—”
“I didn’t say that was true,” she interrupted. “I said it was what you would like to believe.” She sat up and pulled the covers up to her neck. “Actually, I took a plane, and the rest of the nuzzling can wait . . . for now.” She couldn’t keep the corners of her lips from turning upward a bit, but she said, “I have something to tell you. I’ve been trying to find out who James Scully was, and who his distant cousin was.”
“How are you doing that?”
“I figured that the FBI is doing all of the routine, likely, logical things. So I have to do something else. The lab report I intercepted made me think of genealogy.”
“You mean you’re doing his family tree?”
“It had to be something I could do on a laptop and a phone in an airplane. Genealogy is America’s second- biggest obsession, after their lawns. So there’s plenty of information available. You always start with the Mormons.”
“You do?”
She sighed. “Yes. It’s an article of the Mormon faith to try to find out who their ancestors were, and baptize them retroactively to get them into heaven. They’ve been at it for a long time, and they share. So you start with the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. They also have the International Genealogy Index, the Social Security Death Index, and the Military Index.”
“Those guys didn’t seem religious, foreign, or retired, and if they’d been in the military, wouldn’t their fingerprints have—”
“It’s not for them,” she said. “Their common ancestor is at least a generation back. So I tried the Library of Congress Local History and Genealogy Index.”
“Did any of this get you anywhere?”
“Everywhere, and that’s not where I need to go. It got me quite a few Scullys, and if you add in their cousins, it’s an astronomical number. It hasn’t gotten me a sure way to know which one is yours.”
Walker lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. “Another dead end.”
“It isn’t,” she said. “I just need a shortcut. I’ve got thousands of Scullys: maybe a hundred families in New Hampshire, and an unknown number of others on the list whose recent locations aren’t given. By ‘recent’ I mean this century.”
“What’s the shortcut?”
“Coming here. I think your James Scully didn’t move to a rural village in New Hampshire from Chicago or New York.”
“Why not?”
“It doesn’t feel right,” she said. “If you want to be invisible, small towns are poison. If he was some kind of nut—say, an extreme survivalist–racist–mad bomber type—he probably wouldn’t pick Coulter. Those guys move to the south or west, where there’s more real estate that’s really empty and less concern about gun laws. I suspect that he felt safe here because he was born around here. That would mean his relative probably was too.”
“And coming here is the only way to find out?”
“What I want isn’t available any other way. The Health and Welfare Building in Concord has a Bureau of Vital Records. They’ve kept track of every marriage, birth, and death in the state since 1640, and every divorce since 1808. If you give me the right lead, I can find not only James, but any relative who was born here—meaning the other dead guy.”
“It sounds as though it could take months.”
“It could,” said Mary. “If you go into those places acting like a skip-tracer—or an insurance investigator—it would. You just have to endear yourself to somebody who knows the system and get them interested in helping. I’ve already started being endearing, and it’s gotten me my first introduction.” She squinted at the clock, then looked a second time. “I’d better get going.”
Walker sat on the bed and watched her with the same sense of bereavement that he had felt while he’d watched her prepare to leave his hotel room in Los Angeles. Seeing her pull clothes over that smooth, white body was like watching the moon being obscured by dark clouds.
She said, “Don’t sit there ogling. Get up and get dressed so you can buy me breakfast.”
When they left the hotel room they walked past Stillman’s door. It opened and he emerged. He nodded to them without a change of expression and said, “Morning, Serena.”
She answered in the same tone, “Always a pleasure, Max.” She was Serena again.
He walked with them to the restaurant, then selected a booth along the far wall. As soon as they had menus in their hands, he looked over the top of his and stared at Serena. “Did you bring something to the party?”
She said, “I’m trying to find out who the cousin was, so you can see what’s in his house. Is that what you want?”
“That’s what we want,” said Stillman.
“I’ve made a contact, and that should speed things up.”
His eyebrows bumped up, then down again. “A contact?”
“Yes,” she said. “I called the Bureau of Vital Records and talked to a lady. She knows another lady who lives on a farm outside Jaffrey. She’s an amateur historian who knows about the families and the little towns around here. I called her, and I’m going to see her this morning.”
Stillman said, “Take your boyfriend with you.”
She smiled and glanced at Walker, then back at Stillman. “I don’t think so. Night with the girls, day with the boys.”
“Take him,” said Stillman. “He has his limitations, but he’s big and strong, and if anything’s after you, he’ll throw himself in front of it.”
Walker glared at Stillman, then looked at Serena to find that she was studying him speculatively. She made a decision. “All right. Just let me do most of the talking.”
32
The farm had not seen a plow in at least a generation. The fields surrounding the small rise where the old white house had been built had settled into a man-smoothed, grassy expanse of lawn. A long fieldstone fence had been laid along the edge of the farm beside the road. Walker imagined the first farmer stopping his horse each time his plow turned up a stone, then prying it up with a pole and staggering with it to the edge of the field to add to the fence. Here and there big, stubborn rocks had been left in place, undefeated by the farmers, and now a few trees had grown tall in the middle of the field.
There was no gate anymore, just a gap in the fence and a concrete driveway that extended only twenty feet in, then changed to a gravel strip leading up to a small barn that had been converted to a garage.
Walker turned Mary’s rental car into the driveway and then let it crawl onto the gravel and up to the house. As soon as it reached the wider turnaround near the barn, he parked.
“Silvertop alert,” muttered Mary. “Smile a lot. It may not be enough, but it will be something.”
He could see that she was already working her face into a demure smile that went with the modest blue summer dress she was wearing. He glanced toward the house, and he saw that the front door was open. A woman appeared in the shade behind the screen door. She was wearing a dark suit and a white blouse, as though she were on her way to work at a bank. Her hair was white, like spun floss, and she was staring at them expectantly.
Walker got out and opened Mary’s door. As she got out, she whispered, “How gallant.”
“I’m just afraid to go first,” he whispered back. “Kick your way in, grab the tea, and run.”
They approached the door along a flagstone walk between rows of tall purple irises that all seemed to Walker to be full of bees buzzing ominously. The woman pushed the screen open a little, and Mary said, “Mrs. Thwaite?”
“Who else?” called the woman. “Come in.” Her voice was a resonant soprano that sounded as though she might have once been a singer. She swung the door wide as they reached the porch, and they stepped over the threshold.
Mary was already busy impersonating herself. “I’m Mary Catherine Casey, and this is John Walker.” As she fell into character, her smile warmed.
