Nell was slow to leave the room even while Richard Sullivan Healey, the eldest son of the chief justice, greeted his two literary guests.

“Forgive my chambermaid’s behavior,” Healey said after ordering Nell Ranney away. “She was the one who found Father’s body and took him inside the house, and since then, I’m afraid she examines every person as though he could be responsible. We worry that she imagines almost as many demonish things as Mother does these days.”

“We were hoping to see dear Mrs. Healey this morning if you please, Richard,” said Lowell very politely. “Mr. Fields thought we might discuss with her a book of memorial tributes to the chief justice that could be made up by Ticknor and Fields.” It was customary for relatives, even distant cousins, to make personal calls to the family of the recently deceased, but the publisher required a pretense.

Richard Healey bunched his bulky mouth into an amiable curve. “I fear a visit with her won’t be possible, cousin Lowell. Today is one of her bad days. She is confined to bed.”

“Why, do not say she is ill.” Lowell leaned forward with a trace of morbid curiosity.

Richard Healey hesitated with a series of heavy blinks. “Not physically, or so according to the doctors. But she has developed a mania that I fear has worsened over the last weeks, so it may as well be physical. She feels a constant presence on her. Pardon me to speak vulgarly, gentlemen, but a crawling across her very flesh for which she insists she must scratch and dig into her skin, no matter how many diagnose imagination as the culprit.”

“Is there anything we might do to assist her, my dear Healey?” asked Fields.

“Find Father’s murderer.” Healey chuckled sadly. He noticed with some unease that the two men responded to this with steely looks.

Lowell wished to see where the body of Artemus Healey had been discovered. Richard Healey balked at this strange request, but attributing Lowell’s eccentricities to his poetic sensibilities, he escorted the two visitors outside. They went out the back doors of the mansion, past the flower gardens and into the meadows that led down to the riverbank. Healey noticed that James Russell Lowell walked with a surprisingly quick, athletic stride for a poet.

A strong wind blew particles of fine-grain sand into Lowell’s beard and mouth. With the rough taste on his tongue, a catch in his throat, and the image of Healey’s death in his mind, Lowell was transported by a vivid idea.

The Neutrals of Dante’s third canto choose neither good nor evil and thus are despised by Heaven and Hell alike. So they are placed in an antechamber, not even Hell proper, and here these cowardly shades float naked following a blank banner, for they had refused to follow a course of action in life. They are stung incessantly by gadflies and wasps, their blood mingles with the salt of their tears, and all this is mopped up at their feet by loathsome worms. This putrid flesh gives rise to more flies and worms. Flies, wasps, and maggots were the three types of insects found on Artemus Healey’s body.

To Lowell, it showed something about their killer that made him real.

“Our Lucifer knew how to transport these insects,” Lowell had said.

It had been a gathering at Craigie House the first morning of their investigation, the small study inundated with newspapers and their fingers spotted with ink and blood from turning too many pages. Fields, reviewing the notes Longfellow had been compiling in a journal, wanted to know why Lucifer, as Lowell had named their adversary, would choose Healey for the Neutrals.

Lowell pulled thoughtfully on one of his walrus tusks. He was in full pedagogical mode when his friends became his audience. “Well, Fields, the only shade Dante singles out in this group of the Lukewarm, or ‘Neutrals,’ is the one who made the great refusal, he says. This must be Pontius Pilate, for he made the greatest refusal—the most terrible act of neutrality in Christian history—when he neither authorized nor stopped the crucifixion of the Savior. Judge Healey, likewise, was asked to deal a grave blow to the Fugitive Slave Act but instead did nothing at all. He sent the escaped slave Thomas Sims, barely a boy, back to Savannah, where he was whipped until he bled and then paraded with his wounds before the town. And old Healey growled all the while that it was not his place to overturn Congress’s law. No! In the name of God, it was the place of us all.”

“There is no known solution to the puzzle of this gran rifuto, the great refusal. Dante does not give a name,” Longfellow chimed in, brushing away the thick smoke tail from Lowell’s cigar.

“Dante cannot give a name to the sinner,” insisted Lowell passionately. “These shades who ignored life, ‘who never were alive,’ as Virgil says, must be ignored in death, pestered without end by the most insignificant vile creatures. That is their contrapasso, their eternal punishment.”

“A Dutch scholar has suggested this figure is not Pontius Pilate, my dear Lowell, but rather the young man in Matthew 19:22 who is offered eternal life and refuses it,” said Longfellow. “Mr. Greene and I both favor reading the great refusal as having been made by Pope Celestine the Fifth, another man who took a neutral path by turning down the papal throne, giving way to the rise of the corrupt Pope Boniface, who led ultimately to Dante’s exile.”

“That is too much confining Dante’s poem to the borders of Italy!” protested Lowell. “Typical of our dear Greene. This is Pilate. I can almost see him before us scowling as Dante must have.”

Fields and Holmes had remained silent during this exchange. Now Fields said kindly but reproachfully that their work must not become a club session. They had to find a better way to understand these murders, and for that they would have to not merely read the cantos that gave rise to the deaths but cross into them.

At that moment, Lowell was scared for the first time of what might come of all this. “Well, what do you suggest?”

“We must see firsthand,” Fields said, “where Dante’s visions came to life.”

Now, making his way through the Healey estate, Lowell grabbed his publisher’s arm.” ‘Come la rena quando turbo spira,’ “ he whispered.

Fields did not understand. “Say again, Lowell?”

Lowell sped ahead and stopped where the dark dirt lining gave way to a circle of smooth, light sand. He bent down. “Here!” he said triumphantly.

Richard Healey, trailing slightly behind, said, “Why, yes.” When his mind caught up, he looked flabbergasted. “How did you know that, cousin? How did you know this is where my father’s body was found?”

“Oh,” Lowell said disingenuously. “It was a question. You seemed to be slowing your walk, so I asked, ‘Is it here?’ Was he not slowing?” He turned to Fields for help.

“I believe so, Mr. Healey.” Fields, puffing for breath, nodded eagerly.

Richard Healey did not think he had been slowing. “Ah well, the answer then is yes,” he said, making a point not to hide the fact that he was impressed with, and wary of, Lowell’s intuition. “This is precisely where it happened, cousin. At the most demonish ugly portion of our yard, too,” he said bitterly. It was the one patch in the meadow where nothing at all could grow.

Lowell traced his finger in the sand. “It was here,” he said as though caught in a trance. For the first time, Lowell began to feel real and quickening sympathy for Healey. Here he had been sprawled naked and left to be devoured. The worst part was that he had met an end he would never understand, even in the ever after, nor would his wife or his sons.

Richard Healey thought Lowell was on the verge of tears. “He always kept a soft place in his heart for you, cousin,” he said, and knelt beside Lowell.

“What?” Lowell demanded, his sympathy quickly broken.