“I don’t know who was here when your father saw the light but I don’t think it wise we let them know we are taking a look. That’s why I wanted to do this at night. Did you tell anyone you were coming here?”

She shook her head.

“Did anyone see you leave? Did Nat?”

“Nat wasn’t there,” she whispered. And then I smelled it.

“You’ve been drinking.”

She leaned back and looked at me defiantly. “Family tradition at funerals.”

“Another of your situations?”

“Funny how having your brother incinerated can set you back.”

I looked her up and down and noticed something on the inside of her arm, a patch of white gauze. I turned the flashlight on and pointed the beam right at it. “What’s that?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“What the hell are you doing to yourself?” I said, certain that she had gone past alcohol into something more virulent.

She took a step back.

I followed her and reached for the gauze, ripping it off.

“Oh, Caroline,” I said with a sad sigh. “What are you doing to yourself?”

“It’s nothing,” she said, taking the gauze with its tape back from my hand and trying to reposition it on her arm. “Everyone’s doing it.”

“Oh, Caroline,” I said again and then I couldn’t say anything more. Her arm had been branded, a circular sun with regular curved rays pouring from it had been burned into her flesh and the skin around the sun was swollen red and proud. Tattoos were no longer permanent enough for her, I supposed.

“It’s my body,” she said with a practiced defiance that let me know she had said those very words many times before.

“Yes it is,” I said.

“Are we going in or are we just standing here all night?”

“Will you be able to handle this?”

She closed her eyes and swayed a bit before nodding.

“All right,” I said, “but keep it quiet.”

With the flashlight in one hand and her elbow in the other, I walked with her slowly, through the dips and turns of the fireflies, toward the house. A short flight of steps led to a sagging porch of gray timber, singed at the edges by fire, and on to the front door. These were the steps, I assumed, where Faith Reddman Shaw had first discovered the Poole daughter reading to Faith’s son, Kingsley. The wood creaked and bowed beneath our feet as we climbed. Caroline tripped slightly on the steps and fell into me. I pushed her straight again.

On the porch, I flashed the light briefly to the left and the right. The porch was empty of furniture, a few of the timbers had rotted completely through. One of the upright railings was charred black. Of the window on the left side of the door, two of the panes were smashed and the others were yellowed and brittle. The window on the right was boarded with plywood. A swift motion caught my attention and I aimed the beam of light at it. First one frog leaped from the porch, and then another. Cobwebs floated like ghost streamers from the railing and the roof, but the front entrance was free of them. I pointed that out to Caroline before we stepped to the door. There was an old rusted mortise lock and when I pressed down on the latch with my thumb it wouldn’t budge.

“Locked?” I said.

Caroline shrugged. I leaned my side into the door and gave a shove and quick as that it creaked open. We glanced at each other for a moment and then stepped inside.

We entered directly into a large parlor room, thick with swirls of dust, scattered dead leaves, cobwebs hanging like gauze in the corners. It was cold inside. I flashed the light on an old couch, the color of dirt, sitting across from a stone fireplace. Judging by its appearance the couch hadn’t been sat upon in a decade.

“I can’t believe this is still here,” said Caroline, softly, stepping toward it and rubbing her hand across a filthy arm. “Franklin and I cleaned up this room a bit and made fires here sometimes. We brought a rug in and sat by the hearth.”

I shined the light at the fireplace. There was a small pile of coals, gray with dust. A dead mouse nestled among the remains of a fire. There was nothing on the floor before the hearth but leaves.

“The rug’s gone,” I said.

She shrugged. “It was long ago.”

I cast the beam around the walls. A floral print wallpaper faded almost to brown, bare except for something over the mantelpiece. I stepped closer. It was a drawing of a man, a rather primitive drawing, faded and on yellow paper, tacked to the plaster above the fireplace like an ironic family portrait. The man in the picture was bald and the lines around his mouth were evident but it was done in a young person’s hand. The face of the man, I realized, was somehow familiar.

“Do you recognize him?” I asked.

She walked up to it and stared.

“I think,” she said, “he looks like the man in the photograph we found, with the tense-looking wife.”

“That must be Elisha Poole,” I said. “Probably drawn by his daughter.”

“This wasn’t here before,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it was and I didn’t notice.”

Off the parlor was the kitchen, a large room with a few cabinets and a large wooden table. Two rickety chairs lay strewn upon the floor. There was an old wood-burning stove with disks of metal atop for burners, the stove where the Poole daughter stirred the broth for her mother while Faith Reddman Shaw watched, entranced, from outside. Pots and pans, blackened by fire, were scattered on the floor about the stove, covered with webs and leaves. A cement sink with one faucet stood by the wall, its weight resting on a rusted metal frame.

“Cold and cold running water,” I said. I stepped to it and turned the knob. Nothing.

“What exactly are we looking for, Victor?”

“I don’t know,” I said softly. “But I feel something here, don’t you? Something cramped and desolate.”

“It just feels old and cold.”

An archway from the kitchen led to another room, mostly empty, with a fireplace. It must have been the dining room but there were no tables or chairs, only a massive wooden breakfront. The upper doors of the breakfront were lined, where one would expect glass, with a pleated yellowed fabric. I tugged the doors open. The shelves, covered with a browned paper, were entirely empty. The lower part of the breakfront held three rows of drawers and the drawers I could pull open also contained nothing but the same browned paper. The top middle drawer, designed for the most valuable serving pieces, was locked, but that too was probably empty. It was doubtful the Poole daughter would have taken the china but left the silver.

“I suppose she took everything she wanted and could carry out,” I said, “and abandoned the rest.”

“I think she just wanted to get the hell out of here,” said Caroline Shaw too loudly. “Who wouldn’t?”

“Shhhhhhh,” I said.

At the far end of the dining room was an entranceway that led off to a narrow set of stairs. I followed the beam of light and started climbing. Slipping slightly, I grabbed hold of the banister and it tore off in my hand with a shriek. The banister slammed into the wood flooring and slid nosily down the stairs, plaster cascading behind it. I jumped as if I had been goosed. I turned around and Caroline was smirking at me.

At the top of the stairs was a hallway. In the beam of light I could see four doorways, three of them open. Across from us was a small room with a listing wooden bed frame. When we stepped in something scurried across the floor and disappeared. On the wall were tacks, spiking remnants of yellowed paper into the plaster. The floor was filled with tumors of dust and crumpled bits of white stuff and there was trash piled in one of the corners. The window was covered with plywood.

The next room was a bathroom with a wooden floor and an old toilet. The sink was ceramic and cracked and there was one faucet. Beyond the bathroom was another room completely bare of any useful furniture, in its center a heap of broken chairs and shattered china. A doll without its head rested atop a rocking chair with only one rocker. Across the hall was the door that was closed.