“And that’s why we could never be together?” said Caroline. “Tell me, you asshole, is that why?”

“The tragedy of the Pooles,” said Harrington, “was not that their business was stolen from them by your great-grandfather. The tragedy of the Pooles was that they allowed themselves to be tragic. They defined themselves by what the Reddmans had taken from them, by what the Reddmans had become. I was never going to let that happen to me.”

“We were in love,” groaned Caroline.

“I thought I’d leave and be done with it all when I found out,” said Harrington. “But I let your grandmother put me through Princeton, sort of as a recompense. I figured why not, and then I let her put me through Wharton, and then when I was offered the job at the bank, it was naturally advantageous to have her trust accounts under my aegis, and pretty soon I was neck-deep in Reddman money, so it didn’t quite work out like I had thought. But I wasn’t going to join the family, Caroline, at least not that. That I would never do.”

“You said you loved me.”

“I did.”

“And you never told me.”

“I didn’t know until that day.”

“And you didn’t tell me then.”

“How could I?” said Harrington, a soft pain in his voice. “You were a Reddman and I was a Poole. How could I…”

“Did you ever think, Franklin, did you ever consider that by leaving me you became just as much a victim as the rest of them? Did you ever think of that, you asshole?”

He didn’t have a chance to answer before she was out the door.

Harrington and I both acted as if we were going to go after her, but then our eyes met and we stopped. I felt for an instant like an old-time gunfighter, waiting for the man standing across from me to make his move.

“Did you hire Jacqueline’s killers?” I asked finally.

“You didn’t listen to a word, did you?”

“If you didn’t, who did?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where’s your father?”

He looked at me for a moment. “He’s long gone,” he said. “He passed away from us years and years ago.”

“Any other Poole relatives you know about?”

“None.”

“Who’s Wergeld?”

“That’s the name of the trust I told you about.”

“Who’s the beneficiary?”

“I don’t know.”

“You come back here often?”

He looked around and shrugged. “Not in over ten years,” he said.

We stared at each other a moment more, our hands twitching as if we really did have guns on our hips. I nodded my head to the wall above the fireplace where the primitive drawing of Elisha Poole was tacked. “You put that up?”

He looked at it for a moment. “No,” he said.

“You know she’s right, of course. If you loved her and let her go just because she was a Reddman and you were a Poole, you’ve given in as badly as your grandmother and your great-grandparents.”

“What the hell do you know about it?”

I thought on that for a moment. “You’re right,” I said. “Not a thing.”

On our way to the door I stopped and told Harrington I had left something in the house. He looked at me gratefully, as if it were a cheap ploy to allow him some time alone with Caroline. I nodded and slipped him half a smile and let him think what he was thinking as he walked out to her alone.

It was a cheap ploy, yes, but not to give him time alone with Caroline. When he left I turned and walked through the kitchen to the dining room and the massive breakfront with the one drawer locked. Under the beam of my flashlight I took out my wallet and extracted the ornate key with the bit like a puzzle piece attached to the shank, the key we had found in the metal box, in the envelope marked “The Letters.” Slowly I inserted the key into the lock in the drawer. It slipped in as though the key and the lock were made one for the other, which they were, because without much effort the key turned, the bolt dropped, the drawer slid open.

Inside were packets of letters, each yellowed and brittle, tied together with pale ribbons that had once held color but no longer. One by one I stuffed the bundles into my pack. Among the letters was a small book of scaling brown leather. I opened it to the title page. Walden by Henry David Thoreau. I took that too. Beneath everything was a heavy old envelope, tied shut with a string. The words on the outside, written with a masculine hand, read: To My Child on the Attainment of Majority.

I stuffed the envelope into my pack with the rest of the stuff and headed out the door.

I WANTED TO TALK on the drive home, I was so excited I was bursting with talk. The whole chilling story of the Reddmans and the Pooles was coming clear and more than ever I was certain that the sad entwining of the fates of those two families was at the heart of the plague that was presently afflicting the Reddmans. We were close, so close, to figuring it all out and to taking the first steps toward retribution, as well as toward a lucrative lawsuit. I wanted to talk it out, desperately, but just as desperately Caroline wanted silence.

“Are you all right?” I asked after three of my conversational gambits had dropped like lead weights in a pool of silent water.

“No,” she said.

“What can I do?”

“Just, just shut up,” she said.

Well at least she knew what she wanted.

So, as we drove in silence out of the Main Line and toward the city, I considered to myself what we knew and what we still needed to learn. Claudius Reddman had stolen the company from his friend Elisha Poole, had embezzled sums which he used to buy up a portion of the stock, and then, after reducing the company’s value with his thievery and through production holdbacks, had purchased the balance of the shares for an amount far below their true value. In the process of making his fortune he had ruined his friend, driving him to drink, to poverty, to suicide, and Reddman knew all he had done, too, because right after Poole’s death, either out of guilt or a misplaced magnanimity, he brought Mrs. Poole and her daughter to live in the shadow of his wealth and grandeur, in the shadow of Veritas. Is it only a coincidence that shortly thereafter tragedy began to stalk the Reddmans?

Charity Reddman was murdered and buried in the plot behind the house, alongside the statue of Aphrodite. Who killed her? Was it Christian Shaw, disposing of his inconvenient lover, as Caroline believed, or was it maybe Mrs. Poole, wreaking her husband’s revenge? And the Reddman tragedies didn’t stop there. Hope Reddman died of consumption, which might have been poisoning instead. Christian Shaw was killed by his son with a shotgun blast to the chest. Claudius Reddman’s lungs filled with tumors and his muscles grew wild with palsy. How much of this tragedy was just the natural order of things and how much was bad karma and how much was directly caused by the Pooles? We as yet had no answer and probably would never find one, but if we only reap what we sow then Claudius Reddman’s harvest was appropriately bountiful. But it hadn’t ended with his death.

Somewhere along the line, it appeared, Faith Reddman Shaw sought to make amends. We knew that she had examined her father’s old journals and discovered his crime. Was it after this discovery that she found Emma Poole and brought her to the luxury apartment in Philadelphia to live out her life? Was it then that she found Harrington, Emma’s grandchild, lost in an orphanage, and brought him to the estate to be raised as one of her own? Was the purpose of the Wergeld Trust to ease her family’s conscience? Conciliation, expiation, redemption she had said she was seeking, and it appeared she had been seeking it actively. But still all this had failed, somehow, to stem the curse, because someone had hired Cressi to kill Jacqueline and probably Edward too. Their deaths might be all tied up with Edward Shaw’s gambling debts, true, both killings ordered by Dante to collect on his loan, but after visiting the house of Poole I suspected it had more to do with the ugliness of the Reddman past than anything in the present. So who was ordering the killings? Harrington, the only known surviving Poole? Robert Shaw, knocking off his siblings to increase his inheritance with which he could play the market, showing himself as ruthless in matters of business as his great-grandfather? Kingsley Shaw, carrying out the deranged commands of the voice of the fire? Or was it maybe Faith Reddman Shaw herself, coming back from the dead as her son had claimed, sacrificing her grandchildren one by one as bloody final acts of reparation for her father’s crimes?