the winding lane to repair a pipe or deliver supplies but for the most part, the house was like a dragon in the hills, a sleeping legend that barely touched anything beyond its line of trees. For over a century, the owners had been importing their chefs from France, their butlers from England. Of all the people who knew about the big house in the middle of Wyndham Woods, very few had ever been inside.

Perfect Scoundrels by Ally Carter