the eerie sense of being watched, and so I let my eyes retreat from it, drifting upward, along a wall of brick and mortar, until our bedroom came into view and I saw Marie standing at the window, watching me from afar. For a single, delicate moment, we stared mutely at each other, two faces peering outward, it seemed to me, from two different worlds. Then, her eyes still gazing at me with the same penetrating force, she lifted her arms very gracefully, like the wingspread of a great bird, grasped the separate edges of the bedroom curtains, and slowly drew them together. They were still weaving slightly as I let the car drift on down the driveway and out into the street.
“Hi, Steve,” Rebecca said as she opened the door. She stepped aside to let me pass.
I took a chair not far from the window. Outside, I could see the still gray surface of the lake. It looked like a sheet of slate.
Rebecca took the chair opposite me, so that we faced each other directly, as if we were about to begin some kind of intensely demanding game.
“We’re close to the end, I think.”
Something in my face must have puzzled her, because for a moment she stopped and regarded me closely. “We’ve gone through each member of your family,” she explained, “and their relationships.”
I nodded but said nothing.
“There are things I’ll never know, of course,” she added. “Your father still seems very mysterious to me.”
“My father,” I repeated softly. Curiously, I suddenly thought of him almost as a rival for her attention, a dark, majestic figure whose profound experience of life and death utterly dwarfed the humdrum banality of my own.
I felt the need to bring him down. “Are you sure he’s worth knowing any more than you already do?”
“Yes, I am.”
“But you’re sure he fits your criteria, aren’t you?” I asked. “You’re sure that Nellie Grimes, for example, had nothing to do with the murders.”
She nodded. “Yes, I’m sure of that,” she answered.
“You found her, didn’t you?” I said. “You found Nellie.”
She shook her head. “Not exactly. Nellie Grimes died eight years ago. But I found her daughter, May. She lives not far from Somerset.”
“How did you find her?”
“Through Swenson.”
“I thought he hadn’t known anything about Nellie.”
“He’s never mentioned her to me, that’s true,” Rebecca told me, “but only because he’d never thought of her as actually connected to the case.” She paused a moment, then went on. “After the murders, Swenson talked to a lot of people who’d known your father. He was trying to get some idea of where he might have gone after the murders. One of the people he talked to was Grimes.” She reached into her briefcase and handed me a picture of a woman standing on a small wooden porch. “She was living in Hoboken,” she went on. “Swenson remembered seeing May playing in the backyard despite the drizzle. He said her dress was muddy, and that her hair was wet and stringy, but that Nellie didn’t seem to care.”
It was hard to imagine May in such a state, or her mother’s indifference to it. In all my other memories of them, they’d been dressed as well as they could afford to be, always neat and clean, as if waiting to be put upon display.
“Nellie Grimes was not doing very well at that point,” Rebecca added.
“What did she say about my father?”
“She said that he’d always been very kind to her,” Rebecca answered, “and that he’d given her some money when she’d left Somerset.”
In my mind I saw the envelope pass from my father’s hand to Nellie’s.
“She also told Swenson that she didn’t believe your father had killed his family,” Rebecca added.
“Then who did?”
Rebecca shrugged. “She only said that she was sure it was someone else,” she said. Then Swenson asked her directly if your father might have been involved with another woman, and she said absolutely not. She told him that she knew for a fact that your father was not that kind of man.”
I remembered the way Nellie’s face had lifted toward my father that day in the train station, and I suspected that it had lifted toward him in just that same tempting way many times before. In isolated places, no doubt, where no one could have seen him answer to the intensity of such a call, but he’d drawn back on those occasions, too, resolutely, with his own unfathomable pride.
Rebecca looked at me as if she expected me to contradict her, then added. “May also had a very high opinion of your father.”
“But she was just a child,” I said. “What could she have known about him?”
“Actually, she remembered him quite well,” Rebecca said. “Very clearly, even down to the gray work clothes he always wore.”
For a moment it struck me as intimate knowledge, and I felt a strange resentment toward May Grimes, as if she’d usurped my place as the sole surviving witness.
“How would she have known anything about my father?” I asked.
“May evidently spent a lot of time in the hardware store,” Rebecca continued. There was no place for her to go after school, so she played in the back room. Sometimes your father would come back there and try to entertain her a little.” She smiled. “May remembered that he bought her a Chinese checkers set and that they used to sit on the floor and play together.”
