dark car behind them, and the car swung to the curb on the other side of Haven Lane. The lights died. First Ricky, then Sears got out of the old black Buick. Don left his own car and trotted across the street to join them.
'And now Lewis,' Ricky said to him. 'Did you know?'
'Not definitely. But I thought so.'
Sears, who had been listening to this, nodded impatiently. 'You thought so. Ricky, give him the keys.' As Don opened the door, Sears grumbled behind him, 'I hope you'll tell us how you got your information. If Hardesty fancies himself as the town crier, I'll arrange to have him spitted.'
The three men went into a black entryway; Sears found the light switch. 'Peter Barnes came to me this afternoon,' Don said. 'He saw Gregory Bate kill his mother. And he saw what must have been Lewis's ghost.'
'Oh, God,' Ricky breathed. 'Oh, my God. Oh poor Christina.'
'Let's get the heat going before we say any more,' Sears requested. 'If everything's blowing up in our faces, I for one at least want to be warm.' The three of them began wandering through the ground floor of the house, lifting dust sheets off the furniture. 'I will miss Lewis very much,' Sears said. 'I used to malign him terribly, but I did love him. He gave us spirit. As your uncle did.' He dropped a dust sheet on the floor. 'And now he is in the Chenango County morgue, apparently the victim of a savage attack by some sort of animal. A friend of Lewis's accused Harold Sims of the crime.
Under different circumstances, that would be comic.' Sears's face sagged. 'Let's take a look at your uncle's office, and then take care of the heating. I don't know if I can bear this anymore.'
Sears led him into a large room at the rear of the house while Ricky switched on the central heating boiler. 'This was the office.' He flicked a switch, and track lights on the ceiling shone on an old leather couch, a desk with an electric typewriter, a file cabinet and a Xerox machine; on a broad shelf jutting out below narrower shelves filled with white boxes sat a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a cassette recorder.
'The boxes are the tapes he made for his books?'
'I guess so.'
'And you and Ricky and the others never came here after he died?'
'No,' Sears said, gazing at the well-ordered office. It evoked Don's uncle more wholly than any photograph -it radiated the contentment of a man happy in what he did. This impression helped to explain Sears's next words. 'I suppose that Stella told you we were afraid to come in here. There might be some truth in that. But I think that what really kept us away was guilt.'
'And that was part of the reason you invited me to Milburn.'
'Yes. I think all of us except Ricky thought you would-' He made a shooing-away gesture with his hands. 'Somehow magically dispel our guilt. John Jaffrey most of all. That is the wisdom of hindsight.'
'Because it was Jaffrey's party.'
Sears nodded curtly, and turned out of the office. 'There still must be most of a cord of wood out in back. Why don't you bring some of it in so we can have a fire?'
'This is the story we never thought we'd tell,' Ricky said ten minutes later. A bottle of Old Parr and their glasses stood on the dusty table before Ricky's couch. 'That fire was a good idea. It'll give Sears and me something to look at. Did I ever tell you that I started everything by asking John about the worst thing he'd ever done? He said he wouldn't tell me, and he told me a ghost story instead. Well, I should have known better. I knew what the worst thing was. We all knew.'
'Then why did you ask?'
Ricky sneezed violently, and Sears said, 'It happened in 1929-October of 1929. That was a long time ago. When Ricky asked John about the worst thing he'd ever done, all that we could think about was your Uncle Edward- it was only a week after his death. Eva Galli was the last thing on our minds.'
'Well, now we have truly crossed the Rubicon,' said Ricky. 'Up until you said the name, I still wasn't sure that we'd tell it. But now that we're here we'd better go on without stopping. Whatever Peter Barnes told you had better wait until we're done-if after that you still want to stay in the same room with us. And I suppose that somehow what happened to him must be related to the Eva Galli affair. Now; I've said it too.'
'Ricky never wanted you to know about Eva Galli,' said Sears. 'Way back when I wrote to you, he thought it would be a mistake to rake it all up again. I guess we agreed with him. I certainly did.'
'Thought it would muddy the waters,' Ricky said through his cold. 'Thought it couldn't possibly have anything to do with our problem. Spook stories. Nightmares. Premonitions. Just four old fools losing their marbles. Thought it was irrelevant. It was all so mixed up anyhow. Should have known better when that girl came looking for a job. And now with Lewis gone…'
'You know something?' Sears said. 'We never even gave Lewis John's cufflinks.'
'Slipped our minds,' Ricky said, and drank some of his Old Parr. He and Sears were already deep in the well of their story, concentrated on it so wholly that Don, seated near them, felt invisible.
'Well, what happened to Eva Galli?' he asked.
Sears and Ricky glanced at each other; then Ricky's eyes went to his glass and Sears's to the fire. 'Surely that's obvious,' Sears said. 'We killed her.'
'The two of you?' Don asked, thrown off balance it was not the answer he had expected.
'All of us,' Ricky answered. 'The Chowder Society. Your uncle, John Jaffrey, Lewis, and Sears and myself. In October, 1929. Three weeks after Black Monday, when the stock market collapsed. Even here in Milburn, you could see the beginnings of the panic. Lou Price's father, who was also a broker, shot himself in his office. And we killed a girl named Eva Galli. Not murder- not outright murder. We'd never have been convicted of anything-maybe not even of manslaughter. But there would have been a scandal.'
'And we couldn't face that,' Sears said. 'Ricky and I had just started out as lawyers, working in his father's firm. John had qualified as a doctor only the year before. Lewis was the son of a clergyman. We were all in the same fix. We would have been ruined. Slowly, if not immediately.'
'That was why we decided on what we tried to do,' said Ricky.
'Yes,' said Sears. 'We did an obscene thing. If we'd been thirty-three instead of twenty-three, we would probably have gone to the police and taken our chances. But we were so young-Lewis wasn't even out of his teens. So we tried to conceal it. And then at the end-'
'At the end,' Ricky said, 'we were like characters in one of our stories. Or in your novel. I've been reliving the last ten minutes for two months now. I even hear our voices, the things we said when we put her in Warren Scales's car…'
'Let's start at the beginning,' Sears said.
'Let's start at the beginning. Yes.'
'All right,' Ricky said. 'It begins with Stringer Dedham. He was going to marry her. Eva Galli hadn't been in town two weeks when Stringer set his cap for her. He was older than Sears and myself, thirty-one or two, I imagine, and he was in a position to marry. He ran the Colonel's old farm and stables with the girls' help, and Stringer worked hard and had good ideas. In short, he was a prosperous, well-thought-of fellow, and made a good catch for any of the local girls. Good-looking fellow too. My wife says he was the handsomest man she'd ever seen. All the girls above school age were after him. But when Eva Galli came to town with all her money and her metropolitan manners and her good looks, Stringer was sandbagged. She knocked him off his pins. She bought that house on Montgomery Street-'
'Which house on Montgomery Street?' Don asked. 'The one Freddy Robinson lived in?'
'Why yes. The one across the street from John's house. Miss Mostyn's house. She bought that house, and set it up with new furniture and a piano and a gramophone. And she smoked cigarettes and drank cocktails, and she wore her hair short-a real John Held girl.'
'Not entirely,' Sears said. 'She was no bubble-headed flapper. The time for those had passed, anyhow. And she was educated. She read quite widely. She could speak intelligently. Eva Galli was an enchanting woman. How would you describe the way she looked, Ricky?'
'Like a nineteen-twenties Claire Bloom,' Ricky said immediately.
'Typical Ricky Hawthorne. Ask him to describe someone, and he names a movie star. I guess you can take it as an accurate description. Eva Galli had all this exciting modernity about her, what was modernity for Milburn at any rate, but there was also a refinement about her-an air of grace.'
'That's true,' said Ricky. 'And a certain mysteriousness we found terribly attractive. Like your Anna Mobley. We knew nothing about her but what she hinted-she had lived in New York, she had apparently spent some time in
