“Piss and Vinegar,” Dave suggested.

“If you like,” Vince said evenly. “Sure, ayuh, if you like. Devane goes off with those two stupid cops, O’Shanny and Morrison, as soon as Cathcart gives them the preliminary report on the burn victims from the apartment house fire, because they don’t give a heck about some accidental choking victim who died over on MooseLookit Island. Cathcart, meanwhile, does his guttossing on John Doe with yours truly in attendance. Onto the death certificate goesasphyxiation due to choking or the medical equivalent thereof. Into the newspapers goes my ‘sleeping ID’ photo, which our Victorian ancestors much more truthfully called a ‘death portrait.’ And no one calls the Attorney General’s Office or the State Police barracks in Augusta to say that’s their missing father or uncle or brother.

“Tinnock Funeral Home keeps him in their cooler for six days—it’s not the law, but like s’many things in matters of this sort, Steffi, you discover it’s an accepted custom. Everybody in the deathbusiness knows it, even if nobody knowswhy. At the end of that period, when he was still John Doe and still unclaimed, Abe Carvey went on ahead and embalmed him. He was put into the funeral home’s own crypt at Seaview Cemetery—”

“This part’s rather creepy,” Stephanie said. She found she could see the man in there, for some reason not in a coffin (although he must surely have been provided with some sort of cheap box) but simply laid on a stone slab with a sheet over him. An unclaimed package in a post office of the dead.

“Ayuh, ’tis, a bit,” Vince said levelly. “Do you want me to push on?”

“If you stop now, I’ll kill you,” she said.

He nodded, not smiling now but pleased with her just the same. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she did.

“He boarded the summer and half the fall in there. Then, when November come around and the body was still unnamed and unclaimed, they decided they ought to bury him.” In Vince’s Yankee accent,bury rhymed withfurry. “Before the ground stiffened up again and made digging particularly hard, don’t you see.”

“I do,” Stephanie said quietly. And she did. This time she didn’t sense the telepathy between the two old men, but perhaps it was there, because Dave took up the tale (such tale as there was) with no prompting from theIslander ’s senior editor.

“Devane finished out his tour with O’Shanny and Morrison to the bitter end,” he said. “He probably even gave them each a tie or something at the end of his three months or his quarter or whatever it was; as I think I told you, Stephanie, there was no quit in that young fella. But as soon as he was finished, he put in his paperwork at whatever his college was—Ithink he told me Georgetown, but you mustn’t hold me to that—and started back up again, taking whatever courses he needed for law school. And except for two things, that might have been where Mr. Paul Devane leaves this story—which, as Vince says, isn’t a story at all, except maybe for this part. The first thing is that Devane peeked into the evidence bag at some point, and looked over John Doe’s personal effects. The second is that he got serious about a girl, and she took him home to meet her parents, as girls often do when things get serious, and this girl’s father had at least one bad habit that was more common then than it is now. He smoked cigarettes.”

Stephanie’s mind, which was a good one (both of the men knew this), at once flashed upon the pack of cigarettes that had fallen onto the sand of Hammock Beach when the dead man fell over. Johnny Gravlin (now MooseLook’s mayor) had picked it up and put it back into the dead man’s pocket. And then something else came to her, not in a flash but in a blinding glare. She jerked as if stung. One of her feet struck the side of her glass and knocked it over. Coke fizzed across the weathered boards of the porch and dripped between them to the rocks and weeds far below. The old men didn’t notice. They knew a state of grace perfectly well when they saw one, and were watching their intern with interest and delight.

“The taxstamp!” she nearly shrieked.“There’s a state taxstamp on the bottom of every pack!”

They both applauded her, gently but sincerely.