`No. He didn't.'
`Was he interested in birds?'
`I don't think so.'
`Who chose the pictures?'
`I did,' Elaine Hillman said from the hallway. `I decorated the room for Tom. He liked it, didn't he, Ralph?'
Hillman mumbled something. I crossed the room to the deeply set front windows, which overlooked the semicircular driveway. I could see down the wooded slope, across the golf course, all the way to the highway, where cars rolled back and forth like children's toys out of reach. I could imagine Tom sitting here in the alcove and watching the highway lights at night.
A thick volume of music lay open on the leather seat. I looked at the cover. It was a well-used copy of The Well-Tempered Clavier.
`Did Tom play the piano, Mr. Hillman?'
`Very well. He had ten years of lessons. But then he wanted-' His wife made a small dismayed sound at his shoulder. `Why go into all that?'
`All what?'
I said. `Trying to get information out of you people is like getting blood out of a stone.'
`I feel like a bloodless stone,' she said with a little grimace. `This hardly seems the time to rake up old family quarrels.'
`We didn't quarrel,' her husband said. `It was the one thing Tom and I ever disagreed on. And he went along with me on it. End of subject.'
`All right. Where did he spend his time away from home?'
The Hillmans looked at each other, as if the secret of Tom's whereabouts was somehow hidden in each other's faces. The red telephone interrupted their dumb communion, like a loud thought. Elaine Hillman gasped. The photograph in her hand fell to the floor. She wilted against her husband.
He held her up. `It wouldn't be for us. That's Tom's private telephone.'
`You want me to take it?'
I said through the second ring.
`Please do.'
I sat on the bed and picked up the receiver. `Hello.'
`Tom?' said a high, girlish voice. `Is that you, Tommy?'
`Who is this calling?'
I tried to sound like a boy.
The girl said something like `Augh' and hung up on me. I set down the receiver: `It was a girl or a young woman. She wanted Tom.'
The woman spoke with a touch of malice that seemed to renew her strength: `That's nothing unusual. I'm sure it was Stella Carlson. She's been calling all week.'
`Does she always hang up like that?'
`No. I talked to her yesterday. She was full of questions, which of course I refused to answer. But I wanted to make sure that she hadn't seen Tom. She hadn't.'
`Does she know anything about what's happened?'
`I hope not,' Hillman said. `We've got to keep it in the family. The more people know, the worse-' He left another sentence dangling in the air.
I moved away from the telephone and picked up the fallen photograph. In a kind of staggering march step, Elaine Hillman went to the bed and straightened out the bedspread where I had been sitting. Everything had to be perfect in the room, I thought, or the god would not be appeased and would never return to them. When she had finished smoothing the bed, she flung herself face down on it and lay still.
Hillman and I withdrew quietly and went downstairs to wait for the call that mattered. There was a phone in the bar alcove off the sitting room, and another in the butler's pantry, which I could use to listen in. To get to the butler's pantry we had to go through the music room, where the grand piano loomed, and across a formal dining room which had a dismal air, like a reconstructed room in a museum.
The past was very strong here, like an odor you couldn't quite place. It seemed to be built into the very shape of the house, with its heavy dark beams and thick walls and deep windows; it would almost force the owner of the house to feel like a feudal lord. But the role of hidalgo hung loosely on Hillman, like something borrowed for a costume party. He and his wife must have rattled around in the great house, even when the boy was there.
Back in the sitting room, in front of the uncertain fire, I had a chance to ask Hillman some more questions. The Hillmans had two servants; a Spanish couple named Perez who had looked after Tom from infancy. Mrs. Perez was probably out in the kitchen. Her husband was in Mexico, visiting his family.
`You know he's in Mexico?'
`Well,' Hillman said, `his wife has had a card from Sinaloa. Anyway, the Perezes are devoted to us, and to Tom. We've had them with us ever since we moved here and bought this house.'
`How long ago was that?'
`Over sixteen years. We moved here, the three of us, after I was separated from the Navy. Another engineer
