Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 57, No. 1 & 1, January/February 2012

Old Cedar D. A. McGuire

“There it is; that’s the house. Now might take you a day, a week, but that’s what I want you to do, boy, what I can’t do, damn it all, because of these worthless legs of mine.”

Well, I didn’t understand, but that was more usual than not when it came to Mr. Horton. He’d give me a task to do with some half-baked instructions, as if I could see inside his head and figure out exactly what he wanted. So this time I just stood there and watched as he twitched a bit in the hot sun — he’d forgotten to wear his cap — and turned the walker around in slow, incremental steps to face the house, or houses.

We were on Long Bay Causeway Road. Most of the houses here fronted Manamesset Bay; many had smaller cabins facing the road. In fact we were looking at two houses — one on the road directly, and a bigger one farther back behind a grove of red cedars. The first one was an unimposing Cape Cod cottage of weathered gray clapboard and a dark-shingled roof. Of its two entrances, the front one faced the road and led into a small screened-in porch; the other, around to the left, probably entered into an equally small kitchen.

Three large hydrangeas in front of the cottage were just coming into blossom, and Mr. Horton was muttering about them. It seemed to me that hydrangeas — proper Cape Cod hydrangeas, that is — should only come in a sky-and-water blue, but these...

“Purple, damn it,” Mr. Hornton was still going on; I had sort of tuned him out. Must have been the heat. July first and we were already in the fourth day of a ninety-degree-plus heat wave. “She told me how to do it, and I wrote it down but damned if I lost the directions.”

“Directions? Mr. H., I think the heat is getting to you. Why don’t we go back to your place, I’ll make some lemonade and you can explain again—”

He turned to glare at me, his sharp blue eyes as penetrating as a knife blade.

Paint, repair, mow, rake, hammer, haul — that’s how I’ve spent most of my summer, well the last few summers, since around my twelfth birthday. Most of my work came from this man, Mr. Hornton, seventy-five years old (that’s all he’d admit to though I knew he was at least eighty), a retired sign painter, fisherman, and jack-of-all-trades who found me odd jobs when he didn’t have any for me himself. Today he had dragged me down Long Bay Causeway to show me my next job, and according to him, I damn well better take the job because a boy with nothing to do all summer is a boy just looking for trouble.

“I explained it already,” he snapped at me. “Molly Windsor, that’s her house, Old Cedar, up there on the bluff.” He indicated the much bigger house at the top of a gravel driveway that was barely visible behind the cedar trees. “She’s dead, told you that, too, you stupid boy. I’m paying good money for you to do this and why the—” He stopped suddenly to have a gagging-coughing-choking fit. It took him a few seconds to get out his handkerchief, then use it to mop his brow and his mouth, then to blow his nose. He swore a few more times too.

I said nothing. Patience would win. We made our way back to his house while he swore again at the walker. His house wasn’t much bigger than the little one with the purple hydrangeas.

“Easiest money you’ll ever make,” he told me over iced coffee and clam rolls. “I’ve been taking care of Old Cedar for, oh, fifty years, maybe longer.”

I added sugar to my coffee. He frowned, grunted, went on:

“Molly passed away last January, born in 1911, so...” A moment to contemplate the grandeur of extreme old age, another cough. The radio, tuned to the Red Sox, played in the background as he leaned over the kitchen table and looked me in the eye, “Woman was a saint! But I never in my life knew someone of so few words. You saw the little house with the hydrangeas? That’s where she lived. The big one, she rented that out. Anyhow, we could sit out on the porch all night playing cribbage or gin rummy, and I swear to you, mine would be the only voice I’d hear!”

“All night?” I laughed and pushed back, balancing the chair on two legs. “She was how much older than you? You had a thing going on with an older woman? You sly—”

He slammed his hand down on the table so hard it made me jump and spill coffee on my shirt. Suddenly, all four chair legs were on the floor.

“You listen to me, Herbert Sawyer Jr., I’m throwing an opportunity your way, and it’s all coming out of my pocket!” More coughing, hacking, the handkerchief produced.

I looked at the clock; it was late, nearly seven and I hadn’t called the Wenlows in four hours. They were my foster parents, nice enough people, but strict. I’d told them Elmer Hornton had a job for me and rode my bike over from Falmouth to check it out.

“Sorry,” I muttered. “But I still don’t get what you want me to do.”

Another slam. “Damn it, I told you already! When Molly Windsor died, her secret died with her! I want you to find out what it was!”

I lay on my back, hands under my head, staring up at the open-raftered ceiling. My room was over the garage, but I’d chosen it, and no one else wanted it. Too crude, I guess, with its open walls and uncertain insulation. Might find a mouse up here, or a couple of spiders. So none of the other kids — the Wenlows’ other foster kids — shared the room with me. Just the way I liked it.

Downstairs in the kitchen, I could hear them arguing, fighting, jostling over cereal bowls and milk, the television blaring in the corner. (The Wenlows had a TV in practically every room of the house.) Soon most of those kids would be off, taking their arguing-jostling selves to play video games, eat junk food, and mostly waste the rest of the day.

But the older foster kids, including me, were expected to have a job for the summer because it helped keep us “responsible.” So I’d assured Mrs. Wenlow that Mr. Hornton was going to fix me up with something. She’d been glad to hear that, but she needed to know exactly what the job entailed. I had sort of a mixed “history” — some trouble at school, though nothing major — and she wanted to make sure whatever I was doing was legal and safe.

I turned on my side, tuned out the noise below, and thought how I was going to explain this to her.

“Met her in ’38; I was fifteen,” he’d said wistfully, sipping his iced coffee, nibbling on a cookie filled with plum jam. “Pulled a card off the bulletin board in the general store: Help wanted, handyman, good wages. Well, it was still the Depression and good pay might be fifty cents a day. She told me what she wanted done, paid me a dollar a day, and I think, well, I kind of liked her from the start.” He had darted his eyes up at me, expecting a smirk perhaps, but he got nothing from me.

“I digress,” he’d said, almost formally, “How we met isn’t important. What is, is this: Molly passed away and never told me what she promised to before she died. Damned if I don’t kick myself now for not being more... assertive, I guess is the word. We played hundreds of card games in that little house and many times I’d say to myself, ‘Elmer, ask her now!’ ” He paused to take a breath.

“Ask her what?”

“Damn, boy have you got rocks in your ears! Ask her what the secret was!”

“But I still don’t get—” I began, but he hadn’t heard.

He was off in his own reverie...

“Gray eyes, blonde hair, little wisp of a thing, and always a smile. I did her chores, anything she asked, any time she asked.

“I painted that big house, Old Cedar, more times than I care to admit. Painted it white one year, and it stood proudly up on the bluff, like a castle. That was ’47, right after the war ended, and the next year I had to paint it all over again in that dark green. She hated the white.” A soft chuckle. “Told me how to grow purple hydrangeas, but I’ve forgotten, something about aluminum in the soil. Anyhow, she was never much of a talker. Had a job and an apartment in Boston, and came out here every spring around Memorial Day. I’d open up the big house, unroll the rugs, wash the windows, stock the pantry. Dust and vacuum and clean and at the end of the day, she’d meet me by the kitchen door, pay me cash, and say, ‘The lawn needs mowing on Tuesday and garbage pickup is Thursday.’ Very matter-of-fact she was.

“Well, I think she wanted to keep a distance between us. Wasn’t proper, you see, for her being older, to take notice of a younger man. Damn those days.”

“They sound like good days, Mr. H.,” I’d said, and respectfully so.

His blue eyes lifted to me. “In those days a younger man did not pursue an older woman.” He shook his head. “When I retired and left the sign business, she and I got a little closer. I had a schedule of chores which I tended to at the big house, but I’d also stop by to rake or mow, do a bit of yard work at the little house. She’d ask me in, have coffee; we’d play cards. It became a ritual, couple nights a week. It felt right. Felt like it should have been happening all the time, but by then she was in her eighties and it was too late.”

“Too late for what?”

“Too late for anything more, damn it!” And then rising, fumbling for his handkerchief, he’d muttered, “The devil knows why I’m telling you this.”

Okay, I’d been embarrassed for him. I fumbled around, picked up a magazine, sat down at the end of his new wicker sofa. He went off into the kitchen, started to wash dishes, muttering “no,” when I asked if he needed help.

As for me, I just shut up. Eventually he started again:

“Always small talk. Weather and sports, not much else. I did say to her once, tell me about you, Molly, about your job, and she smiled and changed the subject. Didn’t take long to learn she was never going to take our friendship any further than she already had. She was what in an earlier day was called retiring. Or deferential. I’d see Molly in the check-out line stand aside for people, let them go in front of her, saying, ‘No, you go first, please.’ ” He sighed. “Anyhow, she finally got so she couldn’t live alone. She’s been in a nursing home the last five years.”

So that explained why I’d had no idea who this woman was. Over the course of my friendship with Mr. Hornton, I’d come to know most of his friends, cronies, and acquaintances — his fishing ‘buddies,’ his war ‘buddies.’ I also knew this neighborhood: It used to be mine until my mother had to sell our house. I knew the roads, the people, what they did, where they worked, the names of all their kids. Oh, I was presently living in a foster home, but that was because my mother was “sick” and not able to take care of me right now. My only other living relative was my aunt, and she had six kids, so...

So I hadn’t known Molly Windsor, but I knew the little house by the road. I knew the big house too. I knew how it stood up on the bluff, shaded in giant cedars, and how it was rented out each summer to big families — the kind that invite all their cousins and friends to come and stay.

Old Cedar was an institution at the end of North Manamesset Beach, where the pale sandy beach gave way to marshlands and scrub pine woods. The Victorian-style house, gracious and permanent, stood three stories high, with a gray, clay-tiled roof and two diamond-shaped, stained glass windows on the third floor — one on the south side, the other the north. Facing the bay, the property’s wide sloping lawns extended down to a cement seawall. There was even a private dock with moorage for three boats.

Mr. Hornton had stopped talking, was standing at the counter, staring out the window to the west, the general direction of the coast and the big house, though neither was visible from here. It was getting dark; and I had to leave soon. A low fog was starting to roll in and a sea breeze, humid but cool, was breaking through the windows, lifting the old-fashioned Venetian blinds.

“So you want me find out her secret?”

“I haven’t told you everything yet.” He’d fumbled for his walker; I pushed it his way. “I helped her get the house ready every summer, but she’d never go in!” He gripped the walker, came toward me. “Never went inside that damn house once in all those years!”

I guess I sort of stared at him. I didn’t know what to say.

“One day I said to her, kind of joking, Molly, why won’t you go in your own dam house?” Suddenly a dreary-eyed look. “And she said, ‘Why Elmer, that’s my secret. Everyone has a secret and someday I’ll tell you mine.’ Then she put her hand on mine, squeezed it.” His eyes got wet — honest to God — and shaking his head, then swearing in a particularly vulgar manner, shuffled out of the kitchen into the bathroom.

I’d left shortly after that.

So the job was to find out a dead woman’s secret which had something to do with the house known as Old Cedar. How did I tell Mrs. Wenlow that? She wouldn’t be too happy to hear my name and the word ‘secret’ in the same sentence. And I couldn’t lie; she might find out.

So the next day I told her I was doing some odd jobs for Mr. Hornton out at Old Cedar and left it at that.

It went okay. She knew Elmer Hornton, and despite the fact I’d gotten involved in a few “police matters” from time to time, and that Elmer had been indirectly, or even directly involved in the same, she gave her approval.

Outside, two of the Wenlow children were drawing in the road, a bucket of chalk at the end of the driveway. I leaned over and helped myself to two sticks of chalk, tucked them in my pocket, then got on my bike and headed back to Manamesset.

He handed me the keys, a big old ring of them, the kind that look like they could open a pirate chest.

“House is empty, wasn’t rented this summer. Fellow in Hyannis handled all the rentals. I offered to do it, but Molly told me, you do enough, Elmer. But I don’t think I did. She was a lonely woman and if it hadn’t been for me, she’d have had no friends at all.”

“Mr. H., how do you know...”

“Mr. H.?” he snapped. “Damn it, I’m Mr. Hornton or Elmer!”

“How do you know that, Elmer?”

He spun his walker around, dropping it almost on my feet, then pushing up the brim of his green corduroy fishing hat, he stared up at me.

Up at me, perhaps that was a shock to him, but I didn’t move. I had no desire to upset him, and I wasn’t trying to be a wise guy.

“Because I got too many friends!” he shouted. “And I know the burden—” He stopped short and smacked his lips. “This is doing a number on me, Herbie. I can’t talk about it without getting all misty-eyed. Damned embarrassing.”

I looked past him, past the little cabin out by the road, its purple hydrangeas rustling in the light breeze. Behind the house was a grove of at least thirty red cedars, and just above the tallest of them, the very top of Old Cedar could be seen with its dark gray roof.

But there were still things I didn’t understand: “This woman had a secret that had to do with that house, but she died before she could tell you. Now you want me—” I shook my head. “Honest to God, Mr. Hornton, I haven’t a clue what you want me to do.”

He shook his head, then turning away, said, “I’ll walk up to the door with you and we can talk.”

I turned the key in the old lock, felt the tumblers move into position under my hand, and wondered if any of the renters — of which there’d been dozens in the last sixty-plus years — had felt the life in the lock, the soft moan of the house as the door swung open before them.

An old, wood-paneled door, stained a deep mahogany brown, was Mr. Hornton’s handiwork, for sure, and though I’d seen this house many times from the beach and from the road, I’d never been on these steps, never been inside the house. Never felt its huge coolness as I stepped through a small side porch into the wide, black-and-white kitchen.

“So what should I be looking for?” I’d asked as we walked up the driveway. “Diaries? Letters? Scrapbooks or photographs—”

He cut me off with a wave of his hand. “Ain’t anything like that in the house. She kept nothing personal up there. No furniture left in there but a few pieces of junk. Weren’t any desks. Molly had the house filled with that new modem stuff and that’s all been sold or given away, per instructions in her will. Most that’s left is a chair here or there. This was a rental, Herbie. You’re not going to find personal items in a rental house.”

“Then what do you—”

“Just look around! Use your good eye to see what might have been missed. Look inside the closets, the pantry, all the shelves. There’s bookcases everywhere. And the fireplace — just feel around, just look.”

I walked into the empty pantry, clean as a whistle, as my mother would have said. Clean shelf paper, a few pots and pans on hooks, some empty tin canisters.

He’d said, “There’re no linens either, no blankets, towels, that sort of thing. Molly had a service supply those, made it easier for her.” He frowned, shook his head. “She had the floors buffed and polished last fall. Told her I’d do it, but she said, you do enough...”

I stepped back into the kitchen, and from there walked into a small room that gave a magnificent view of the bay. The room was totally empty. Not a rug on the floor or picture on the wall, not a stick of furniture. Smooth, bare, dark wood floors. There was a small closet, some built-in bookshelves.

From there into the wide living room with an even more expansive view to the bay. Through a pair of French doors, the room opened out onto a wide, unscreened porch. Nothing there either, except two rather worn-looking Adirondack chairs tipped to their sides and a metal stand for a hammock.

On the other side of the living room was another smaller room, which looked like it had been made into a media room: There was a huge shelving unit built into the far wall with space for a television, stereo equipment, and so on.

Then back into the living room, which was the largest room of the house. The dark floors had been polished to a shine. The walls were clad with barnboard.

At the far end of the living room was a massive fieldstone fireplace with a flagstone hearth. All the fireplace utensils were gone. The mantel above it looked like a single piece of carved gray wood, maybe driftwood, and over that, hanging on the wall, was a rather ordinary-looking painting of a large house behind some trees.

I went into the next room, a formal dining room. It had a smaller side room from which stairs curved up to a small landing, and then off to the second floor. Off the dining room, facing east, was a morning room or what some might call a breakfast room. There were built-in bookcases everywhere, and at least two closets in every room, even the smallest. But every closet was empty, as were all the rooms. There was only an occasional rug rolled and pushed against a wall, or a broken chair.

It all smelled of age, of floor polish, and that peculiar musty odor that fills Cape houses when they’re closed up for a while. I went back into the living room, started unlocking and pushing up windows, pulling down screens. In fact, I decided any room I was in, I’d let in the air. Out past the porch was the wide, green lawn, meticulously maintained, which ran about thirty yards to the top of the cement seawall, and beyond that was the pale sand of North Manamesset Beach. There were boat sounds out in the bay, people shouting on the beach, kites whipping in a stiff offshore breeze.

I opened the French doors going out onto the porch and stepped outside.

I tipped one of the chairs — the one that looked cleaner — right-side up and sat down.

Maybe Molly Windsor’s secret was this: Her life, though seemingly quiet and simple, was a happy one. Maybe she didn’t need the “burden” of too many friends. Maybe Mr. Hornton and cribbage, the Red Sox, was all she needed or wanted. She had a job in Boston, possibly a demanding job, maybe sher friends were there — who knows? Maybe summer was her escape, her quiet respite.

So why wouldn’t she go inside her own house?

I had said to Mr. Hornton, “So I’m looking for what? Secret passageways? Hidden panels? Hidden rooms?” He hadn’t cut me off that time, just given me a grim look.

“You see things,” he had said to me. “You sense things—”

It had been my turn to interrupt him, and a bit angrily at that: “No, I’m not... psychic or super-sensitive or anything crazy like that. Look, I have—” I took a short breath, but I understood, even as I protested it, to what he was referring. “—maybe a few times I’ve helped figure out some situation. But this is different.”

And to that Elmer Hornton had one response: “Exactly.”

I got up, went back into the house, sized it all up. The first floor rooms: kitchen, pantry, front room to the west, front room to the east, living room, dining room, morning room. There was also a storage room off the kitchen on the south side, which had probably been the housekeeper’s room. In addition, there were two bathrooms on the first floor: a small one off the kitchen and a larger one just off the dining room — it was around and under the staircase. Both bathrooms were completely modernized, the bigger one having a custom-built shower stall in which you could have had a party, and a hot tub large enough for me and six of my friends.

Now that was an inviting thought, if only I’d had six friends.

Then I walked through all the rooms again, this time opening and closing doors and drawers, running my hands across shelves. I sat on the hearth and tried to move the flagstones and the massive granite stones of the fireplace. I reached into the fireplace, stuck my head up into the chimney, and played with the damper, barely moving in time before a shower of soot came down upon my head. I walked the length of every room, inspecting floors, walls, ceilings, and I marked every space, every wall, every closet I checked with a white X chalk mark.

I was taking Mr. Hornton’s money for not doing an awful lot. I should have felt guilty. He was paying me to walk around a big, old empty house — a simply wonderful house with the ocean air moving through it.

“I’m turning over the keys to the town administrator on September tenth,” he’d said. “Then it’s to be torn down.” He hadn’t given me a chance to ask why before he said, “She willed the land to the town, just the land.”

“So did you have a secret, Molly?” I asked while standing in the middle of the great living room, and as I did a rush of cold air swept in from the northwest. The windows still had a slight frill of faded blue curtains and they swept up and down as I shut my eyes...

I reopened them and, returning to the dining room, took the stairs to the second floor.

Four bedrooms on the second floor, all running off a central hall. Pale wood in the walls and floors, probably maple, and paler walls in the bedrooms. Floral print in the bathroom shared by the front two bedrooms, a more robust red and orange pattern in the bathroom shared by the back two. But all of it was thoroughly modem: the lighting, the windows, the fixtures in the bathrooms. It seemed that perhaps there had been even more rooms up here, but to update the bathrooms, a smaller room had been sacrificed both front and back. But like downstairs, the rooms were empty, not even a rug or broken chair, odd picture on the wall. These rooms had been stripped.

The stairs which came up from the dining room continued upwards by way of a small alcove to the third floor. Up here three more bedrooms, two on the southwest side, with a shared bathroom between, and one bedroom in the back. That third bedroom, which didn’t overlook the bay, but south to the cedar grove, and the little house out by the causeway road, was bigger than any of the other bedrooms and had a colossal walk-in closet that smelled of cedar. It also had its own bathroom with another huge shower and an antique tub sitting on four brass-clawed feet.

In the hall on this floor was a small sitting area, a nook containing a window seat that overlooked the bay. Nice place to sit and read or just contemplate the view: beach, water, sky, boats. I threw up the windows, then turned and saw a closet in that nook. I opened it and found more stairs, these went to the attic.

I didn’t go all the way up, just stuck my head into the attic, and looked around. Okay, if I were looking for secrets, I would do this space last. But there seemed nothing here, just eaves and dust and the ceiling and roof above me. No old storage chests or bureaus, not even an ancient dress form, which most attics seemed to have.

I did another walk around of the second floor, inspecting walls, backs of closets, tops of closets. In one room I found an empty box for Imperial Floor Polish, which I used to stand on as I felt around inside the closets, pushing at the walls, running my hands along the smooth maple and oak floorboards. Every area and wall I checked got a new white chalk mark.

I turned the faucet in one of the second floor bathrooms. It ran brown for a few seconds, then was clear and cold. The hot tap worked too. I flicked a light switch and the light over the sink blinked on.

“So what am I looking for, Molly?” I said aloud.

No box of letters tucked up high on a shelf in a musty closet, no skeletons walled up, no unexplained stains on the floor.

The sun was moving into the west; late afternoon shadows were shifting through the open windows, with here and there a forgotten curtain lifting in the ocean breeze. It was indeed a strange sensation to walk through the huge, empty spaces looking for a “secret” that might not even exist.

I returned to the living room and stood in front of the fireplace. Above it was the painting.

A bit simplistic, almost childlike, but it was of Old Cedar, and it was signed MW.

“Kind of a nice place,” I said, sitting out on Mr. Hornton’s front porch, watching the guy across the road. He had dragged an outboard motor over to his side yard, had it set up in a large galvanized trash barrel full of water.

More than just a nice place, Old Cedar was an exceptionally nice place. I liked the deep, hollow feel of the rooms, the sound the hardwood floors made under my sneakers, the sweep of the salty air in my face when I pushed up the windows. It was a house which could draw you in — comforting, solid, and large. I would have liked to have sat in one of those rooms for hours, as the sun turned westward then dropped into the dark pool of the bay, and watch the shadows move across the floor and fade off as the sky turned purple, orange, and red.

But as far as this secret was concerned, I’d come up with nothing, nada, zilch, and I’d made that pretty plain to a grim-faced Elmer Hornton who sat next to me attempting to tie a fishing fly.

“Damn, it could be staring you right in the face, and you’d never know,” he snapped.

Was that intended to be personal? Especially after praising my ability to “sense things” earlier.

“Maybe the secret is that there is no secret,” I said, thinking I was pretty clever. He glared at me. “Okay, then it’s something else, isn’t it? What I mean is, it’s not the secret.”

“What are you going on about?” he snarled.

“You don’t want Old Cedar tom down.” The wheels were turning in my head, “So if someone important had lived there or...” It had occurred to me that what he really wanted was to find out something startling about the house, something which would make it more than just a local landmark, a reason to save Old Cedar.

“I’m already having that checked out,” he said, swearing under his breath at me, at the fly, the line, and even at the guy across the road who was now setting up an awful racket with his outboard motor. The rich scent of gasoline and diesel floated across the road. “Martin Cross is doing some research.” He muttered, swore, nicking himself with the jackknife he was so ineffectively wielding. Out came the handkerchief — along with a sour look directed my way.

Martin Cross was a local historian and a friend of Mr. Hornton’s. I’d met the man, had liked and respected him; compared to Elmer Hornton’s brusque gruffhess, Martin was gentility itself.

“So let me get this right,” I said, “Mr. Cross is doing the easy book stuff, and Herbie Sawyer is doing the grunt work.”

He ignored that. “I know there’s something,” he muttered. “Should have seen her funeral. Dead of winter, sad little affair. I was there, one of her neighbors, and an old fellow from the firm where she used to work. Three of us. That’s it.” He threw aside the feathers, the line, the knife onto an end table with another curse.

“Firm she worked for? What firm?”

“Legal firm up in Boston. Stayed there into her seventies, as a clerk, helped with legal research. She spent the summers in the little house. Could have made a pretty penny if she’d sold the big one outright, but—” He put a bloody thumb into his mouth, glared at me; I kept a straight face. “—I didn’t know anything about her finances. In fact, I didn’t know anything about her at all.” He muffled a curse.

“Seems you know more than you think you do.”

“Nah, just bits and pieces she handed out over the years. She did say she lived in the big house until she was ten, then her parents died and her aunt took her to Boston. Far as I know, she never dated, never had a boyfriend. Never went to college. For sixty years she just worked at the law firm.” He paused, and the outboard motor across the street roared to life, dying just as quickly, and setting up another awful stink, but Mr. Horton didn’t seem to notice. “You could see it in her eyes, something just not there.”

“Maybe this secret was a joke, Mr. H., between you and her.”

“Mr. H. again? When the heck did I become Mr. H?” he snarled. He grabbed his walker, stood up with a half groan, and left the porch.

I followed him inside, wishing I’d found something, anything for him. He was moving around the kitchen, opening and shutting drawers, slamming them, rattling silverware. Then he was in the cabinets, probably looking for a bandage.

“There is the painting,” I said. “Over the mantel?”

“So she painted a bit. That’s no secret.” He snorted. “She did a few of the beach, the dunes, and the big house. Nothing special about them.”

“You know, if you can stop being angry at me for maybe, um, five minutes, you could seriously tell me what you expect me to find.” When he didn’t answer, I added: “Or maybe you can tell me why this means so much to you.” I was in the doorway to the front room, hands in my pockets, leaning against the door frame.

Bandage box in hand, pointing it at me, he snapped, “It’s the secret to who she is! Who she was!” He threw his hands up in an expression of alarm, dismay and maybe even grief. “Sixty, seventy years you know someone, you have a friendship, Herbie, and you know absolutely nothing about them! It’s wrong. And it was wrong of me. I should have been more persistent and less selfish! But no, there I was, talking about me. Me and my business. Me and my fishing. Me and my garden, me and the new roof I was putting on! That was the gist of our conversation, what little there was of one. She’d just sit there, smiling and nodding and seldom, if ever, said anything.”

“You can’t go back and change things, Mr. Hornton, but isn’t it possible that she, well, enjoyed your friendship? Some people aren’t great talkers.”

He wasn’t listening to me; he had moved across the room, and was gazing out a window onto his perfect, green lawn, the low cedar fence which marked it off, the narrow driveway strewn with clean white, crushed qua-hog shells. “That was the one thing she had though, that secret. ‘I’m going to tell you someday, Elmer.’ And her eyes would get this far-off look.”

“Okay.” I shrugged, thinking I’d humor him. “I’ll go back again. I barely checked the third floor, and there’s the attic.”

He didn’t say anything else.

“Hey there! You, boy!” A shout from down on the beach, but I ignored it. I had opened up one of the old Adirondack chairs, set it on the porch, and with my mp3 player turned full blast, was reveling in the opaque sounds of an outrageous Swedish electronic band. I still hadn’t found any secrets in the house, and with the temperature pushing into the mid nineties, I was losing interest — well, for the moment anyhow.

It was the second day on the job, and I’d gone through every room. I’d used a different colored piece of chalk, marked everything again. I’d slid my hands up panels and across floorboards and over ceilings, looking for hidden pockets or places where there might be a journal or diary, or perhaps the family Bible.

But at the moment I was on a break. It was midafternoon and hot. I had my feet up, bottle of cream soda by my side, and sweet Swedish sounds ringing in my ears. I ignored the shouts, certain they weren’t for me.

I jolted as I came to, realizing someone was blocking the westward-turning sun. I looked up into the shadowed face of a very big man.

Buster Holiday, smelliest man on Manamesset Bay.

“So it is you!” he said, a little too eagerly and too close to my face. Buster rarely shaved, and with his crooked teeth, persistent sweet-onion breath, and sweat-soaked T-shirts, one would think he was the most destitute man on Cape Cod. In reality, he was one of the wealthiest.

He was the author of a string of self-help books on electrical repair, carpentry, plumbing, and now with websites to match, Buster had accrued an estate worth in excess of a hundred million dollars. He had his own flotilla of boats, homes all over the eastern seaboard, even a penthouse in NYC, but here he was, facing me down: “Damn it to the nearest outhouse, Herbert Sawyer, Jr.! Thought you were a trespasser!”

And then he turned and spat off the side of the porch into the grass.

Well, I was thinking fast, how to explain why I was sitting up on Molly Windsor’s porch. I muttered something about “helping Mr. Hornton out.”

As his words rode right over mine: “Hell yes, too bad they’re tearing this old place down. Landmark it is,” followed by, “And about Molly W.? Holy hell’s blazes, I was so sweet on her back in forty-two — or was it forty-three? No matter, nice girl she was, though very private. Why I’d see her on her bike going to the store and toot my horn, give her a friendly wave, and she’d never wave back. Never. Same in the store. Just nod if you said say g’momin’, good evenin’. All boxed up she was, and, well, that’s to be expected, I suppose.” He was scratching his chin, flakes of skin falling off. “Yep, known Molly for sixty years, give or take a decade, and been strolling past this house and seeing all the families who rented here all that time, and well, it’s sad this place has got to go. I’d have bought it myself if it was available. It’s just the craziest damn thing.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“ ’Cept the cabin, what she used to call the ‘little house’ out by the road.” He pointed in its direction behind the big house, past the cedar grove. “Goes to Elmer Hornton — did you know that?”

“No, sir. I did not.” I had inched back into the chair as far as I could, but every time I moved, Buster just moved in closer.

“Craziest thing.” He looked up at the house behind me, the open door, letting all the flies in. But what did it matter?

“Laid some of the floors myself one summer. Molly, she updated it back in...” He started scratching his head; the man was eighty-eight, if he was a day, and mostly bald with a white fringe of hair around a sunburned scalp. “Well, some time in the fifties, back when Elmer was all caught up in his sign business. So I chipped in. Elmer sent me the work. Me and Elmer, you know, are very good friends.” Buster turned to look at me, but strangely enough, despite all his dirtiness, he had that same dreary look in his eye that I’d seen in Mr. Hornton’s recently. “I think we competed a bit over Molly.” He shook his head, then turned his attention back to the house. “Yep, I put in some cedar closets for her, did up a bathroom or two. Painted here and there. Helped out where I could. That’s my motto, Herbie. Help out where you can.” He turned and eyed me closely as if I were something he’d like to take a swat at, like a bug.

“So what you doing up here? Come to collect the pictures? Nothing left of any value in the whole place. I saw some trucks here a few weeks ago, took away all the furniture.”

“Pictures,” I murmured.

“Well, they’d be worth something only to anyone who cares. She was not a painter. Elmer can tell you that. Contrast all out of kilter and her take on perspective? Crooked lines everywhere like she never heard of vanishing point or anything, not that I’m a painter, mind you. Can’t paint a damn straight line, but Elmer, he showed me a thing or two. I had a mind to be a portrait painter back in — when did my first book come out? Hmm, late sixties?” He leaned forward, slapped me on the knee, jolting me nearly out of the chair. “That’s all ancient history to a kid like you now, ain’t it?”

“I guess,” I said, sinking back into the chair as he moved away, finally, and standing at the edge of the porch, looked out over the bay and said:

“Hey, got a new little sloop, Herbie, and she’s a beauty. A forty-footer, not that big, needs a crew of four to handle, but you and me and Elmer, we ought to take her out for some deep-sea fishing.” He paused to pick at his teeth with some metal thing. “What do you say?”

“You inherit the little house?” My first words on entering his house without so much as a knock.

And his response: “So what? Worthless shack. Going to tear it down, is what I’m going to do.”

“Mr. Hornton—” I walked toward him, determined and just a bit angry. “—you want me to find Molly’s secret? Well, it’s probably in that little worthless shack!”

“Ain’t nothing in there but a few personal things. No, Herbie, the secret’s up in Old Cedar and if you can’t find it, well, I got half a mind to burn the whole place down.”

“You can’t be serious.”

Silence, almost a stunned emptiness between us as old Mr. Hornton turned way from me, shuddering, shoulders sagging. For a moment there was nothing there, no feeling, no sensations, just a deep void as empty as the rooms in Old Cedar. He had truly loved this woman.

“Hey, I’ll be back later. Sorry...” I started toward the door.

“Stay,” he said between half-muffled sobs, and then angrily: “Stay!”

“All right.”

“What’s a few tears between friends, hey?” he said, making hot coffee on this hottest day yet in July, but I took it, added three packets of sugar, and sitting in the little hot box that was his kitchen, he said to me. “Maybe I did love her, in a fashion, I don’t know. Only twelve years between us...” He shook his head, put a fist down on the tabletop, but not hard, just in emphasis. “Maybe she could have been my wife. All those years, Mrs. Elmer Hornton.” He ran a sweating hand over his forehead. “You ever been in love with an older woman?” He looked at me and quickly answered his own question. “Course not. You’re just sixteen, a boy still, but I tell you this, it’s a pain that won’t go away, and it gets worse as the years pass by.” He turned aside a bit, pulling in his bottom lip, but he wasn’t about to cry this time.

“Yeah, I have,” I admitted. He turned his head sharply. “She was fifty-four.”

“Fifty-four? Holy mackerel, that’s a young ’un for me!” He tried to laugh, but his eyes were reddening up again.

“I thought she was thirty-five.” I shrugged. “I suppose it was more of a crush.”

“Yes, that’s a good name for it because you feel like your whole insides are being crushed to pieces. I can talk a blue streak, you know that, but I could never talk enough to get inside who Molly really was. She was quiet, but she was also sad. There was something missing.” He sat back, sighing, almost gasping, and I moved to help. It was a new problem Mr. Hornton had been experiencing. He put a fist to his chest.

I found his inhaler in a kitchen drawer. He used it, took a minute to compose himself, then said, “I know the answer’s in the big house, but if you want, well, go ahead, look in the little house; the keys are on the ring. I gave Martin all her papers, well, what she had of them, and what the lawyers didn’t need.”

“I’ll look tomorrow,” I said, watching him carefully. His breathing was still ragged and he wanted more coffee. I got up to make it for him.

He reached for the white handkerchief in his back pocket. “Life is full of might-have-beens, Herbie. Don’t let your life get filled with too many of them.”

“There is the painting,” I said as I brought him his coffee. I was hoping to get his mind on something solid, away from all this emotional stuff. “It’s still over the mantel.”

He waved his hand at me: “I told you! Couldn’t paint to save her life! I tried to show her a few things, but she pushed me away, said, ‘Elmer, I paint for my own enjoyment.’ ”

“Where are the other paintings?”

He paused to think. “Well, a few hang around town, post office, library, but that’s because I put them there. Most are just collecting dust.”

“Where?”

“In the little house, of course.”

I spread the paintings across the kitchen floor in the little house. There were twenty of them, all total, all neatly framed, and all, indeed, amateurish. There was no sense of space; everything was flat. One showed seagulls flying over a marsh, but the painting had no life, no color, no sense of anything real to it.

There were ten paintings of the big house. I set those aside and opened the window which looked north and toward the cedar grove. Old Cedar wasn’t visible from here, but Molly had painted these pictures from somewhere nearby, maybe just outside the little house. I knew this because every picture of Old Cedar showed only the top of the house, the part which included the second and third floors, along with the diamond-shaped, stained-glass window, the attic area, and the high, peaked roof.

I lined up these ten paintings, not by date — Molly hadn’t dated any of her work — but by the fact that the cedars had grown taller through the years in which she had obviously painted them. Less and less of Old Cedar was visible, until in the final picture only the peaked roof and the very top corner of the stained-glass window could be seen.

I went outside, slamming the door. It was gusting wind today and would soon get worse. Possible thunderstorms, coming in after the heat. I walked around the little house, looking up toward the big house, through the cedars.

Red cedars are an evergreen; they grow fairly straight up with a peeling, reddish brown bark, and can branch out thickly from a very low height if not trimmed back, and none of these trees had been trimmed; they’d been allowed to grow up thick and close. The branches, for the most part were short, covered with a bristly, blue green needle, and at this time of year, were starting to break out in small blue berries.

The house wasn’t visible at all anymore, unless I was almost at the road and facing toward the bay, to the northwest. From there I could see the roof of Old Cedar, and just make out the very top of the stained-glass window on the third floor. But if I could imagine going back in time, the cedar trees shrinking as the years moved backwards... My conclusion was that Molly had painted all ten pictures of Old Cedar right here, from her side yard, looking north toward the cedar grove. There was also one more picture which I knew of, over the mantel at the big house. I didn’t know what pictures were in the post office or the library, but possibly there were two more of Old Cedar.

It was getting on to noontime and Mrs. Wenlow had told me to return by lunch. She needed me to watch some of the younger children so she could do some food shopping.

I stacked the pictures on the kitchen table and locked up the little house.

“Strange job, indeed,” Harriet Wenlow remarked as she cut a tuna fish sandwich in half. It had taken a few months, but she and I had come to sort of an arrangement. Oh, no doubt she didn’t approve of me — not my music, my hairstyle (straight-up, closed-cropped, with a touch of gel), my clothes (jeans and a T-shirt most days, shorts if it was hot), or my apparent lack of friends.

“Never approved of loners,” she’d told me shortly after my arrival. But she was sympathetic to what had put me in the foster-care system and didn’t pry into anything beyond what she needed to know.

But today she asked: “So what is it you’re really doing over there at Old Cedar? I hear it’s going to be tom down.”

“Just making sure nothing of any value is left behind.”

“My family is from that area, but I didn’t know Molly Windsor. We go way back, so I asked my mother if she knew anything.” Mrs. Wenlow shook her head. “She said the old woman just wasn’t a part of things.”

And neither am I, I wanted to add... well, most the time. Oh, I do have friends, I even had a girlfriend or two, but just then I was happy flying solo, in all areas of my social life.

“The only other thing my mother knew about her is that she painted pictures,” Mrs. Wenlow added as she started to fill her dishwasher.

“Painted pictures,” I echoed.

“Yes, they were said to be terrible,” she said, chuckling.

I didn’t have a chance to return to Old Cedar that day, and the next day I was recruited for a different job, cleaning the gutters at the Wenlow house. It was after noon before I could get away. It was July Fourth, kids were running up and down the beach setting off small firecrackers, and I was in the house again, staring up over the big fieldstone fireplace, staring at the painting of Old Cedar.

An early Old Cedar, I realized now. The cedars between the two houses were smaller, and the house was visible from the windows of the first floor up to the roof. It was also an Old Cedar that had been painted white.

“You painted this view all through the years,” I said, “But why?”

Not everything’s a mystery, not everything’s a secret, even when someone tells you it is. But I took the picture down, using a rickety old chair I found in the kitchen, and set it carefully by the kitchen door. Then I did yet another circuit of the house — my third.

This time I moved a bit slower, and did more standing and...

Looking at where windowsills met the wall or how a door fit into its frame. I was searching for something, anything that was a bit out of line, a bit off center. I studied paneling in the bedrooms, and if anything looked crooked, patched, or sealed over, I checked it out. I’d bought a measuring tape, a hammer, and a small crowbar because I figured if I did find something a bit off it would do no harm to break a wall, pry off a sill, knock out a bookshelf. But again there was nothing.

First floor, marking everything off in green chalk this time. Second floor, the same, and the third floor. Then even the hot, dusty attic, crawling around under the eaves on my hands and knees. Nothing but a bit of dry rot and spiders.

Shortly after four in the afternoon, I was back on the second floor, sitting on the floor in a southeast-facing bedroom, back against the door frame. Not much natural light in this room this time of day, only a light glow in through the windows. But it was cooler here, comfortable, full of shadows. And if I shut my eyes for two minutes...

I shook myself alert before I could doze off, and then I saw it. Something.

In the top corner of the room, near the ceiling, and on an interior wall, was a thin streak of something dark that trickled down through the green and blue pattern of the room’s wallpaper. I couldn’t tell what it was at first, and truthfully, I jumped up thinking it was a bloodstain. I went and got the floor polish crate, came back and stood on it, and reached up to touch the streak. A reddish-brown powder came off in my fingers. I looked at it, smelled it. Rust. Probably from a rusty old steam pipe.

Again, nothing.

“Why Herbert Sawyer, haven’t seen you in a dog’s age.” Martin Cross reached forward from his wheelchair. I took his hand, gave it a good shake. The man was a powerhouse from the waist up and he nearly took my arm off in his grip. “You don’t come to the library anymore, Herbert.”

“Don’t live in town anymore, Mr. Cross. I’m over in Falmouth with the—”

“He knows all about that!” Elmer Hornton cut me off, angry, impatient. “Forget the pleasantries, Martin, damn it! Tell the boy what you told me!”

For a moment both Martin Cross and I simply stared at Elmer, until he shook his head, mumbled some kind of apology, and shuffled with his walker across the kitchen. “I’m not staying,” he snarled. “I’ll be out on the porch, working on a damn fly. You tell me when you’re done.”

“Of course, Elmer,” Martin said in an amazingly patient manner. “Thank you for the coffee.”

Mr. Hornton went onto the porch.

“This is really bothering him.” I sat down at the table. Outside in the distance was the constant boom-boom of fireworks. They’d go on for hours.

“I know,” Martin said, “I also think he’s angry at me. I couldn’t find much of anything on this woman. She lived a very unremarkable life.”

“No secrets?” I said.

“Let me tell you what I told him.”

Martin removed some papers from a manila folder lying on the table and began:

“First about the house. It was built in 1888 by the Windsor family as a summer home, a retreat. Nothing very notable ever happened there, as far as I can find. Next, about the family. They owned Windsor Feed and Grain and up until around 1920, made a very respectable living from it. However, the company never diversified, never branched out into lumber or other areas, and as the small farms in the area disappeared, so did the customers. Edgar Windsor, the last owner, died of a heart attack working at his desk; he was forty-four. His wife, Elvira, died a week later in bed of what the death certificate calls a ‘wasting disease.’ It might have been cancer, tuberculosis, perhaps anorexia.” Martin shook his head. “She was only thirty-five. Mary, their daughter, also known as Molly, was ten when her parents died and she was immediately taken to Boston by her father’s sister, Sarah. Molly Windsor never attended public schools, either here in Manamesset or in Boston; she was ‘home-tutored,’ possibly by her mother and later by her aunt. There’s no record of their being a governess or other instructor.” Martin paused to look at me. “The records of the Windsor company are public, Herbert, and kept in the Barnstable Public Library. Windsor Feed and Grain folded shortly after Edgar Windsor’s death. Its assets were sold to pay off its debts and the remainder, which amounted mainly to that one big house, Old Cedar, went to Sarah Windsor. Edgar mixed family finances with his business, so I found accounts of what he paid for wood, for ice, for household expenses, and so on. But there’s no account for a tutor or private school, so I’m assuming—”

“Boring.”

“Quite so.” Martin shook his head. He shuffled through the folder a bit, removed some more papers.

“Now, from Stribner and Sons, the law firm where Molly was employed. Molly started there at age fifteen, and continued until her retirement at age seventy-seven. Remarkable. She was a legal assistant. I could find no indication that Molly ever joined any clubs, or was a church member.” A pause to take a sip of coffee, and then, “I have spoken by phone to the oldest Stribner, an Abner Stribner, grandson of the man who hired Molly. He remembers her, of course. But she retired twenty years ago and his memories of her are sparse. According to him, she was an efficient, older woman who kept to herself. Oh, one more thing: she did have two library cards. One for Boston Public, the other here in Manamesset.” He smiled.

I tipped back in my chair. “There’s no secret, Mr. Cross.”

“Well, there is one very minor thing. I do intend to research it a bit further.” He paused, studied me. “Molly was a twin, but her sibling died at birth, a girl named Anne. Birth, death, marriage records, they’re all public documents, Herbert, and I have copies of them, for Molly, her parents, her aunt, and her twin. The twin girl died—” He looked through some other papers on the table. “—from injuries suffered at birth.”

I frowned. “Could that...” But we both shook our heads at the same time.

“It’s a disappointment to find so little, but her life—” Martin tipped his head back and raised his voice. “—was a good one. She registered to vote. She went to the library. She worked and paid her taxes. Elmer, she was a happy woman, I think.”

Mr. Hornton just made a noise from the porch, then silence.

“Injuries suffered at birth,” I said. “Such as?”

“Oh, Herbert, the things they can do now that they couldn’t in Molly’s day. Perhaps her twin was undersized, or had a birth defect, even a minor one. She wasn’t stillborn. The cause of death specifically states ‘injuries suffered at birth.’ Maybe the doctor or midwife made an error.” He shook his head sadly.

“Like a cord around the neck or something?”

“Perhaps.”

“I tried, Elmer.” Again Martin raised his voice so Mr. Hornton could hear him. “I will do some more research on this twin.”

But the man on the porch was silent as he turned up the radio. The Red Sox were playing the Yankees.

“How much longer you going to pay me to do this?” I asked the next day. I almost added, “to do nothing.”

“ ’Til you find what I’m looking for!” Mr. Hornton snapped. He walked away, banging the walker deliberately on the kitchen floor with every step.

I was meeting Mr. Cross here rather than have to explain to Mrs. Wenlow who he was, how I knew him, and what we were going to do. I was tired of justifying every move I made to a foster parent. Now here I was, in an argument with Mr. Hornton again.

“I got a question for you,” I said. “Who are you mad at? Is it me? Mr. Cross? Molly?”

This was his answer: “Martin called an hour ago. Seems he’s taking you to the post office, the library, and the cemetery. Seems you got quite an itinerary this morning.”

“Oh yeah, we’re just going to town today. This is going to be the highlight—” I exaggerated the effect, dragging out the words, rolling my eyes. “—of my summer. The Manamesset Post Office? Oh, my God, waiting ail my life to go there.”

“You are one damn disrespectful boy, you know that?”

I threw up my hands. “I’m sorry! But it’s like, well, I’d rather talk to smelly old Buster Holiday than you, Mr. Hornton. We’re doing our best. We really are. You want better, call a P.I.” I turned to go.

“Buster Holiday,” Mr. Hornton said, his voice cool, emotionless, “Why’d you say his name?”

“Your old friend?” By then I was in full sarcasm mode, “Your pal who worked for you, what? Back in the sixties? Because I saw him out at Old Cedar and we talked a little. Oh, he wants us to go deep-sea fishing with him sometime. You up for it? We’ll need gas masks to survive the smell.”

“Buster’s no friend of mine,” he said, but again in a low, cold tone.

“He said you were,” I said. Mr. Horton turned away, waving his hand at me as if in disgust, so I said, “He liked Molly, too, didn’t he? Were you and him rivals?”

There was a honk in the driveway. Mr. Cross was waiting for me, but as I headed for the door, not expecting an answer or comment to what I’d just said, Mr. Hornton muttered: “Like hell he was. She didn’t want either one of us.”

The post office and library were both a bust; the first painting was of a pair of white heron walking through a marsh at high tide (not badly done, by the way), and the second was a scene of the beach at sunset. It was what Martin Cross and I found at the cemetery which was more interesting.

The cemetery was in Sandwich, on a hill overlooking the canal. I pushed Martin Cross up the small hill where the Windsor plot was located. All five Windsors, their names carved in an old-style white marble headstone, were there, only Molly’s date of death had yet to be recorded on the stone. Edgar, devoted husband; Elvira, loving wife; Sarah Elaine, loving sister; Mary, daughter; Anne, daughter.

The problem was Anne’s date of death read six years after her birth.

“This isn’t right,” Martin insisted. “The death certificate clearly stated that she’d died from injuries suffered at birth.”

“You can die from injuries suffered at birth six years later, Mr. Cross,” I said.

“But the date...” he argued, and turning to me, he added. “Can it be? Yes, it must be a mistake.”

“For the first six years of her life, Molly had a twin sister,” I said, “who had something wrong with her.”

But could that be Molly’s secret? Sad and maybe tragic, yes, but something she didn’t want Mr. Hornton to know? It didn’t make sense. I think each of us muttered that phrase four or five times around the table later that evening.

Mr. Cross and I had picked up Chinese take-out on the way back to Elmer Hornton’s house, but when I called the Wenlows to say I was staying for dinner, I knew from the nervous tenor in her voice that Mrs. Wenlow didn’t approve. Even though I had my bike with me, she insisted Mr. Wenlow would come and get me later.

“It’s difficult enough knowing a person when they’re alive, all their intimate, daily struggles, their feelings, their passions — now imagine trying to learn about them after they’re gone,” Martin Cross said, as he finished his fried rice and egg rolls. “What I mean to say, Elmer, is that Molly kept herself very closeted while alive. Her secrets, if there were any, are just as sealed — maybe more — now that she’s gone.”

But Mr. Hornton was firmly entrenched in the facts: “So, mistake on this twin’s death certificate?”

“Oh, most likely, and it does happen,” Martin Cross nodded. “Might be a clerical error. Perhaps someone saw the words ‘from injuries suffered at birth,’ and they just penciled in the birth date. The medical examiner signed his name to it later, never noticing the error in the date.”

Mr. Hornton nodded, fell silent.

“And nothing ever happened up at the big house?” Mr. Hornton interrupted, his voice low, contained.

“Nothing,” Martin confirmed. “No wild parties, no scandals, no bootlegging or rumrunning. No mysterious or unexplained deaths. The house wasn’t part of the Underground Railroad, nor were the Windsors mooncussers, luring ships to land by waving lanterns on the shore.”

“Mr. Hornton,” I spoke up as I finished the last of the crab rangoons, “You said there were three people at the funeral: you, someone from the law firm...?”

“Yes, that would be the gentleman I spoke with on the phone, Abner Stribner,” Martin Cross interjected, “Very nice fellow but not a font of information.”

“Who was the third?” I asked, but he didn’t answer. “Mr. Hornton? Elmer?” Still nothing. “Mr. H.!”

“Buster Holiday,” Mr. Hornton muttered.

“Mr. Holiday?” It took a few seconds to register. Now I was confused. Was it possible Buster Holiday had been out at Old Cedar looking for something? One of the paintings?

Mr. Hornton was different suddenly, somber, and he hadn’t finished his plate of food either. He got up from the table slowly and for a minute I thought he might be sick or needed his inhaler; then he said to me and Martin Cross: “It’s over. I’ve pried enough. Let the woman rest in peace.” He shook his head. “I don’t want to know anymore.”

“Indeed, it’s a conundrum, isn’t it?” Martin Cross said to me a few minutes later. We were out in Mr. Hornton’s side yard, me pushing him to his special car. Quahog shells were crackling under the wheels as he said, “I thought at first Elmer really did want to save the house, now I have my doubts. It’s not the house that matters; it’s this last piece of information about Molly.”

“Yep.”

“I will do a little more looking around, especially about this twin. Perhaps there are hospital records, doctor’s records. Edgar Windsor did mix his family with business. Maybe somewhere in one of the ledgers there’s a doctor’s name, a nurse, something. Or maybe the child was placed in a special school or institution. You know, Herbert, the Windsors originally lived in Boston, but they sold their home there when the business began to fail. Edgar moved his family here, to the summerhouse just after Molly — well, the twins — were born. I imagine it was a difficult time for him, company failing apart, a child born with problems of some sort, and maybe a sickly wife.”

“I suppose,” I said. “And I’ll go over to Old Cedar one more time.”

“Yes, do that,” Martin agreed just as Mr. Wenlow in his black pickup truck pulled into the driveway. Then I was out of there.

It had to be something more, this secret. Something about the house. Something in the house. And what about the fact Molly Windsor led this quiet, almost insulated life?

I rolled over on the bed, cigarette between my fingers, wondering why Elmer Hornton wanted to know this secret so badly. Because he had loved her? Because the standards of the day — his day, when he was a young man — didn’t permit him to court her or pursue her or whatever terminology fits? And now here he stands, an old man, and he has regrets, terrible ones that make him lash out at the people who respect him, like him, care about him.

I put out the cigarette, reached up to pull shut the unscreened window, rolled on my side. I’d heard Mr. and Mrs. Wenlow talking about me earlier as I came up here — their voices carried pretty well from the kitchen, out the adjoining side door to the garage, and up to my room.

“That boy’s alone too much. Needs to do things with kids his own age. Spends too much time with a lot of old men...” Mr. Wenlow was saying.

“Elmer Hornton...” Mrs. Wenlow said, but her voice was fading, “...fine man, and that Mr. Cross is the town historian. I think I would know if...”

I rolled to my other side, watched the sun go down through the one small window there and wondered how the sunset looked from Old Cedar. It probably looked pretty nice.

I had to get to the bottom of this thing. It was the least I could do for Mr. Hornton.

My boat, the Splendida, was covered in canvas and tied up at a dock in the Manamesset River. I hadn’t taken her out in weeks. Now, I uncovered her, checked her over. She was taut and tight, a wooden runabout of pure beauty. I figured I had enough gasoline for about an hour run, a little more. I wanted to go out to North Manamesset Beach, look at Old Cedar from the water.

So I did, and killing the motor for a few minutes, bounced in the waves, watching as the sun came up from behind Old Cedar. The windows on this side, which looked northwest, were like black squares. Except for the diamond-shaped, stained-glass window; it glimmered red, orange, purple, green.

Where was the window inside the house? Third story. Above the nook with the windowseat? No, somewhere in the short stairwell to the attic. Yes, I remembered seeing it as I went up into that dusty, spider-infested attic. What about the other stained-glass window? What room — or stairwell — did it look down onto?

I didn’t remember.

I went back to Old Cedar and rushed inside, then up two flights of stairs, heading for the third floor and that one big, back bedroom. But there were no windows on the south side, just the two rooms: a bathroom and the walk-in cedar closet. I went in both — no diamond-shaped, stained-glass window.

“Then it’s behind the wall,” I said to myself, standing in the doorway to the bathroom. “Or on the other side of the cedar closet.”

So wherever that other stained-glass window was — on the south side of the house and facing the causeway, the road, the cedar grove and the little house — it had been walled over from the inside. I stepped back into the hall on the third floor, quickly judged the length of the hall from the window nook to the large bedroom. I didn’t have a measuring tape, but I walked it off: seventy-two paces.

Then I ran down to the second floor, did the same thing, from the farthest point facing north — to the farthest going due south. The second floor showed a difference of ten paces, or about ten feet.

I stood at the end of the second hall, glanced up, then dashed into the bedroom where I’d seen the rust stain. It didn’t come from a water pipe — what a fool I’d been. Water pipes were copper or plastic or maybe if they’re really old, lead, but not steel, not iron. Something else had rusted up there in the ceiling, which corresponded to where the missing space was on the third floor.

I didn’t have a cell phone, but it didn’t matter. The phone in the little house was still active. I ran all the way out there.

I was out on the porch when he arrived, just as he had four days ago, from up over the curve of the seawall. His boat was out in the bay and he had come in on a small motorboat, tied it at the end of Old Cedar’s dock next to my wooden runabout.

“Herbie,” he said, looking surprisingly good — for him, that is. Clean shirt, khaki trousers, new boat shoes. He’d made an effort, but not for me. His hair was combed; his face neatly shaven, and he didn’t pause to snort or spit or scratch. “I was having lunch on my boat with some friends. What’s this all about, buddy?”

“Did you put in the cedar closet off the third floor bedroom?” I turned my head to the house. “Up there.”

“Well, yes...” Did I see a sudden change in this usually open and garrulous man? As good a talker as Elmer Hornton any day, but now he seemed strangely reticent.

I stepped forward to Buster Holiday, said, “Elmer Hornton is convinced Molly Windsor had some kind of secret, something she never shared with him. It had to do with Old Cedar. Do you have any idea what that might be?”

Buster sighed, slipped his hands into his back pockets and said, “I think I do.”

“House is being tom down, right?” Buster had the crowbar I’d brought a few days ago and pushed it between two of the cedar panels in the back of the walk-in closet.

We were on the third floor, the south side, and with a few grunts and groans — Buster Holiday might have been close to ninety, but he was a strong man, strong enough to get it started, that is. Then he handed me the crowbar just as the wood splintered and said, “Finish it, Herbie. What you want to see is on the other side of this wall.”

It was a small room. With a metal floor. And in the outside wall facing south, halfway up, was the other diamond-shaped stained glass window. The entire room was covered in dust.

“What is it?” I asked. Where were we? In a small, dirty room about ten by ten feet with a floor made of metal plates, some of which were rusted around the perimeter of the room.

Buster’s voice was very soft as he said: “It’s a disappointment room, Herbie. It’s where Molly and her sister Annie spent the first six years of their life.”

“What?” I turned around, crowbar in hand, staring at him.

“I can’t stay in here, Herbie, sorry.” And with that Buster disappeared through the opening I’d made in the back of the cedar closet, leaving me in there alone.

Two days later we met — three old men and me — in the little house out on Long Bay Causeway Road, the one with the purple hydrangeas.

Of course, we were all affected, even Buster, who’d been told about the room five decades earlier by Molly herself, when he’d discovered it while doing renovations on the third floor. What the heck was it, he’d demanded to know? He’d refused to just cover it up, not without some explanation. Buster could be, in his own words, a “damned ornery man.” So Molly had come up and into the house that one and only time to answer his questions, to settle his mind.

The only light had been through that stained-glass window, she’d told him, the only way out through one small door, which was always kept locked on the outside. The floors and the door were made of metal plates, to soundproof the room.

“I remember standing there, just dazed by it all,” Buster told us, a stunned Elmer Hornton, a pensive Martin Cross, and me. “A million emotions went through my head and my heart,” Buster went on, “and there was Molly, in the doorway, without a trace of anything on her face.” He looked at Elmer, sitting at Molly’s small kitchen table. “She asked me not to tell anyone, Elmer, and I’m sorry that I...” Buster pulled in his lips and looked like he might cry. “She didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for her.”

“Boxed in.” I whispered. “You told me she’d been boxed in.”

“Slip of the tongue, Herbie,” Buster admitted. “But, yes, for sure she was. Her sister Annie was born with birth defects. She couldn’t walk, could barely move her limbs. The mother didn’t take it well, so she shut Annie up so no one could see her. Shut Molly up too. Molly said her mother was depressed or something and didn’t want anything to do with either child.” Buster was obviously uneasy talking about all this. He shrugged, shook his head.

Martin Cross spoke up: “And the pictures, she’d been painting that side of the house until—”

This was easier to explain: “She wanted to live long enough to see the cedars cover it up, or so she told me,” Buster said. He glanced over at Elmer. “Sorry, old friend, if I’d known how much this bothered you...”

But Mr. Hornton wanted explanations, some way to sort this all out. He turned to Martin: “Damn it, Martin, have you nothing to say?”

Martin raised both hands helplessly. “It was a different time, Elmer. It wasn’t common practice, but it did happen to children with mental or physical disabilities, children who weren’t what their parents expected. They were cared for, of course, fed and clothed and kept clean, usually by servants. But they were hidden away from the rest of the family and society in general. We really shouldn’t judge—”

“No!” Elmer shouted, but his anger wasn’t directed at Martin, or any of us, not even at Buster. “It’s wrong now; it was wrong then! Damn them! She — Molly — shut up with her sister like that! She never learned... she never knew how... she never trusted...”

And it was all there, in just those few words.

A few days later I was at Mr. Hornton’s house, telling him about my new job. I was working at a marina over in North Falmouth, doing odd jobs: painting, cleaning boats, and so on. He was happy to hear it. We had clam-cakes and onion rings out on his porch. Then he told me to come into the house, he had something to show me.

The painting of Old Cedar, which had been over the mantel of the big house, was now over his own mantel. He folded his arms, looked up at it with a strangely peaceful expression on his face.

“Molly wasn’t much of a painter,” he said, “but she was one hell of a woman.”

Then he smiled.

Author’s note: Disappointment rooms really existed.