“Less than a week ago I saw her in her garden,” he said.

From the window there was a clear view to the overgrown hedges and wild flowers of Faith Reddman’s garden. From here the mazelike pattern was much clearer and in the center clearing I could see the shape of the bench that had been devoured by the orange flowering vines.

“I saw the light,” he said. “She was there. She was digging in her garden in the middle of the night. I saw the light, I heard the clang of her shovel. I swear it.”

“I believe you saw the light, Mr. Shaw.”

“She’s come back.”

“Why has she come back, Mr. Shaw?”

“She’s come back to take me away, to save me. That’s why she’s waiting in the house, waiting for me.”

“What house is she waiting in, Mr. Shaw?”

“The old house, the old Poole house. I’ve seen her there, at night. I’ve seen the lights through the trees.”

“In the house by the pond?”

“Yes, she’s there, waiting.” He suddenly looked away from the window and stared at me with his watery eyes. “Will you take me there? Will you? I can’t go myself because of my legs. But I’m light now. You can carry me.”

He reached out and gripped again at my sleeve. It was frightening to see the yearning work its way beneath his slack face. This is a man worth half a billion dollars, I thought. What happiness has it bought him? I turned my face away and looked at the garden once more and then altered my focus.

“Why are there bars on your windows, Mr. Shaw?”

He dropped his head and let go of my arm. Slowly he spun his wheelchair around and rolled back to the fire. He leaned toward the glowing heat, listening. I stared at him, his color washed completely away by the sunlight now flooding through the window.

I looked around once more. This room reeked of a single personality, yes, but if the personality that had created and maintained it once belonged to this man it had clearly fled. Nothing was left but a shell. I had intended to ask him about Caroline’s paternity, about the Wergeld Trust, about the Pooles, but I would get no answers from what remained of this man. I walked over to the bookshelves and their heavy tomes. Leather-bound volumes of the great works of literature, Dickens and Hugo and Balzac and Cervantes, each spine perfectly smooth. I took out volume one of Don Quixote. It was a beautifully made book, the boards thick, the leather hand-tooled and leafed in gold. The binding cracked when I opened it. I remembered that Selma Shaw had told me she had been brought to Veritas because her future husband had difficulty reading. I remembered the disappointment in Faith Shaw’s diary over young Kingsley’s failures in his studies.

“Do you read much?” I asked.

He responded as if I were merely an inconvenient distraction pulling him away from the voice of the fire. “No.”

“Don’t you like books?”

“The letters mix themselves up on the page.”

Dyslexia? Is that why he had so much trouble learning to read as a boy? Then why are there so many books in his room? I wondered. Why would a problem reader surround himself with such potent reminders of his failings? Was it pretension? Was it merely a facade, like Gatsby’s library with its uncut pages, or was it something else? I closed the book and put it away and then looked around the room with newly opened eyes and a growing sense of horror.

“Do you hunt, Mr. Shaw?” I asked while I looked at the wall full of dead animal heads.

“Once I did,” he said.

“Are these your trophies?”

“No. They were my father’s.”

“Even the cat?”

“It’s a cougar,” he said in his distracted monotone.

“Is that your father’s too?”

“No,” he said. “Everything but the cougar.”

I stepped slowly toward the cougar head, its eyes dazed, its yellow teeth bared. There was a brass plate beneath the ruffed fur of its neck. It said something I couldn’t read for the tarnish, but I could make out the date: 1923. I felt colder than before. This wasn’t just any cougar, I was certain, this was the cougar that had slipped down from the mountains to terrorize the farms around Veritas in 1923. The same cougar Kingsley Shaw was aiming for in that dark rain-swept night when, with his mother by his side, he fired into his father’s chest. How could he live with that cat staring at him every day of his life, taunting him with that grin? And the ornate shotgun beside it, that gun, I realized, must be the gun.

I took a photograph out of my suit pocket and walked it to the fireplace to show to the man in the wheelchair. It was a photograph, removed from the metal box, of the unattractive young woman with the long face, the beady eyes, the unruly hair. “Do you know her?” I asked.

He took the photograph into his shaking hands and examined it closely. I wondered if he recognized her at all and then realized, when I saw a tear, that he did.

“Who is she?” I asked.

“Why are you here?” he said, still staring at the photograph.

“I am trying to find out who is killing your children.”

“This is Miss Poole,” he said. “She was my friend from long ago. She read to me.”

“Do you know where she is or where her child is?”

“Why? Do you know her?” He smiled up at me with a hope that was at odds with everything he had shown me before. “Is she alive too?”

“I don’t know. Her father believed that your grandfather stole his company from him. Do you believe she could be responsible for hiring the man who killed your children?”

“She was my friend,” he said. “She was lovely. She could never have hurt a soul.”

“Then who do you think is killing your children?” I asked.

“I told you,” he said, staring up at me. “She’s alive. Didn’t I tell you? She’s alive.” He turned his face back to the photograph. “Can I keep this?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you, Mr. Shaw, and I’m very sorry for your loss.”

With a wan smile he waved the photograph. “She used to read to me about a pond. Such a beautiful pond it was. I forget the name of it now.”

“Walden Pond,” I said.

“No, that’s not it, but it was so beautiful.”

On my way out I stopped for a moment and stared at the cougar head mounted above the door. I turned around.

“Mr. Shaw, why are there bars on your windows?”

From across the room, still staring at the photograph, he said, “Because of the first time I heard the fire speak.”

“When was that?”

“Years and years ago. When I could still walk.”

“What was the word it repeated the first time?”

“ ‘Jump,’ ” he said. “ ‘Jump. Jump. Jump.’ ”

I think all of us in this world carry our own individual hells, like a turtle shell on our backs, hauling it about from place to place, the burden so constant we often forget how its weight is twisting our bodies and spirits into grotesquery. This hell is the cost, I believe, of being human and humane, and better that, I figure, than the oblivious, spaced-out bliss promised by places like the Church of the New Life. But never have I seen an individual’s personal hell so objectively and oppressively rendered in his surroundings as I saw in the room of Kingsley Reddman Shaw. Wherever he was jumping to when he ruined his legs, he was jumping to a better place than this.

I blinked into the sunlight outside Veritas. Nat had progressed in his work to the hedges on the other side of the doorway. He saw me standing on the steps and without climbing from his ladder he shouted out, “Had a pleasant meeting, Mr. Carl?”

“How long has he been like that, Nat?”

“For as long as I’ve been here. But it’s gotten worse over the years.”

“How old was he when he jumped from the window?”

“Twenty-five or thereabouts, but by then he had not been out of the room for six or seven years.”

“I’ve never seen such a horrible place in my life.”

“N’aren’t too many like it. That was his grandfather’s room until the elder Mrs. Shaw moved her son into it. Much of the furnishings were left over from Mr. Reddman’s time.”