Without waiting for me, Caroline went to that door and shoved it open. I followed her inside. This room too had a fireplace and there was a mattress on the floor and an old transistor radio, circa not 1923 but 1979. On the wall to the right, its sole window covered with plywood, hung a poster with a grinning, multicolored skull above the legend “STEAL YOUR FACE!” and another showing a leather-jacketed greaser with a pair of sneakers hanging from the neck of his guitar. Bruce Springsteen? The Grateful Dead?

“I guess old Mrs. Poole was ahead of her time,” I said.

“This was our room,” said Caroline softly. She picked up the small black-and-gray radio and turned it on, but nothing happened. “It’s still tuned to WMMR, I’d bet. Oh God.”

“What was this room before you and Harrington took it over?”

“I think it was Mrs. Poole’s bedroom,” she said without turning to me. “I seem to remember there was stuff in the closet.”

I looked at her for a moment, standing still, with the dead radio cradled in her arms like a baby, and then I stepped quickly to the closet door and pulled at it. It was stuck at first, swollen shut, but I gave it a good yank and it opened up for me with a shriek from the hinges.

Inside, moth-eaten, shabby with age, like skeletons of their former selves, were dresses, some still hanging, some slumped to the floor, their frills darkened, their colors washed out by the white light of the flashlight and their age. Which of these dresses, I wondered, had she worn on the night of the ball when she so publicly refused Claudius Reddman’s offer to dance? Well, he sure as hell deserved the rebuke.

With two fingers I lifted up the dresses from the floor, finding nothing but old shoes underneath. There was a shelf above the bar and I stood up on my tiptoes to look at it. Hats and shoes, the leather cracked, and a pile of rags in the corner. I jumped up and grabbed at the rag pile and pulled them down. Dust flew and I sneezed loudly. When I stopped sneezing I noticed now, in the corner, a little wooden box. I jumped up again and snatched it. With a little work I was able to lift off the lid.

“Photographs,” I said.

Caroline emerged from her reverie and we sat down together on the mattress, their mattress, to look at the pictures.

They were old black-and-white photographs, many with curly edges. There was a pretty young woman sitting on the ground, her head tilted suggestively, a long string of pearls knotted beneath her breast, and then the same woman sitting on a stoop, her hair long and young, a sly, sensual smile.

“Any idea who she is?” I asked.

“It looks like the woman that was next to Elisha Poole in the other pictures,” said Caroline.

“It does, doesn’t it,” I said, and it did, but it also didn’t. There was nothing sour in this young woman. “It must be Mrs. Poole, you’re right, but look how young she is. And in this one she’s almost laughing.”

There were other photographs of the woman, more formal photographs, posed in a studio, going back in time until there was one of her as a young girl, with her parents, the girl wearing a frilly dress, like an angel’s, button leather shoes, the serious smile of the very young. And there were pictures of a brash young man with wavy hair, leaning dramatically against a post, or clowning at the beach. On the back of the picture at the beach was written in a fading ink, “Elisha, Atlantic City-1896.”

“Look how handsome he was,” said Caroline. “Who would have imagined? I guess he was something before he became a bitter old drunk.”

“They’re all something before they become bitter old drunks.”

We kept going through the pictures, shining the light carefully on each, examining them one by one. There were pictures of the woman and the man together, laughing, in love, ready to conquer the world. In one picture there was an old man with his arm around Elisha. Elisha was leaning away, as if to gain some distance. The old man’s eyes were half open, one was blackened from a brawl, his nose was large and venous, teeth were missing from his mouth. “Elisha and his father,” was written on the back. And there was one that brought a gasp from Caroline.

“That’s my great-grandfather,” she said.

A young Claudius Reddman, in a vested suit, high collar, bowler hat cocked low over his bulging eyes, standing side by side a young Elisha Poole, their arms linked, a great blocky building behind them.

“That must be the before shot,” said Caroline.

I said nothing, only stared, feeling the life and camaraderie in the picture, the linked arms, the burgeoning possibilities. They had been friends. I hadn’t counted on that but here was the proof. They had been friends; did that make the betrayal any deeper? Is it more acceptable to swindle a stranger than a friend? Or can a friend more clearly understand that he is only doing to his pal, his buddy, his comrade-in-arms, what his comrade-in-arms would do to him had he half a chance? Could it have been that Elisha, in paying his friend what Yitzhak Rabbinowitz had described as a miserly wage, had a hand in his own financial destruction? “It was only business,” had said Claudius Reddman and I couldn’t help but wonder if he hadn’t learned his business practices from his dear and valued friend Elisha Poole.

So engrossed were we in the pictures that we didn’t hear the front door open or the creak of someone walking through the parlor and the kitchen and the dining room. So engrossed were we that we didn’t hear a thing until we heard the soft even footfalls rising up the stairs.

I STUFFED THE PHOTOGRAPHS back into the box and the box into my pack and clicked off the light. Darkness covered us. And in the darkness an uneven wiggle of shadow impressed itself upon the air around the door. A candle? Yes. I grabbed hold of Caroline and whispered in her ear, “Absolute silence.”

The footsteps continued to climb, step by step. The light causing the uneven shadows became ever more prominent. The intruder reached the top of the stairs and hesitated.

Slowly Caroline and I crawled together off the mattress to a corner of the room where someone glancing in the doorway wouldn’t so easily spot us. I crouched into a ready position and hefted the flashlight in my hand. It was as heavy as a billy club. We waited.

Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. I heard something and was about to tell Caroline to be quiet once again when I realized it was my breath, coming out in gulps. Sweat blossomed on my forehead, sweat trickled down my sides. I couldn’t stop thinking of what Kingsley Shaw had said, that his mother was alive in the Poole house and waiting for him. Was it she holding the candle, rising up the steps? Whoever it was, I was certain, whoever had climbed those stairs was the murderer who had been stalking the Reddmans. And now Caroline and I were cowering in the corner like two targets. My heart jumped in my chest. I willed whoever was coming to turn around, to step down the stairs, to just go away and leave us alive.

And then the steps began again. Toward us. The uneven flicker of light growing. The intruder stopped at one door for a moment and then moved on and stopped at another and then stopped before our own.

I grabbed tighter to Caroline and held my breath. Go away, I thought, we’re not here, nobody’s here.

A hand with a white candle slid through the doorway and then the arm, black-sleeved, and a man’s shoe.

I clicked on the light as soon as the head appeared, aiming the beam at the figure’s face. It whited out for an instant before we could recognize who it was.

“Franklin?” said Caroline.

“Get that out of my face,” said a calm Franklin Harrington.

I scrambled to my feet and sent the light sprawling against the far wall. His face, now lit only by the candle held below it, flickered in ominous shadow.