“All the time she was with us. I can even show you her old room, but it’s a lot changed since then.”

“Tell me about the last time you saw her.”

“Oh my.” She thought about it as though she were going through a mental calendar, trying to fit it into the chronology of her life. “Well, it’s a few years ago, let me put it that way. I was sleeping upstairs and something woke me up. I went to the window and saw something moving downstairs. I went and got my husband’s old shotgun and went down in my nightie. I opened the back door, the door to the garden, and there she was.”

“What was she doing?”

“Just kinda standing there. I said, ‘Connie, my goodness, why didn’t you tell me you were coming?’ and she said, ‘I didn’t know I was till I got here.’ You know, that must have been the year of the tulip disaster, and that was about five years ago, I think. Or maybe it was after that, the next spring. Well, four or five years, I can’t be sure.”

“Did she say anything about herself, what she was doing?”

“She said she had a good job in New York, but she wouldn’t give me an address. Said she just wanted to see the old place again. I never took Connie for sentimental, but you never know about people, do you?”

“It was night when she came?”

“It was dark. I don’t recall if I looked at the clock.”

That had to be when she and Martin Jewell spent a weekend together upstate. She had taken his car while he slept and driven up to the house for old times’ sake. “Did you ever see her around Thanksgiving?” I asked.

“Never. Not since she left. I’m not usually at the house that late in the year anyway. It’s too cold.”

We kept up the chatter till we reached the house. Mrs. Lewellyn had a lot of memories she was happy to talk about. Connie had had a simply awful childhood, till she came to live with the Lewellyns, that is. Poor little thing once had her nose broken when she sassed her daddy. Her mother wasn’t much good either and left nothing but debts when she died.

“Did Connie ever go to Indiana that you know about?”

“Not when she was living with us. I don’t know what she’s done since. We kept up a little after she went to New York, got a Christmas card most years, and then it stopped. I thought once she was going to get married—that must’ve been almost twenty years ago—and for all I know, she did, but she never told us. There’s your turnoff just up ahead.”

The conversation ended there and I concentrated on getting us where we were going. It was a pretty house set far enough back from the road so you could hardly see it till you reached the end of the drive. There were lots of tall evergreens as well as bare deciduous trees and shrubs, and the house itself looked very old. I asked her about it as I turned off the motor.

“Oh yes, it goes way back. Early eighteen hundreds, is what we’ve been told. That’s why I hate to give it up. The kids love it, too, so one of them’ll probably take charge of it. I just hope they keep up with the flowers.”

We got out and she led the way to the front door. Inside it was almost as cold as out, and she had warned me in advance that the water was turned off to keep the pipes from freezing, so we couldn’t use the sink or toilet. We had eaten on the way and stopped to wash before we got here.

I was quite charmed by the house. There were old timbers along the living room ceiling, and the well-cared-for floors were uneven in a way that indicated age. The kitchen had been carefully modernized, leaving old beams bare with kettles hanging from them.

I followed her up the steep, narrow stairs to the second floor, where there were four bedrooms, the last and smallest having belonged to Connie. There was a big oval rag rug on the floor and what looked like a handmade quilt on the bed, a lovely room for a single person. There wasn’t much in it that would tell me anything about Connie because it had been occupied by other people in the decades since she had left. Down the hall was the bathroom, an ancient claw-foot tub surrounded by a plastic shower curtain prominent against the wall.

“Years ago I decided we should get a new tub,” Mrs. Lewellyn said, “but my friend started telling me that the old claw-foot ones fetched a fortune now, so I left it. Makes it look awful old, though, doesn’t it?”

“It looks lovely. I think this is a wonderful house.”

“Well, I don’t know what else I can tell you.”

“Where did you see Connie that last time when she came at night?”

“Down back. I’ll show you.”

She held on to the banister going down, her feet side-ways on the narrow treads, and I followed suit. She took me to a back door that she opened with a key. We stepped outside onto a concrete patio that was cracked with age.

“She was over there near that tree, the big oak at the edge of the grass. I saw her from up there.” She stepped away from the house and pointed up.

I walked across the patio, then over to the tree. Any of the windows on the back of the house would have a view of this tree, and probably most of the lawn between the tree and the patio. I went back, circling what looked like a moss-covered flower bed.

“That’s the tulips,” she said as I neared. “I got a whole bucket of bulbs one fall and planted ’em till my knees hurt. Then the damn squirrels came and tossed them around the place. I was madder’n hell,” she said, using language I hadn’t expected from her. “My knees’ll never forgive ’em.”

“And you’re not sure when that was.”

“It’s gotta be three or four years ago.”

“Did you replant the tulips?”

“I did, and we put a netting over the place to keep the squirrels away. It worked. You should see those tulips in the spring.” She looked cold, although the day was mild.

“Why don’t we go somewhere for a cup of hot coffee?” I suggested. “Then we can go back to Albany.”

“That’s all? You’re finished here?”

“I’m finished,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her that I was only starting.

27

“I think we have to try it, Jack.”

It was the same night. I had come home late, worn out from a day at the wheel. “I think Connie or Natalie or whatever her name was hid something there, maybe when she sent the postcard to Dickie Foster. There are still two small keys on the ring. Maybe she buried a lockbox or suitcase. She came back a year later, or sometime later, I’m not exactly sure when, to make sure her secret was still intact. Whatever it is, it’s going to answer all the questions we have.”

“Let’s go up on Saturday.”

—

After I checked with Mrs. Lewellyn, I let Roger Belasco at the weekly newspaper know. She wasn’t happy at the prospect of having her beautiful tulips dug up a second time, but I promised I would pay to have a gardener replant her bulbs, or new ones if she chose.

We got up at six on Saturday and drove up to Albany to pick her up. She was ready and we wasted no time setting out for the country house. We had a pickax and shovels in the trunk, but we needn’t have bothered. Mrs. Lewellyn’s garage had a great assortment of tools. At eleven-thirty, with a representative of the newspaper looking on, we set to work.

I have to admit my heart broke every time a bulb was unearthed. Some of them were already showing fresh spring shoots, and Mrs. Lewellyn took each one fondly, wrapped it, and put it in a box in the garage. The recent weather had not been cold enough to freeze the ground solid, and once we were through the top layer, the earth wasn’t very hard to move. Not that it was easy, because it wasn’t. We stopped to eat at Jack’s suggestion (cops are always hungry), stopped to rest, stopped to chat with the newspaperman, whose name was Joe Belasco, Roger’s son. Eventually young Joe, either embarrassed at watching Jack and me work or bored with doing nothing, picked up a shovel of his own and joined in.