Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 48, No. 1, January 2003

The Trophy Room by D. A. McGuire

Of course it was her handwriting. The way she formed the small letter a and crossed the letter t so high, the nonexistent r at the end of both Carter and Sawyer; they were her trademarks. Even though Frances used a quill pen, with ink so old it was brown, and a sheet of yellowed paper she’d probably found in the attic, along with...

“Look at these, Herbie. I think we used these here, once, when I was a child. Can you imagine how old they must be?” She had plugged them in, and ancient as they were, the filament in each bulb glowed.

“But it’s not even Thanksgiving yet.” My protest had been small. These were her things; this was her house; these were her brass electric candles — ancient Christmas decorations. And they were standing stiffly in each window because of her insistence.

These were not my windows I looked out to watch the wild autumn wind sweep the leaves back and forth across the street. This was not my carpet, books scattered across it in the waning afternoon light, where history was opened to a forgotten chapter, and science to facts which held no interest. Nor was this my chair, where I rested my arms and leaned forward to watch the wind play with the leaves and rock the naked limbs of the sycamores in the front yard. And not my cat padding across the floor softly. Not my keys wound round my fingers.

I was only the caretaker, the boy hired to clean, to repair, to watch over this house that was not his own.

“Make it seem lived-in,” Frances had said. “Set the timers. Put the electric candles in the windows.”

So I had. I’d also set the clocks. “There are so many; I’ve not got to them all. Maybe what I should do is...” She seemed so flustered, and yet so perfectly beautiful as she tapped the tip of her pen against her teeth. “Yes, that’s it. I’ll make a list of chores for you. Will that be all right? It’s odd being back here. This was just a summer house for me, and well, I’m a city girl.” Then she had signed my paycheck, looked at me, and smiled.

I stretched my arms forward and the cat brushed its face against my fingertips. I reached into my pocket, removed the small wooden object there, and spun it on the floor for the cat’s amusement. The late afternoon light was so low now it was nearly gone, and yet the room still seemed bright and animated. I watched the electric candles flicker on, just as I’d set them to do. Out in the kitchen the radio crackled, then there was music. I’d planned that, too.

“I want it to feel as it did when my father lived here.” She’d been wistful as she stood by the windows in the afternoon sunlight, slowly fading most of the color out of this great room. The side of the sofa facing south was a dull, drab purple, while the opposite side, facing me, remained a vivid magenta. I’d noticed that when I’d cleaned this room, and vacuumed and dusted and polished each surface — wood, glass, or brass — until it sparkled. The furniture hadn’t been moved in years.

I’d done the carpets, the windows, and everything but the curtains, which I was staring at now. They were frail looking, mere wisps of sheer yellow fabric. She might want them cleaned; she might want them thrown out. Whatever she wanted, I’d do it. I would have done anything so I wouldn’t have to go home.

I would even have braved the trophy room. “You don’t need to bother with it now. Sophie kept it orderly. We can save it for last. It’s the other rooms I need livable first.”

I dropped the keys on the floor, looked down at the four squares of paper I’d found, or rather, had been left for me. Because as she’d said...

“A boy should have an adventure at least once in his life. Like Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. Do kids still read Mark Twain in school? It’s been so many years; I can barely remember what kids read. Or do they...” Her brow had wrinkled as she’d said, “...read anymore?”

“I read,” I’d told her. Though not a lot — that I didn’t say.

“Do you? Some time you must tell me what you read. But don’t you agree that, oh, that a boy should have at least one adventure before he’s twenty? I’ve often thought so.”

How did I tell her I’d had my share of adventures? I just agreed with her in my own way: “Yeah, sure, I guess.”

“It will be all right? I won’t take you away from your studies?” She hadn’t asked about my mother, but she knew. She’d had the talks all right, a long one first with Clem, and then another with Jake.

“No, it’s okay,” had been my response. “I can use the job.”

I might have added that I’d clean your house and your yard, mow and rake, and pile the leaves out back. Burn them up later, if you want. I’d paint the porch, clean the gutters, and repair the railings — I’d do it all, and it won’t matter what you paid. And you don’t have to leave “clues” around the house to amuse me, so I can have “an adventure.”

I spread the yellowed squares of paper in the dying light on the old carpet. Underneath the floorboards of this room, the front room, the furnace gurgled. Yes, that’s how it sounded, like a large, wet animal was down there, burping and turning and shaking the house. The pipes began to rattle and squeak; the heat was coming on as the wind whistled through the leafless branches of a sycamore standing near the house. But I loved the sound and the feel of this house, large and warm and empty around me. I loved the heavy, overstuffed, faded furniture and the worn, soft woven rugs; the floor to ceiling windows; and the pale curtains hanging in them. I loved the way the heat rose slowly from the radiators and moved those curtains just lightly so. I loved coming here every day after school, working, then eating the food I’d brought with me. I even liked spreading out my assignments in the waning light of this huge room. There were no distractions. There was no television or computer, no video games. There was only that one old radio out in the kitchen. It sat on the black countertop — which I had polished — next to the cell phone Jake had insisted I bring with me.

Four weeks ago they’d come to a different house, my house, and taken my mother away. Three days after that, Jake Valari had stood in my kitchen arguing with me.

“I talked to your Aunt Clem. It’s either this or you go live with her.” There was no way Jake could hide the emotion in his voice. “Look, I know it’s not much of a choice, but I’m willing to do it.”

“For her?” I’d challenged. “Or for me?”

“You’re fifteen, you can’t stay here alone while your mother...” It was too hard for him to use the euphemism “gets well.” “Either I move in with you for the time being, or you go live with your aunt in Boston. I don’t think that’s what you want. I think you want to stay here in Manamesset and go to school with your friends. Just correct me, please, if I’m wrong.”

What a choice they’d all given me.

“I don’t care what the court says, or some judge, or even my Aunt Clem.” Truth is, that was a lie. I did care. No way I wanted to move in with my mother’s sister. Clem was a good enough person, but I had no desire to move in with her family. So Detective Jake Valari, a friend of my mother’s, was moving in with me. Until my mother...

Well, what do you say about a woman who tells her son, “Life is tough,” after hearing how he’d discovered his girlfriend with her arm around a member of the football team? What do you say about that same woman after she downs a fifth of vodka, along with a half-bottle of sleeping pills, then crawls into bed without even saying goodbye?

“She’s depressed,” Aunt Clem had said.

“Yeah, I’m depressed, too, sometimes,” I’d said. Then I left the house, walked all the way to the bay and out to the end of the jetty, where I tried to come up with ten good reasons not to jump in and swim until I ran out of energy — or breath or life.

Later I went off to a friend’s house, shot some baskets, getting home long after dark. Jake had been waiting for me. And Clem and her new boyfriend. I hadn’t said a word to any of them, just gone off to bed.

And then to school the next day. And the next. And the next. For three weeks. Like a zombie. Like a walking automaton. Counselors made appointments for me at school. I went to none of them. Teachers I’d known and liked for years tried to talk to me. I ignored each and every one. Friends came up to my locker, punched me in the arm, tried to joke around. I just asked if I could borrow their Spanish homework.

It was like there was a fog around my head and I was trying to drag, or push, or maybe plow my way through it. I dreamt at night that I was drowning — not in the bay; I knew Manamesset Bay could never hurt me, and that when I died — whenever, wherever, however — it wouldn’t be the bay that would take me. This drowning was different, like suffocating in the air around me. I’d watched a friend have an asthma attack a few years ago and had been insensitive enough to ask him what it felt like. Like trying to breathe through a wet rag, he’d said.

So that’s how I felt, like I couldn’t breathe, like someone was holding something heavy and wet and cold against my face. For three weeks I’d awakened night after night, just struggling to breathe.

And then I met Frances. Frances, who looked up at me through her pale blonde eyelashes, and entered my life.

That day I was trying to find a reason not to go home. I was just delivering Remy’s newspapers while he was in Florida for a week. My mother would be home by Thanksgiving, everyone — my aunt, Jake, the doctors — agreed. My mother was... well, she wasn’t dying. She’d be home for Thanksgiving, two short weeks away.

“Well, are you going to stand there gawking?” A voice had interrupted my thoughts. “Or are you going to help get him down?”

Him was the large gray puffball of a cat perched out on the limb of a giant sycamore about twelve feet overhead. I was the hapless paperboy looking up at him. There was no way I could just ride on by, no way I could disregard a request for help. I have a hard time refusing anyone who asks me for help. It’s one of my biggest character flaws.

“Well?” the woman snapped impatiently; she was smoking a cigarette. “Not that I care. He’s my neighbor’s.” A nod to the huge house — peeling white paint with gray shutters, central chimney and four smaller ones, probably built around 1890 — just behind her. The lawn needed mowing. The hedges were far overgrown. There were clumps of weeds, untrimmed bushes, and masses of dead flowers hugging the foundation. Even the driveway and slate stone walkway leading up to the front door had weeds growing up through the cracks. “It’s a Persian,” the woman said. “Miserable breed, so self-centered.” She gestured, cigarette in hand, toward the cat. “I suppose Frances can call the fire department.” She tossed the cigarette onto the sidewalk and stepped on it.

Then she stared at me, waiting for an answer. She was probably in her sixties, dressed in a short tan coat and dark pants that came down just above the ankles. She looked like a skinny scarecrow: bright painted face, straw-yellow hair with black roots, skinny wrists and ankles. And the look on her face? Well, that was an expression I was more apt to get from kids my own age. She was daring me to do something perfectly ridiculous and dangerous: any cat that could make it up into a tree could certainly make it down without my help.

But it was an expression I found hard to ignore. It was the same look that once had me walking through Tideman’s Marsh when the eels were migrating through it. Slipping and sliding through the tall marsh grass, they’d looked like black snakes winding over dry land. It was pretty scary stuff. That was the expression I saw on her face: half contempt, half amusement. It said to me: “You don’t dare help, do you? You’re not a man; you’re just a boy. Weak. Useless.”

“No, ma’am, I don’t think they do that,” I said. I was half off Remy’s bike.

“Who can’t — do what?” she demanded.

“The fire department. I don’t think they get cats down out of trees anymore.”

“They don’t?” She was horrified. “Good God, then what do they do all day? It’s not like we have a surfeit of fires around here!”

“No, ma’am, I guess not.” I backed up the bike a bit. “But if you wait a little while, the cat will come down by it—”

“Jean? You aren’t asking him to get Sammy out of the tree, are you?”

I spun around too fast and nearly fell off the bike. I can’t lie about Frances, or the fact that she startled me. It was the sound of her voice, or maybe the way she walked across the yard, rustling through the unraked leaves. No, it was more the way she looked up at me, even though she was just about my height. Dressed in a short white wool jacket and pale blue jeans, she was, at first sight, unremarkable. If someone later had asked what word first came to mind on meeting her, I’d have said pale.

Not pale as in lifeless, pale as in light-colored. Light skin, light blue eyes, light hair, and lashes so white you had to be very near to her to see she even had any.

“Strong kid like him,” the other woman snorted, lighting a new cigarette, “no reason he can’t climb up there and get that cat down.”

“Oh, please,” the younger woman said, “I shouldn’t wish him to fall and hurt himself.”

Though she seemed to have no accent, there was an inflection in her speech that my mother would have called affected. But to me, her voice sounded like water lapping against a half-submerged buoy.

She turned to me, extended her hand, and said, “I’m Frances Carter, and this is my neighbor, Jean Pritchard. She’s always telling others how best to look out for me or my cat. Do you have a paper for me?”

Even as I took her hand, it took me several seconds to find my tongue and mutter, “Frances... Carter? I don’t think that you... you’re not on my... list.”

“You’re not our regular boy, are you?” she said, still smiling; apparently I amused her. “The name would be under Sophie Carter. That’s my sister. She recently passed away.” She looked back at the house. “Twenty-three Sanctuary Drive?” Then, with her hand still in mine, she looked at me through her pale lashes.

And I was Smitten. Captured. Caught like a fish, but not with the hook snagged in my mouth, but dragged straight through my heart.

“Can you get the cat out of the tree, or not?” the other woman snarled.

“Jean,” she cautioned the woman with a soft laugh, then looking down where I still held her hand, said, “May I have it back?”

So I got the cat out of the tree. The sycamore tree was not quite old enough to be showing the mottled white and brown bark that comes with age, but it was still large, its trunk a foot in diameter, and at one time it had been pruned, which left a few fist-sized knobs low enough to grab onto. So getting up had been effortless. Not so effortless had been reaching out to Sammy, or Samson, who bolted the moment I touched him. He ran down my arm and across my back, then he leaped onto the ground and up into the bushes at the front of the house.

“I really must call your mother and apologize,” Frances said as she tended to the scratches on my arm. “Sammy’s cut right through this shirt, and your sweatshirt.” Her big fat cat had got me good, but I was doing a pretty heroic job masking my pain. I couldn’t help but wince, though, as I sat at her kitchen table and she applied peroxide to the marks.

“So Danny walked out on you,” Jean was muttering at the kitchen door, cigarette in hand as she turned to watch us. “I told Sophie he was no good.” She walked back our way, surveying the room critically as she did. “Something fishy about him, if you ask me. I told you how his friend came looking for him right after Sophie died?”

“Daniel wasn’t stealing from me, or from Sophie either,” Frances said gently. “I told you, Jean, nothing is missing from the house. Daniel was a drifter and he just...” Her blue eyes met mine. “...drifted away.”

“Well, if you plan to live here year-round, Fran, you’re going to need help. You need...” The older woman’s tiny, piercing eyes fell on me. “What about him?” She gestured with her cigarette hand at me.

Up until then I hadn’t said much. I was just the paper boy. I’d stopped and done a favor, for which I was now paying in blood. But now it seemed my turn to speak up: “Look, this is nothing. I get scratched...” I tried to roll my shirtsleeve down, but Frances, small as she was, was very firm; she pushed my hand away, shaking her head. The light in the kitchen wasn’t very good; in fact, the entire room was pretty dingy: dirty curtains; faded tabletop; and countertops cluttered with dishes, pots and pans, and an assortment of crates and boxes. Someone was either doing a cleanup job in here or the place had just been trashed. “...all the time,” I finished.

“I insist on paying for your damaged clothes,” she said to me.

“He’s perfect, Franny.” The older woman was suddenly there between us, hands down on the scuffed tabletop. “He’s not very big but strong enough by the looks.” Then to me, “How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

“There you go,” the woman said, “fifteen, and probably not working. That right?”

“I don’t have a regular job, no.”

“Can you rake, mow, clean up this place? She’s looking. Her handyman just up and left her after Sophie died.”

“Jean...” Frances protested.

Jean, ignoring the younger woman, said to me: “What’s your name?”

“Herb... Herbert Sawyer, ma’am.”

“My God,” Jean Pritchard said, standing back. “You’re the son of that woman who tried to kill herself.”

I wasn’t crazy about Mrs. Jean Pritchard. She was nosy, bossy, unsubtle, and outspoken, but it was her I had to thank for my current position. Caretaker. Handyman. One-boy clean-up crew for Miss Frances Carter, who had insisted from the start I call her Frances. I figured she was somewhere near my mother’s age, and my mother was thirty-six, so Frances had to be maybe thirty-three, thirty-four. But she had done everything right, called and spoken to Jake, then my Aunt Clem, and even my school, just to “be on the safe side, you understand.”

“Police detective.” Frances had been impressed by Jake’s credentials.

“Yeah, he’s a friend of my mother’s,” I’d said. “I mean, they dated... for a while.”

“He was kind enough to move in with you,” she’d said. We’d been at her kitchen table; she had insisted I have a cup of tea. It was my first day on the job, one in which I had single-handedly transformed her front and side yards from looking like an overgrown vacant lot to something fairly respectable. But she insisted I needed a break after working so hard. “Because it must be difficult...” she’d said gently, “with your mother... away.”

I hadn’t wanted to talk about my mother. With the preliminary investigation over, she felt safe hiring me. Now I just wanted to talk about scraping down her porch railings and pulling up the rotted floorboards on the front steps. I wanted to ask how she wanted her hedges trimmed and if I should pull up the black-eyed Susans that had overtaken her flower garden. I was the outside help and felt uncomfortable sitting at the worn kitchen table in her grubby little kitchen.

“This is pretty bad, too, isn’t it?” she’d asked unexpectedly. I guess I’d been too quiet, or she sensed my uneasiness. Maybe I’d been looking around at her kitchen too long: at the grease-stained stove, the broken light fixtures. My own home was small and plain, a kitchen-living room combination with two bedrooms down and an unfinished second floor. But it was clean and orderly and there were windows and light everywhere. This kitchen was basic black and white, with an old-fashioned sink with exposed plumbing, an ancient gas stove, and glass-paneled cabinets with many of the panels missing. Years ago, with copper pots gleaming from the ceiling and polished floors and woodwork, the room was probably pretty special, but today...

“No, needs a little work, is all.” I shrugged. I hadn’t wanted to embarrass her. I’d known her only two days but already I had a pretty high opinion of her. Maybe too high.

“I’m not living here yet. I’m staying at a motel,” she informed me. “The house is warm enough, but the furnace is incredibly noisy. I’m looking for someone to come and work on it.” She shook her head and smiled. “Maybe when you’re done with the outside work...” She leaned toward me, one hand on my arm for emphasis. She was so composed; nothing she did or said ever seemed too forward or improper. “Or am I expecting too much?” she asked. “I don’t want to take up all your time, Herbie. It’s just that when Sophie died...” She sighed and sat back, hands in her lap. “My sister left me comfortably well off, but she didn’t take good care of this place, did she? It was her summer home; she hadn’t lived here in years.”

“I’d be glad to help inside,” I’d told her. “Whatever you want.”

Her whole face grew animated. “Oh, you’re too good, too accommodating! And they say the younger generation is selfish. Slackers — isn’t that the current term?”

“It’s one of them.”

So I worked like a bear those next two weeks, every day after school, often long into the evenings. I raked and mowed, trimmed and pruned, scraped and painted. I pushed wheelbarrows of leaves and branches, sticks and weeds out to the back yard where I built a small bonfire and got rid of it all. It was exactly what I needed: hard physical work, and lots of it.

During those two weeks I saw her every day. It was November, cool but good enough weather for outside work. Frances and me, we were all business. That’s the only way it could have been, because even though I was, well, infatuated, I was smart enough to know that I was just a kid. So I had a kind of a crush on her; it was harmless, like the crush Remy had on the student teacher in Spanish.

Then the week of Thanksgiving arrived and she asked again if I’d be interested in working inside: “I’ve got the place fairly livable, except for that furnace, but at least you wouldn’t be cold inside. So, if you’re still interested, would you...”

Strip the wax off the kitchen floor? Steam and scrape off old wallpaper? Vacuum and buff down the hardwood floors in the front rooms? Vacuum the furniture and all the rugs?

“Of course,” had been my response to every question.

“You’re too kind,” she’d said.

So I had slowly moved from being the outside boy to the inside help, and then, from there, to the caretaker.

Then, a few days ago, she’d said: “It’s just not ready to live in. I’m going back to New York for Thanksgiving and probably won’t return till spring.”

Had she seen the disappointment in my face? Did she know I lived each day watching the clock and counting the minutes until I could see her? Though our conversations were brief, focusing mainly on my next task (“Could you roll up those rugs, take down those paintings, wash those windows?”), I lived for every word she said, my answers yes, always yes.

“The house is winterized, but I can’t stand that clanging furnace. So, until the spring, will you...”

Set up these Christmas candles? Buy a wreath after the first of December, hang it on the front door? Set the timers so the lights will go on? And if it snows, shovel a path and clean the driveway? Make it look like someone lives here? Will you light the furnace, let it run a bit each day, keep it warm enough so the pipes won’t freeze?

“And Sammy?” I’d asked, as the gray cat wound through my legs.

“Jean will take care of him,” had been her reply as she scooped him up into her arms. “I inherited Sammy, too. He belonged to Sophie.” Then she pressed the keys into my hand.

“Sophia Clara Carter. Lived in Lynn, summered here in Manamesset, or did until about ten years ago. Paid insurance and taxes on the Sanctuary Drive property, but other than that, generally let the house and two outbuildings fall into disrepair. Then early this fall she hired a local man to do some painting and carpentry work. Unfortunately that ended when she was found dead in her condominium on October tenth.”

I hate to admit it, but it was the most interesting thing Jake had said in all the time we’d been living together. I looked up from my turkey sandwich. It was the Friday after Thanksgiving and I was having a rare meal at home because I had an indoor track meet that afternoon.

Jake waited for my reaction, then went on: “Self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, Herbie. Sophie Carter committed suicide.”

“And?” I said with complete attitude. “So?” I even shrugged. “Got nothing to do with Frances... Miss Carter.”

“Miss...” he emphasized, “Frances Carter is a research historian, and lives in Greenwich Village, though she’s recently made plans to relocate here to Manamesset. Never married. Inherited the house on Sanctuary Drive, plus two other properties in Falmouth and Brewster, from her sister Sophie. No other living family members. Her father, Lyman Carter, died in 1970...” Another emphatic pause — cops must get off on this stuff. “...of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.”

I shook my head. “Frances must have been just a kid then.”

“Must have been,” Jake agreed. “I have no age on either Miss Sophie or Miss Frances.” He definitely was getting off on all of this. “Maybe suicide runs in their family.”

I bit down deliberately on my sandwich, said with my mouth full, “I’ve heard it does... in some families.”

We’d had a lousy Thanksgiving at home, just him and me and a football game in which I’d had no interest. Halfway through, I got up and left and took my bike to the Carter house to do some work.

“Sorry, Herbie, I shouldn’t have said...”

“Forget it.”

“Okay, here’s something else: the man who worked for the Carter sisters, a Daniel Church of West Falmouth, was reported missing by his girlfriend on October sixteen of this year.”

“So?”

“So, Herbie, I’ve looked into this Frances Carter, though I have absolutely no reason to be concerned, not at this point. I’ve talked to a friend up in Lynn and...”

“And what?” I cut him off. “What are you saying, Jake, that I’m working for a murderer? You’ve got to be kidding. What did Frances do? Off her sister? And her father? When did she do that, when she was five?”

“Let me finish. The medical examiner said that Sophie Carter killed herself. No one accused Miss Frances...” Her name sounded dark and ugly coming out of his mouth. “...of anything improper. She was in New York when her sister died. I’ve just looked into her background because...”

“Because I can’t take care of myself?” I demanded. “Because I wouldn’t know a murderer if I tripped over one?”

“Herbie, no one said...”

“Are you jealous because I spend so much time over there? You do know I’m working, don’t you? That she pays me? I’m not over there partying, Jake. She keeps me busy, plenty busy. You should see the list of things she’s left for me to do.”

Strangely, he didn’t seem interested in arguing with me, just said, “You’d do the same, if you were me.”

“She’s just a woman who hired me. That’s all she is. I bumped into her by accident when I got her stupid cat out of a tree and that’s it. I work for her. I’m her... employee.”

“How’s school?” he asked, startling me.

I stood up, no longer interested in the food, nor suddenly in the stupid track meet I was supposed to attend. I wanted to get on my bike, go over and check the Carter place, make sure the timers were on and the candles set well away from the curtains. I hadn’t been altogether happy about agreeing to leave them on with no one there. And Sammy, I had to make sure I hadn’t accidentally locked him in, and the furnace had to be turned back. It was running worse all the time.

“How’s school?” he asked again, with the patience which makes kids my age so sick of adults sometimes.

“Fine.”

“You haven’t talked much about it.”

“Nothing to talk about. It’s fine. School is school.”

“Your counselor stopped in to see me down at the station Wednesday.”

“I’m not flunking anything. My work’s all up-to-date. My grades are good.”

“I know that. All As and one B,” he agreed. “Your grades have never been better.”

“So why the visit? What’s the point?”

“You been doing your studying at the Carter house?”

“The last week or so, yes, so what? She’s not there, you know. She’s gone back to New York. You do know that? Damn it, Jake, it’s not like — I mean, what do you think I’m doing? I’m not...” I was too flustered to continue. I turned away and ran both hands back through my hair.

“Your mother does that.”

“What?” I spun around on him, not knowing whether to be angry, insulted, confused, bitter.

“Tears her hair.” Jake looked down at his empty coffee cup. “When she’s upset.”

“Glad to hear it. Nice to know you notice,” I muttered, reaching for my jacket.

“I’ve talked to some of Frances Carter’s co-workers. She seems to lead a very quiet, self-contained life. No...”

I hated this! The way he jumped from subject to subject! School, then my mother, and now back to Frances. And they say kids manipulate adults? What was he doing to me? I spun around to face him.

“Self-contained? Does that mean she doesn’t have a record for seducing fifteen-year-old kids? That’s good, isn’t it, then? It means you can get off her and you can get off me and leave us both alone!”

I went out, slamming the door, then shoving my hands into my pockets, stood at the bottom step. It was another windy day, which is all we seem to have here on the Cape in November, December, the whole damn winter. Why do people live out on this damn peninsula anyhow?

“Bay’s that way,” Jake said behind me.

I spun around, glared up the steps at him.

“That’s what you do when you’re mad, isn’t it, walk out to the end of the jetty?”

Okay, my next remark was completely out of line, but I said it right to his face. I told him where he could go.

“Yeah, that’s a good answer,” he said. “But if you’re trying to make me mad, it’s not going to work.” He folded his arms and stared down at me.

“What makes you think...” I was totally flustered, embarrassed, and a little bit ashamed. Truth is, I had such a rush of emotions just then I didn’t know what I was feeling, or why, and neither did I have a single clue as to how to control them. I just knew I felt like I was suffocating.

Then my fingers felt the small wooden object shaped like an egg that I’d tucked in my jacket pocket.

“Do you blame me for what your mother did?” Jake asked.

“This is a stupid time to talk about that!” I fired back. Finally something at which I could aim.

“You’re working your butt off, Herbie, day and night, making yourself so exhausted that you fall into bed each night without time to think about your mother, about what she did, about how it’s affecting you — isn’t that right?”

“You ought to change jobs, Jake. Become a — psychiatrist or something.” I turned around then, headed toward the driveway, the road, the water? I stopped short; no way did I want to fulfill his expectations. If he thought I was headed for the bay, I’d go in the other direction, toward town.

I felt his hand come down heavily on my shoulder. “No, I’m just happy being a — cop,” he said to me, and then in an entirely different tone of voice, casual, friendly, upbeat, said, “So, what have you got planned for the rest of the day? Track meet? Then what?”

“I’m going to...” I couldn’t look at him. “...Frances’s and I don’t know, reset the timers. I change them every few days.” I shrugged. “I got things to do there; it’s a big house.”

“You bill her by the hour, the day, the week? Or does she have you on salary?”

“I work for her, Jake,” I said in a rather small voice. I had my fingers wrapped around the wooden egg, tight in my pocket. It was cool and smooth. Slowly I felt my breathing even out. “That’s all I do.”

“Did you think I doubted you?”

I shook my head, managed to meet his eyes. Mine suddenly felt a little wet. “It’s a real nice house, too. It’s...” I looked over my shoulder at my own home; it had seemed so large to me, so safe and snug, and now...

“It’s not the same as your own house, is it?” Jake asked.

“My mother, she’s everywhere in my house, Jake,” I said, choking on my words suddenly, which was stupid, but I couldn’t stop. “She’s... you can’t pick up a salt shaker and not think about her.”

He slid his arm around my shoulders and said, “So, first the track meet, then you take me to see this Carter house, if that’s allowed?”

“Hey, you’re a cop.” I wiped my eyes. “If you can’t trust a cop, who can you trust?”

“I’m washing all the dishes,” I said to Jake, explaining the reason there were stacks of bowls, platters, and dinner plates on the kitchen counters. “Except those up there.” I pointed to the highest cabinets. “A lot of fancy stuff up there, you know, stuff you seldom use. And I’m relining the cabinets, polishing up the woodwork.” I showed him where I’d worked, cleaning off grease so thick it had taken several scouring pads to remove it. A pair of cabinet doors, their windowed fronts cracked or missing, were leaning against a table leg. “Those are going to be replaced. Frances is going to have a cabinetmaker come in, match them to the originals. I’ve also done the floor.”

And what a job that had been, too, to scrape away twenty years of wax, then clean down to the original black and white tiles. In fact, I’d done nearly all the work in this room: bleached out the sinks, scoured and polished the faucets, washed the walls and floor, removed cobwebs and grime in the molding. I’d carefully cleaned the Tiffany lamp hanging over the center table, but the wiring in it was bad, so it hung beautiful, but useless.

“She’s going to have an electrician in to do some work. Might put in some ceiling fans, some new light fixtures,” I explained.

From there we moved to the dining room where I’d done little more than dust and vacuum; the ancient hardwood dining set was pushed up against an inside wall and still covered with dropcloths. The multipaned windows were almost gray against the afternoon light. “I’ve got a lot to do in here,” I added with a shrug.

Then to the front rooms and the small side parlor, which faced directly west. I deliberately saved this room for last. It was here I had worked the hardest. It had been filled with musty, sheet-covered furniture, most of which Frances planned to throw out. I had vacuumed the rugs down to a near-perfect sheen, and even though they were faded in places, the ancient reds and greens of the old Persian carpets were now brilliant — you could actually step on them now without raising a cloud of gray dust.

The furniture, too, I had cleaned, dusted, polished. The room smelled of lemon oil, the windows were crystal-clear, and the afternoon sun was shining through each perfect square pane. With the steam clanking through the radiators, it was exactly as a room should be, inviting and safe. You could sit and watch the waning sunlight, or the fallen leaves drift lazily across the front lawn. You could look out, see what was coming, and then be prepared for whatever did come.

“Of course, there’s one other room,” I told Jake as he stood in the center, hands on his hips, surveying the results of my hard work. “And the upstairs — I haven’t even started up there. Do you want to see it?”

“Why not?” he said, seemingly well pleased by my willingness to bring him here.

“Why not,” I echoed, then said, “Frances calls it the trophy room.”

What word did Jake use, which I had used myself on first seeing this room? Weird? Yes, though I had only thought it, never wanting to insult Frances. Dust-covered bookshelves laden with musty, mildewed volumes; African masks stacked in a neat row to either side of the red-brick fireplace; rolled-up Persian rugs reeking of mothballs; furniture covered with yellowed sheets. Only the black antique desk pushed against a far wall was bare, but it was covered with thick dust that rose in a cloud when the cat jumped up on top of it, before nestling down into a snug fur ball.

But the most distinguishing characteristic of this room — and the one that astounded everyone on entering it for the first time — were the animal trophies. They were everywhere.

“That one’s an oryx, and here’s an impala, a nyala, and a sable antelope. Water buffalo, addax, kudu. We even have a bongo.” Frances had walked beneath a long line of animals frozen in time and recited all their names. “And waterbuck, eland, blesbok, and even a springbok.” She’d taken a huge breath and smiled at me across the dimly lit room. “Over there,” she pointed, “an ibex and mountain goat, pronghorn antelope, mule deer, white-tailed deer, and a moose. Did you know there is more than one kind of moose and more than one kind of white-tailed deer? And that one over there is an American bison, which many people call a buffalo. Oh, how he hated us to call it a buffalo.”

The smell was overwhelming, a combination of leather, mothballs, and age. It was like walking into a world of ghosts. Not only were there heads on the walls, arranged from eye level all the way up to the ceiling, but scattered throughout the room were other specimens, full-body specimens. And when I realized what they were, under their plastic capes, I was startled. The dead, orange marble eyes stared at us from every corner of the room: brown bear, polar bear, grizzly bear, South American jaguar, Siberian tiger, African lion, mountain lion, African leopard, cheetah...

“He was a big-game hunter,” Frances told me, both with pride and a subtle longing that I didn’t want to see, hear, or worse yet, feel. Her father had died thirty years ago and still she spoke about him with a sense of loss. She smiled and said: “He did this in the twenties and thirties. He was already an old man when Sophie and I came along. His hunting days were long past. See those photos? He kept a photographic record of everything he hunted and killed.” She was standing near the only window in the room, pointing out a row of framed pictures on the wall, arranged beneath a line of mountain rams, their horns twisted up and outward like spiral knives. She was standing in the light of the window with an eastern exposure, so the light was not direct at this time of day, but in that light she looked faded, not merely pale. It seemed that if she turned, the light would bleach her out altogether. And if that happened, I could see right through her, as though she, too, were a ghost.

“Look at these,” she said, indicating a row of framed photos on the fireplace; in picture after picture a man was shown posed beside a downed elephant. “Forty African elephants he shot and killed in his lifetime. Imagine that.”

I couldn’t, and before I could comment, she said, “And the large white and black cat next to you — that’s this one.” She pointed to a photograph of a man resting a gun barrel on the head of a magnificent spotted cat. But there were many other photos there, dozens of them.

“That’s a snow leopard,” she said, touching one of the frames. “They’re nearly extinct now.”

“Maybe because of your father.”

Her smile never dimmed. “Maybe.” She took no offense. “It was acceptable then.” For her these animals simply were; they existed, but in a separate time. “I don’t know what I shall do with them. I don’t wish to keep them, but would a museum want them? I’m not sure.”

“You could ask,” I suggested.

“It’s a room of death, isn’t it?” she said, staring straight at me. “I often felt it was, even though as a child I liked it in here. Still, it’s not quite fashionable anymore, is it? I mean I could hardly hold a bridge party in here, could I?” And then she’d said, “All our treasure hunts started here.”

“Treasure hunts?” Jake was wandering about the room, looking at the animals, the heads on the walls. On his face was a strange mixture of fascination and repulsion.

“Yeah, her father made up these games for her and her sister. With clues. You know, go here and there’s a clue which takes you to the next, then the next. At the end there’d be a prize or something. But the clues were kind of intricate...”

“He always played upon somebody’s name, or their initials. For example, mine are F and N, for Frances Norma. So perhaps the first clue would be ‘FN’s homeland.’ Of course, I’d have to figure out who FN could possibly be. Sometimes he included an object, or on the slip of paper might be a picture of, say, a nurse’s cap. Then I’d know, of course, Florence Nightingale, and if I didn’t know she was from England, I’d have to look that up. Then I’d have to check the globe, or perhaps my father’s atlas, and there’d be the next clue, under the heading England. Perhaps. That should have been a rather easy one.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“It was. We did a treasure hunt every summer, and then another in the fall. He’d spend days putting it together, writing up the clues at that desk, and then, when we were at school, he’d place them about. Sophie and I would play the game together. That was part of the fun.”

“And the treasure at the end?”

“For Sophie, candy-coated almonds, and for me, chocolate coins in gold foil. Do you know the kind?”

“Yeah, I do.” I’d had to admit, just having a father who had the time, and the interest, to do something so essentially unimportant and fun was hard for me to conceive. But she’d had that, Frances had; suddenly I found myself slightly envious of her.

“She made me a game,” I told Jake as I walked to the door. “I found it after she left. I’m kind of going along with it. It doesn’t do any harm.”

“She left you a game?” Jake echoed, a puzzled expression on his face.

“Yeah, I mean, what the heck.”

“Right.” He was frowning now.

“She, well, she used my initials, HS. I’ve got most the clues figured out so far. Do you want to see?” Now I felt stupid, sheepish, like a little kid. “It doesn’t do any harm, Jake.”

“You’ve already said that.”

“Yeah,” I said, turning to leave the room. I just wanted to get away from all those dead animals. “Come on and I’ll show you.”

“1. H _ _ _ _ _ Stone.” Jake held the first clue in his hand. I’d left them on the long shelf of the front room. Written on the old brown stationery paper, it crinkled in his hand.

“Found it rolled up with a string around it on the kitchen table. There was a note next to it, said something like ‘Found this — do you think it’s one of my father’s?’ But I knew her handwriting. Plus why would her father use the initials HS? They’re my initials.”

“And what did it stand for?” he asked patiently.

“Well, it did drive me kind of nuts. I thought of headstone and hard stone and about every kind of stone there is. But nothing fit until I remembered she said all the hunts started in the trophy room. So it was obvious.” I shrugged.

“Obvious?”

“Hearthstone, Jake. I found the second clue on the fireplace hearth in the trophy room.” I picked up the second clue. “This was number two.”

“2. HS, African ruler,” Jake read.

“That one took me a while to figure...”

“Haile Selassie,” Jake said without a pause. “Ruler of Ethiopia from about...”

“Yeah, well of course you’d know that, after thirty years of watching Jeopardy. I didn’t know. I never studied African history, for crying out loud. But I did a little research and figured it out.”

“Which led you where?”

“To the atlas. There’s several shelves of books in the trophy room and I looked up Ethiopia. No dice.”

“Abyssinia.”

“I should have called you, Jake. Yeah, you’re right, Abyssinia, the old name for Ethiopia. Anyhow, there, tucked in the pages, was the third clue.” I handed it to him. “Figure this one out, Mr. Smart Guy.”

“3. H _ S and Uncle Tom,” Jake read, a sly smile creeping over his face. “Too easy, Herbie. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Was there a copy of that book in the room, too?”

“Yeah.” I could feel my face burn. Two clues which took me three days to sort out, and he got them in less than two minutes. “Okay, what about this one. It was tucked in the front page of the book.” I handed him clue number three.

Which is where he stopped, frowned: Mr. Smart Guy was stumped.

Just like I was because on this piece of paper were just my initials, HS.

“That it?” Jake asked, turning the paper over, looking for something else.

“No, there’s also this,” I said, reaching into my pocket and pulling out the small wooden egg, which I put in his hand. “This was with my fourth clue.”

“Sometimes we didn’t finish a hunt, so my father would give in, tell us the final clue so we could have our candy before the mice found it. Sometimes I think there might be forgotten clues all over this house.”

“You really think so?” I took a sip of my Coke. Frances had just taken one from the ancient refrigerator, which despite its age had cranked to life after being plugged in and snorting for a couple of hours. I cleaned the coils; she cleaned two months worth of black mildew from the interior; and now it was stocked with soda and fruit juices.

“I know so. Sophie told me she’d found an old clue tucked in our father’s desk. That was...” Frances looked off thoughtfully, then her eyes twitched to me. I wondered then how much of Frances Carter was simply an outlandish act; she seemed to enjoy teasing me too much. “...last summer, right after she wrote me that she was fixing up this place. But she followed it to the next location and nothing was there. We’d probably solved that game long ago as children. Still, there are those few hunts we never did finish. My father was working on one the summer he died.”

“Really?” I leaned forward on the table.

“Really.” She mimicked my pose on the opposite side and I sank back. Her eyes, laughing, stared straight through me. “So if you find any... odd bits of paper with words that look like clues on them, you must promise to save them for me. Yes? Because if anyone finds anything...” She took a sip from her soda. “...it’s going to be you.”

“Yeah, so that’s where I’m stuck. Clue number four,” I said.

“It’s an egg,” Jake said; he still held the small, inch-long wooden egg.

“Yeah, it’s stupid, I suppose, a kid’s game. I got work to do and I want to get the outside stuff done before the weather turns cold.” I shrugged. “It is a job, Jake. No one bugs me; even when she was here, she didn’t bug me. She worked upstairs mostly, and in the attic. There are more animals up there. A lot of smaller specimens like game birds and stuff.” Suddenly I felt kind of foolish. “Look, Jake, I don’t feel like hanging around today. Let me reset the timers and we’ll go. I got a paper to work on and...” For the first time the house didn’t feel quite the same. Instead of large and warm and safe, it had a different feeling: smaller now with Jake in it, and somewhat tainted or dirty. Despite all the work I’d done, it seemed I hadn’t done enough, and like the treasure hunt games still hidden in the house, the house itself was unfinished. I could see streaks in the windows where I had washed them and dust on the floor where the remaining afternoon sunlight was streaming in.

“Fine. I’ll wait in the car,” Jake said. “Come out when you’re done. No hurry.” Then he turned and left.

“Thought I’d come by, say hi.” It was Emma, the green-haired girl I’d been stupid enough to think liked me, the girl I’d been stupid enough to like back. “Did you have a good Thanksgiving?”

I let the wheelbarrow full of brush and privet branches drop to the ground and just stared at her. It was a gloomy Sunday and I wanted to get in some work before it started to rain. Emma Presley was an unwanted distraction.

No, rephrase that: Emma was just unwanted.

“Your friend, the cop, he told me where you were. But I already knew you were working here. Heard at school.”

I still said nothing. I had too much to do and the skies were growing ominously gray. I had an entire hedgerow to clean out; small pines and maples were growing up through the privet and each one had to be cut back or pulled up. I lifted the wheelbarrow up and turned it around.

“Herbie, you haven’t talked to me in weeks. I pass you in the halls and you just ignore me.”

Still, I said nothing, even though she was right there at my elbow. She wheeled her bike alongside me.

“Herbie, he... the kid you saw me with that day, he’s just a friend. I’ve known him since third grade. I’ve been trying to tell you that, but you won’t talk to me, Herbie.”

I dumped the brush behind the bigger of the two sheds; Sammy was there, tail high in the air, twitching back and forth.

“You know...” I heard the awkwardness in her voice. “I heard that the lady you’re working for, well, that she’s really beautiful and...”

“She is.”

Maybe it was my tone, or the fact that I responded to her, or to the mention of Frances, because Emma spun her bike around, glared at me, and said, “Very beautiful. Are you... are you in love with her?” Her entire face spoke ridicule and incredulity and bitterness.

I refused to answer. I lifted up the wheelbarrow to return to the front yard.

“Or... is it that you’ve been hurt so many times before, you can’t trust anyone? Is it that?” She hurried after me, trying to catch up. “Because I know. I heard about your mother. Everyone knows.”

I left the wheelbarrow where it was, figured if I got the ladder, went up to clean the gutters, she wouldn’t be able to follow me up there with her stupid bike.

“I wished you’d called. I wished you’d talk to me.” She was relentless, following me back to the shed and standing there while I wrestled an old folding aluminum ladder out of the back. Sammy was with me and I hit something in the rafters, a bucket or some clamming gear. It crashed to the floor and the cat went bounding out of the shed.

“Herbie, I want to talk. Why won’t you talk to me?” Emma demanded. She was standing in the door to the shed; I made a great act of dragging the ladder around her. “Damn you, Herbert Sawyer!” she cried as I headed back to the front of the house. “Damn you!”

“You don’t need girls. They’re worthless,” I told Samson as he sat before me, his broad tail pounding down on the wooden floor of the shed. “And untrustworthy.” I was wrapping a rag around my hand where I’d cut it on a broken gutter. The ladder was outside, lying on the ground. It was raining now; there was a steady drip-drip on the wooden eaves overhead. I needed to go inside, make some tea, and work, or maybe read. I had something to read, but I couldn’t even remember what novel we were doing in English class. I shut my eyes and leaned forward as Sammy’s tail went thump-thump-thump on the warped floorboards. “Come on, Sammy.”

I got up, went to the door, but Samson didn’t move. I turned around; he was still sitting in the middle of the little shed, his tail continuing to thump-thump-thump, but not the floor. He was sitting on something painted a pale green, something with...

I walked forward. Something with a brass handle attached to it. A trapdoor. A cellar door.

I was the caretaker, which meant it was my job to take care of things, right? Probably an old root cellar. Storage. We were far enough from the ocean to make cellars possible and the house itself had a cellar, so I didn’t think much of it when I leaned over, scooted the cat off the door, and pulled up on the handle.

“Well, looks like we found Dan Church,” the medical examiner said in passing to me and Jake. His gray eyes took me in severely. “Not a word, Herbie, until we notify next of kin.”

Jake had made some tea, then spent the next half hour making a swift round of phone calls, one of which was to Frances in New York.

The rain was coming down in a steady torrent. The medical examiner owed me nothing, but he was drinking Frances’s tea and I was the caretaker, and even if I was only fifteen, I deserved some explanation. Besides, this man knew me, and if he was going to fill Jake in, then he had to fill me in, too.

“Looks like the door hit him in the head. That’s my first guess. He doesn’t seem to have been shot, and there are no apparent wounds on the body, but he’s been down in that hole a while, at least four, five weeks, or more. He was reported missing when?” He looked at Jake.

“About six weeks ago.”

“Well,” the man wasn’t ready to make any hard and fast pronouncements, “it might be accidental death. He was going down into the cellar and the door fell forward on his head, and then he tripped, broke his neck. But then again, someone might have...”

“Dropped it deliberately on his head.” I refused to be sick, despite the odor, despite the awful knowledge that had hit me with that odor.

“Won’t know anything definite until the autopsy. Until then...” He looked at Jake, then to me. “Thanks for the tea,” he said.

“No way Frances had anything to do with this,” I found myself saying. “No way she even knew. She told me he had just left, that her sister said...” I clutched my arms to myself and stood in the front room where it was dark except for the candles in the windows. “No way. She’s completely... she wasn’t even here when he disappeared. She... he was her sister’s handyman.”

“No one’s under any suspicion,” Jake cautioned. “This investigation has just begun and if the autopsy shows it was an accidental death...”

“Except the cat knew he was there,” I said. I felt sick again. Okay, not the first dead body I’d ever found, or seen; I’d been unfortunate enough to come across a few. But this was different, and unexpected, and suddenly I felt like I couldn’t breathe again. I turned to look at Jake. “Can we go home? I got a test tomorrow. I need to study.”

“Hey, I heard a body was found on the Carter property in one of the sheds,” the senior said to me, actually leaning over my desk. I didn’t turn my head, just my eyes, to look up at the jerk who’d stopped to talk to me. There are always a few like him, a kid who has to repeat a subject so many times he takes most of his classes with sophomores and freshmen. But since I hadn’t said a word, he worked his face into a kind of smirk and speaking up louder (so everyone would hear, including the teacher writing on the board), said, “So what does this make, Sawyer? An even dozen? You just kick up dead bodies wherever you go, don’t you?”

“Take your seat, mister...” the math teacher barked suddenly; he was all of five foot two, but he spoke with the unchallenged authority of a veteran teacher. The kid jerked a little, then moved away from me.

Jake wasn’t surprised to get the call, but he didn’t come get me at school. He sent Officer Abe Andersen, who drove me straight out to the Carter house, as I’d requested. That didn’t surprise Jake either.

“Jerks at school,” I tried to explain. “I took my test and then told the school nurse I was sick.” I stood at the back door of the house, staring out at the shed as the rain came down.

“The cycle of flies, maggots, and reinfestation indicates six weeks.” Jake cringed; for a tough cop, he had his weaknesses. “Or so the preliminary findings suggest. There won’t be an official report for a few days more, but it looks like he had the door propped open, and when he was going down, it fell forward on him. The top of his head was caved in. Literally. Death was instantaneous.”

“My fingerprints are in that shed,” I reminded Jake, though he knew; he’d probably already given orders to screen me out. I’d been fingerprinted before, part of my unusual legacy — and one to which the kid in math class had referred when he mentioned my “kicking up dead bodies.” “They’ll be on the door, the handle, the ladder, and some of the tools out there.”

“We’ve taken care of that,” Jake said.

“You’ll need a precise date of death, won’t you?” I asked. “So you can tell if, well, Sophie Carter was still alive when he...”

“No one is under suspicion.” Jake looked out the back door; the driveway was full of cars, including the county crime scene van. I hadn’t gone out there; I knew I’d just be in the way even though my days of being told, “Back off, kid; nothing for you to see here,” were over. Many of them knew me and had even spoken to me in a friendly, familiar way when we crossed paths. I was Herbie Sawyer, son of Sergeant Valari’s suicidal girl friend. I was Herbie Sawyer...

“Though I do have a man talking to the neighbor — Mrs. Jean Pritchard, is it? She might be able to tell us when she last saw Dan Church.” Jake sort of shrugged. “Though I think this one’s going to turn up accidental death due to blunt trauma to the head. That door must weigh a good sixty pounds, at least. Oak, Abe Anderson says, and Abe knows his wood.”

“Why would he go down into that cellar?” I asked. From the kitchen door I looked out at the shed. Small, drab, and dilapidated in the drizzle, it looked like a miserable place to die. Members of the state forensics crime lab were out there now. I’d seen them arrive with the usual equipment: cameras, bags, small suitcases. Every few seconds there was a flash of light from the shed.

“Well, he was Sophie Carter’s handyman. Maybe he was looking for a tool, or putting something away.”

“Is it a root cellar?” I asked. “The house has got a big cellar with lots of junk down there. Are you going to take a look around here, too? I mean, in this house?”

“As soon as we contact Frances Carter, maybe.”

“Maybe she’s just out,” I suggested. Jake had been trying to reach Frances, using the number she’d given me, ever since I’d found the body, about eighteen hours ago, and still no response from her. And if I knew Jake — and I did — he had the New York police looking for her right now.

“No one’s seen or heard from her since last Wednesday,” Jake said.

“So,” I swallowed, felt my heart skip a beat. “She’s out of town. Took a few days off.”

“Frances Carter resigned from her job a week ago, Herbie.” Jake walked across the kitchen floor and turned on the gas to make a cup of tea. I remained in the doorway, watching as the professionals outside did their work. Jake had been out there with them but came into the house as soon as Abe dropped me off. “She worked for a nonprofit conservation group in New York. It was put together by some philanthropists about thirty years ago. She was in their research division.”

“Conservation,” I murmured. “She’s not a suspect, Jake. She wasn’t here when this happened. If anything, maybe her sister...” I bit down on my lip, turned back. They were removing Dan Church’s body in a black body bag. Large, silver-colored raindrops bounced off the thick plastic. “And so what if she resigned from her job? She told me she was planning to move back here, that’s why she’s fixing up the house.”

“In the spring.”

“So she’s on vacation.”

“If she is, she told no one about it. I’ve spoken to her colleagues, Herbie. They were very surprised she resigned like she did. She gave no notice, just put a letter on the chairman’s desk and walked out the door. She had already emptied out her office.”

“Does that mean she’s a murderer?” I demanded.

“It means that we need to talk to her. A man was found dead on her property.”

“She wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

“Herbie, you barely know her.”

“I know her well enough! I know that she wouldn’t... that she’s too gentle, she’s too...”

Jake walked toward me. “Herbie, you can know someone your whole life and they can still surprise you.”

I turned away and watched as the police van backed out of the driveway and the other officers got into their cars to leave. A distraught woman was out there now; she’d just pulled up in a tan Saturn. She was arguing in the rain with one of the men. Dan Church’s girlfriend?

“Truth is, we never do know people, not really. Even those closest to us, those we love...”

“Go to hell,” I told him. The officer and the woman were heading up to the house. I turned around and walked off toward the darkened front room.

“It was a good job. Dan was making good money, for a handyman, that is. He liked it here and he liked her, Miss Sophie he called her. I think she was a little sweet on him, too, which was kind of weird, you know, her being so much older than him. But anyhow, after he didn’t show up, well, we’d had a fight, so I didn’t... But all the other times when we had a fight, he came home in a week or so. I figured he was staying with a friend, but when I finally called...”

I sat in the dark just outside the kitchen in a chair still covered by a sheet and listened. They were questioning her here. I wasn’t surprised; Jake often did things in an unorthodox way. Sometimes, he said, people need to be questioned where they feel comfortable and safe; other times they need to be brought to the station. All depends on the circumstances and the situation.

“So Jack, that’s the friend, he says he hasn’t seen Dan in a couple of weeks, though Dan did leave him a message, he said. Wanted to borrow Jack’s truck, and he’d let him know when, that he’d make it worth his while. I met the woman, the one who killed herself? You think I didn’t get sick when I heard she did that? I thought then maybe she had fallen in love with Dan, the old bag, and after she killed him, she took her own life. I called you people; I asked questions. I reported Dan missing; you got records of that. I reported him, but...” The woman started to cry.

As I leaned forward in the chair, my hands crushed together, the candles in the windows came on. They saw it from the kitchen. Jake quickly explained that they were on a timer.

“But he was careful, he... Dan was no carpenter or electrician or nothing like that, but he knew how to do things. He said it was good money here and a lot of work, enough to keep him busy all winter. He was even going to ask if we could stay here through till spring, that she could take a little out of his pay, if she wanted. It’s a nice house, better than where we were staying, but then we had a fight...”

“What did you fight about, Miss...” Jake asked.

“Oh, nothing important. I drink a little, I say things I shouldn’t. Mostly about money and him helping out with the bills. I let him stay with me for practically nothing. I mean, I used to let him stay...”

“We need to find this Jack, the friend with the truck,” I heard Jake say, not to the woman, but to the officer with him.

“I already asked about that,” the woman interjected. “Jack didn’t know why he wanted the truck, just that Dan said to be ready at the end of the month, that he had some stuff he wanted to haul away. Probably just junk, trash, who knows? Dan was a good guy; he didn’t mind doing dirty work for other people, just so long as he got paid for it.”

“It’s an egg,” I murmured. I got up, went into the front room, and took the squares of paper from the shelf and looked at the fourth clue again: “Of course, it’s an egg, and birds lay eggs, so HS stands for...” I’d done this before, run through every kind of bird I could think of with a name beginning with H. “Hawk. Hen. Harrier, which I think is a bird, maybe not. Two words. Hard... high... ho... ham. Damn it, when I think of the letter H, I just think of house! House?” I looked around the room, then down at the cat now sitting on my feet. “Sammy, where can I find a picture of a house sparrow egg around here?”

Twenty minutes later I had my treasure, two movie passes tucked into Audubon’s Birds of the World, the chapter on egg identification.

“Yeah...” I muttered to an attentive Samson, “too bad I don’t have a girlfriend to use them with.”

“Of course I’m sure it was October thirty-first when he came by. Trick-or-treat. I had to go buy candy. And there I am out in the yard planting crocuses, and he shows up with a truck at the Carter house. I came over to talk to him — Franny wasn’t home — but he was very rude to me. He said he was one of Dan Church’s friends, but no, he never gave his name. I told Franny about it later, but she just shrugged it off. I told her she had to be careful. There’s a lot of antiques in this house and it wouldn’t have surprised me to hear that Dan Church was planning to steal her blind when she wasn’t looking.”

“Did Mr. Church ever say anything to lead you to believe he was stealing from Miss Carter?”

I wandered into the kitchen slowly, softly. Dan Church’s girlfriend was gone, replaced with Jean Pritchard. Though Jake’s eyes lifted to me briefly, he gave no sign I was unwelcome. He turned his attention back to the woman.

“You were saying, Mrs. Pritchard?”

“Well, Daniel Church and I, we seldom spoke.” Jean Pritchard was a bit flustered. She looked at me suspiciously, then said to Jake, “I never trusted him. Just one look at him and I could see he was no good. He had a shifty look in his eye. I read just the other day that we should trust our instincts more, and mine told me not to trust Dan Church.”

“If you saw this man, Mrs. Pritchard,” Jake said with labored patience, “you would recognize him?”

“The man with the truck? Of course I would.”

“No word from Frances?” I asked. I had my books all spread out in the waning afternoon sunlight; I had my snacks ready to eat; I had the Christmas candles on; I had an affectionate cat rolling into a ball between my outstretched legs. I was on the floor, facing the sun, facing the street and the naked sycamores in the front yard.

“New York City’s finest are in the process of interviewing her neighbors. It seems that Frances Carter has walked off the face of the Earth.” Jake sat down on a hassock next to me, then reached out to touch the cat. “And I have something for you. Totally unofficial, Herbie, and the only reason I’m in this house now is because you have been left in her absence owner of Frances Carter’s house.”

He reached inside his jacket, pulled out two sheets of ordinary copy paper, and placed them down on top of my history text. On one was the familiar outline of a small yellow square shape about two and half inches on each side. On the other was a picture of a chain with a small curved object hanging from it. If this were to true size, the object was about three inches long and looked like a miniature horn. It was off-white in color.

“So Frances Carter left a little treasure hunt for your amusement. What are the chances her sister did the same thing with Dan Church?”

I looked up at Jake, then back at the first paper. On it, written in plain block capitals, was: IV S H E D CELLAR. The letters H E D had been underlined and were written in a different handwriting.

“Is it clue number four?” Jake asked.

“I don’t — where did these come from?”

“The small piece of paper and this object, which is probably a key chain, were both found in Dan Church’s clenched fist. The clues Frances Carter left for you were numbered, correct?”

“Yeah.” I felt like something was stuck in my throat.

“It looks like someone might have wanted Dan Church to go down into that cellar.”

“Or he had a list, Jake, and the fourth thing on that list was to... well... do some work...”

“In an empty root cellar? Because that’s what it is. Nothing down there but some rotten wooden shelves and a few empty Mason jars. Where are your clues, Herbie? We need to look at them.”

He took them all away, the four I had and the books I’d found them in, even the two movie tickets. But after he’d gone, I found a notepad in the kitchen and from memory wrote down exactly what Jake had shown me on the photocopy: IV S H E D CELLAR. It was unmistakable. Someone had given Dan Church, or Dan Church had found, a slip of paper, or maybe he had written it himself, or maybe...

“If this is one of those initial games, then the initials are SC,” I told the cat as he studied me contentedly from the kitchen table.

“Sophie Carter, or Sophia Clara. So this game probably wasn’t made for Dan Church. But if it was a clue, then it’s too easy. Dan Church filled in the letters to make ‘shed cellar.’ Which is where he went, looking for the next clue. But this is clue four, so where are the first three, and did Dan find this one? Or is this the one Frances said her sister found? Or is it a fake, a game Sophie made up, a game that went wrong...” I was so confused by then and it was getting late. I walked to the back door and looked out toward the shed. It was wet and dark out there now, and just a thin ribbon of police tape flapped in the wind. “They’ll check the handwriting, find some copies of Dan Church’s and see if he wrote that clue, if that’s what it is. Or maybe they’ll check it against Sophie Carter’s.” I turned around, studied the room I was in, the ancient rafters overhead, the countertops I’d scrubbed and cleaned, the gas stove sparkling with its copper kettle boiling on top. I’d been given custody of this house, and even if it weren’t mine, it felt like it was.

“And as for that key chain, maybe it was his and has nothing to do with anything.”

“All our treasure hunts started here.”

It was like she was there, like I could really hear her voice.

“The trophy room, Sammy. That’s where they began.”

It occurred to me then that I shouldn’t touch anything in the room. Though I’d effectively destroyed any evidence of Sophie Carter or Dan Church that might once have been in the other rooms of the house, here in this room their fingerprints and their presence might still be preserved. It was one thing to know that this house’s former owner had killed herself, but to know the man who had worked for her was also dead, accidentally or otherwise, lent a kind of awful chill to the house. Maybe I had felt it the day I brought Jake here, when I’d wanted to leave. For the last few weeks I’d loved this house despite the weirdness of this room filled with dead animals. But now it seemed large and strange and very dangerous, and if the house had a heart — an evil, blackened heart — then it was centered here in the trophy room.

“They all start here,” I said as I squeezed the paper in my hand. “He was working on clue four, so where are the first three? If he’d had them on his body, Jake would have told me.” I stood at the door and turned on the lights. “Save this room for last, she said.” I hesitated before walking in, but instead of looking at the heads, or the full-body mounts under their plastic coverings, I walked over to the wall of photographs. Lyman Carter kneeling over an African lion; Lyman Carter posing between a pair of antelope with scimitar-shaped horns; Lyman Carter...

Lyman Carter everywhere posing with death. I wondered then where he’d killed himself, and with what weapon. One of the same guns he’d used to kill all these animals?

I walked along the line of photographs, not knowing what I hoped to find, to see, to learn. I counted six pictures of him with lions; over twenty with him crouched next to antelopes of various kinds; another half dozen with elephants, every one an enormous beast with tusks as long as a grown man.

But it was pointless. I had one useless clue, and if the forensics team had found another, either on Dan Church’s person or in the cellar of the shed, then Jake would have said so. Yes, odd comfort that, if Jake knew anything else, he’d have told me.

The sound of the furnace, just below me, woke me up. It sounded like a large animal was down there, clearing its throat and turning its enormous body under the floorboards. Then it gurgled, sending hot steam up through the ancient heating system. I was startled, though I instantly knew where I was. The electric candles were still glowing, so it wasn’t past ten o’clock yet. But there was darkness everywhere else. Something brushed against my leg and I reached out. Sammy.

So where was Jake? And why had he let me fall asleep in the front room? Had he assumed I’d gone home long ago, or had he just forgotten me? It was still raining — certainly he didn’t expect me to walk home? For a moment I had that sensation again like I couldn’t breathe; then the cat bolted out of the room and made a dive for the kitchen.

So, with a catch in my breath, I got up and followed him.

How do cats know when there’s a mouse around? Samson was on the counter, his head pointed up, his eyes filled with avid interest, staring at one of the doorless cabinets.

“A mouse, Sammy?” I said, and the cat twitched his tail. I grabbed a chair, climbed up, not that I was set on catching a mouse in my bare hands, but because I figured I’d clear a space to put out some traps. The weather was turning cold and that’s when mice come in; I might as well stop them in their tracks.

One item at a time I began to empty out the cabinet, filled with all sorts of odd little containers: gravy boats, butter dishes, cruets, that sort of thing. But no mouse, though there was plenty of evidence where a mouse had been. Then, because I was tired, I gave up, and climbed down from the counter. Jake’s cell phone was still on the counter and I figured I’d call him, have him come and get me.

Then my eyes fell on the pad of paper where I’d written IV S H E D CELLAR. “What if Daniel Church guessed wrong?” I said to the fat cat. “What if...”

Yeah, what if it was an accidental death? What if...

“I think she was a little sweet on him, too, which was kind of weird, you know, her being so much older than him.”

“Sophie told me she’d found an old clue tucked in our father’s desk.”

“We’d play the game together. That was part of the fun.”

“So Dan Church, or Sophie Carter, or both of them together... they fill in the word and make it... Shed Cellar. They find an old clue out of sequence, clue four, and that’s all they find.” I sat down at the kitchen table, the cat in my arms. “They play the game together and something goes wrong and Dan dies. And Sophie... she goes home and...”

I shut my eyes, shook my head. This house was starting to get to me. I couldn’t let it go; Jake could walk in right then and there and I wouldn’t have been able to leave. With my eyes shut I heard myself start talking. “Stop cellar. Start cellar. Too many letters. Shed cellar. No. Slow cellar. Soft cellar. South cellar. Too many letters. Snow cellar.”

There came a loud clank from the rear of the house. Just the pipes — but as I turned I thought of the trophy room again. So many animals and for each there was a picture, and the real animal. A picture and the real animal. A record of each. Isn’t that what Frances had said?

“Snow leopard? Snow leopard cellar. That’s stupid. Stupid cellar. Sane cellar. Insane cellar. So... sun... sat... slow...” I looked across the kitchen, over the counters, the stovetop, to the dishes I’d cleaned, washed, stacked. Among them was a pair of salt and pepper shakers.

“Salt... salt cellar. Salt cellar.” I said it maybe a dozen times. Maybe I screamed it. I don’t know; I don’t remember. What comes next is a blur. I was tired, I was confused, and I was angry, too. But I found the salt cellar; it had been in the assortment of bric-a-brac I’d pulled out of the top cabinet, and in it I found the next clue to a long-forgotten and unfinished game. Then I found the clue that came after that one.

“What the hell have you been...” Jake said to me as he rushed into the house, my keys in his hand. “Are you all right? Herbie?”

Did I see fear on his face, a flicker of concern? Well, why not? I was a mess, wasn’t I? Covered with soot and dirt and God knows what else had come down that chimney in the last thirty years.

“I’m okay,” I told him. “Just been fishing around a dirty fireplace. I found two more clues, Jake, the ones that follow Dan Church’s. I think his was the first, not the fourth.”

It took a while to convince him I was all right. I put on water for tea, and he sent Abe Andersen home. Abe had been parked outside in the driveway, incidentally, while I slept in the front room. Jake had asked him to stay until I wanted to go home, and without any entertainment in the house for Abe, he’d gone out to sit in his patrol car and listen to the radio, which is where he’d promptly fallen asleep.

But then, once we got past all that, I showed Jake what I’d found and explained that Dan Church, Sophie Carter, or both, had made a mistake in figuring out that the clue had read SHED CELLAR. They were supposed to go to the salt cellar, left forgotten in a cabinet with other equally useless culinary items.

The next clue had been a snap to decipher: “O. SC’s greatest classic.”

“Tom Sawyer?” Jake said swiftly. He was actually pretty good at this.

“No,” I told Jake, “Huckleberry Finn. There’s a copy in the trophy room. The next clue was tucked in the frontispiece. And here’s where I get stumped.” I showed it to him. And so maybe we don’t solve who killed Dan Church, if anyone did, or absolve either Sophie or Frances of complicity in his death, but with this I’d thought I could figure it out. But I hadn’t. Either I’d deciphered it incorrectly, or the next clue had been found, destroyed, lost, or just burned up in a fireplace twenty years ago.

“RY. Where SC comes down,” Jake read, immediately coming to the same conclusion that I had. “Santa Claus? A fireplace?”

“There’s a fireplace in the trophy room, but no luck, Jake. Though I have to talk to Frances about getting a chimney sweep in here. Thing is filthy. Looks like it has an old bird’s nest stuck in it and...”

“You looked already.”

“Yeah, I could have waited for you, but I couldn’t sleep.” I shrugged. “Where’ve you been?”

“At the station talking to an overseas operator and a lieutenant in the Paris Sûreté.” He watched me, waiting for this choice piece of news to sink in. “We found Frances Carter — with her fiancé in Paris. She’s honeymooning in Europe.”

So sometimes you can look for evil intent — and find none. It now seemed fairly obvious that Dan Church’s death, though tragic, had been accidental, happening because he had been on a little treasure hunt when he died.

Because a lot of the rest was done by Jake. The friend Dan Church had contacted, with the truck he’d wanted to borrow, was turned up. Seems Dan had told this friend he’d soon have a “load of merchandise,” which he needed “help to move.” Phone records also revealed that Dan had contacted a Japanese auction site the week prior to his death.

When Frances Carter finally made her reappearance, a week before Christmas, and was shown the clues of the unfinished treasure hunt game, she looked at me and shook her head.

“You checked the fireplace?” she asked, but she knew I had. “My goodness, though...” She sank down on the faded sofa in the front room. “Thirty years ago.” She looked up at Jake and me, then at the clues spread on the worn hassock before her. “Yes, this is my father’s handwriting, which can be verified if you...”

“We’ve already done so, using some old bank drafts,” Jake told her.

“It must be the last game he made for us, but it’s so foolish, so silly. Why would Sophie, if she were involved, or Dan care about a box of old candy and some chocolate coins?”

“Put the letters together, Miss Carter,” Jake said, rearranging the clues in front of her. “IV, O, and RY. That plus the key chain.”

She turned to looked out the windows. Their panes, uninsulated from the cold, were covered with frost patterns. “If you’d known all this would happen, Herbie, would you still have climbed up that tree and got Sammy down for me?”

I didn’t even hesitate: “Yes.”

She turned back to me. “So... how many fireplaces did you check?”

“Just... the one in the trophy room.”

There were five, including the central chimney which came right down straight into the front room. And so, with Frances’s permission, Jake and I got a crowbar and a hammer, then broke and peeled away the paneling which had covered it. Then we went upstairs and did the same to the three in the upstairs bedrooms.

“He left a good portion of his money to found the society,” Frances explained to Jake and me over tea. “But the ivory...” She sighed heavily. “I think he always felt badly about that. He said it never occurred to him when he was a younger man. There were so many elephants, he said, and so few hunters. I did ask him once where it was, if he’d sold it or had it destroyed, and his answer was, ‘It’s all been taken care of.’ He must have hidden it there when the furnace was put into the house and the fireplaces boarded up. My goodness, that was so long ago, in the fifties, perhaps, and...” She shook her head sadly.

“The Japanese black market will pay over three hundred a pound for it,” I informed her.

“That biggest one is over seven foot long,” Jake said, looking at the soot-covered tusks he and I pulled down out of the chimney in the front room. “And well over a hundred pounds.”

“My father killed only the best specimens,” she said sadly. “I think he meant for us to find this the summer he died. We didn’t need the money, or maybe...” she looked away, “...we did. I don’t really recall. We didn’t play that last game. We had a funeral to arrange.”

“But you were just a kid,” I said. “How could you be planning...”

Jake cut me off: “Miss Carter, we think Dan Church did know about the ivory, that maybe your sister told him about it. She might have known when she found that first clue in your father’s desk.”

“She knew?” Frances looked up at Jake. She had a dazed look on her face. “Oh yes, I see. It seems obvious with the key chain. But how do we do we know that Sophie didn’t just find that and gave it to Dan?”

“There’s the friend with the truck,” Jake said to her.

“Come to pick up some trash! Some old furniture, that’s all. Maybe Sophie said, well, you can have this and this, and... no, Sergeant Valari, the medical examiner has told me that Daniel Church’s death was accidental, and that my sister...” Her lips, then her entire face, began to tremble. “...was depressed, and her death had nothing to do with Daniel. So if you’re suggesting that she...”

“I’m suggesting he was using her,” Jake said as gently as he could. “She told him about the game, perhaps in a moment of excitement when she found that first clue. The letters IV and the key chain together tipped her off to...”

“No,” Frances whispered.

“But when she found out that Dan planned to sell it on the black market...”

“No,” she said again, almost frantically, shaking her head.

I hated then to see her so upset, and though I wanted to go to her defense, I couldn’t. Not even when she got up and walked away, straight out of her big house, down the steps, and into her back yard.

“It didn’t work you, you know, not with Sophie, and not with me.” She didn’t seem to be talking to me, not exactly, so I walked over to her slowly.

“My wedding,” she said over her shoulder. “I got over to Paris and found that marriage to a younger man wasn’t going to work, though we did have a lovely vacation together.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Thirty years ago I stood in this same yard wondering what I was going to do with my life, and here I am, still wondering.”

“Thirty years ago...”

“I saw the look on your face, Herbie, in the kitchen, and I take it as a compliment you think I’m so young. But I’m not young. I’ll be fifty-five my next birthday.”

So I was a little surprised; I was off by about twenty years. It really didn’t matter.

“So, what was it, then?” she asked suddenly. “How did it happen? Did she... did they go on a hunt together? Did she tell Daniel what the clues were probably leading to, especially with that key chain? It was our father’s. I haven’t seen or thought about it since he died.” She turned away from me, hands clasped together inside her sleeves as she stared at the shed. “But Sophie knew the two together could only mean one thing. So did he deceive her, then she killed him? And then she killed herself? Or was it an accident, and when she found him...”

“Jake says there’s no prints of hers on the trapdoor, or the handle.”

She threw out her arms. “So Sophie wore gloves!” And then her face folded, grew heavy, and was not so much pale now as gray. “Do you know how that sounds? She wore gloves. Did she? In the middle of October? Did she wear gloves when she threw down that door on Daniel Church’s head? Did she go home that night, and kill herself the next day? Is that how it happened? My fifty-eight-year-old sister, who was foolish enough to fall in love with someone twenty years younger? Did she really think...”

“We may never know,” I said, for what it was worth.

“It could have been an accident. She might have found him later. She might have been in love with him and couldn’t... if she...” Her eyes grew wet. “No. It’s wrong. I can lie to myself only for so long.” A door slammed behind us and we both turned to look up at Jake, coming to join us. Frances turned back to me. “If Sophie found that clue, she knew what it referred to, and it wasn’t the shed cellar. That’s ridiculous. She’d have known the only thing which would have fit was salt cellar. It would have been the first thing that came to her mind. There’ll never be any doubt for me...” She moved a step away as Jake walked over to us. “...that my sister sent Dan Church into that shed... to die.”

Two weeks later and I was back in the house. Under the floorboards the furnace was gurgling again. The candles had just flickered on and in the front room Jake was asleep on the sofa, Sammy curled close to his side. I walked in and looked down at the remaining elephant tusks on the floor. I knelt down and touched one of them; it felt warm, like some part of the animal was still there. Lyman Carter had killed it nearly eighty years ago. Incredible.

Most of the ivory was already gone, trucked off to a company that bought estate ivory for legitimate use. Pens made from ivory were popular now; I’d read that on the Internet.

As for the animals of the trophy room, most of them were gone, too, sent off to several children’s museums. The snow leopard was out in the kitchen awaiting its new owner, some fellow who was putting together an Endangered Species of the World exhibit. All proceeds from sales were being rolled back into the conservation group Lyman Carter had helped start, and for which Frances had worked.

“Frances,” I muttered, shaking my head. How had I ever thought that she... I looked over at Jake, snoring in his sleep, then walked back across the room, grabbed my copy of the Green Hills of Africa off the floor, and settled down on the sofa to finish reading it.