"Of course you're welcome. Everyone in Coventry has an open invitation." She smiled, as if she had no idea that Monty was the only exception. Addison despised this man, and Isabelle's only joy in life was thwarting her father. "I'll tell the caterer to seat you in the ballroom, unless you'd rather have an outside table." She borrowed his notebook and scribbled a personal invitation that would get him past a gorilla doorman hired for the event.

"Oh, this is wonderful," he said, insanely pleased.

While answering his interview questions, she slowly steered him back to his car, hoping to see him off before her mother awoke to appear on the deck. "Sorry," she said in response to his last inquiry. "I don't remember the year Addison started building this place." She looked up, shading her eyes to see the high tower. "It seems like we've always lived in the castle."

The mangling of this famous line of American gothic was not wasted on Monty. His eyes flickered, and his face brightened as he committed her words to paper, maybe embellishing on innuendo to create something worse than the truth about her family life.

Fat chance.

As I recall," he said, "you left town a few days after Joshua Hobbs disappeared."

"Well, there was nothing odd about that." And now she thought of another lie. "It was time to go back to school. I had summer sessions that year." She neglected to mention that she had been sent farther away than her eastern boarding school. Her plane had landed in Paris, where she had learned to speak French and miss her mother.

"But you never came back." His pen described small circles above the page of his notebook, a subtle prompt.

"Oh, you mean for the summer. No, you're right. This is my first summer back in Coventry. In my college years, I did internships during school vacations, and I picked up my graduate degrees in London. That's where I work now. So my visits home were short ones, holidays mostly." And they had indeed been short stays, years apart and never lasting for an entire day.

Isabelle and Ferris Monty smiled at each other, and there was no protest or insinuation. They had mutually and silently agreed that he would have to make do with this stew of truth and lies.

"Oh, one more thing." He held up his index finger, as if to test the wind. "Shortly after you left, your mother also went away for a while."

And that would have been the time, recently recounted by Addison, when her mother had been committed to a hospital for wealthy people with eccentricities, patients who eccentrically acquired the angry red tattoos of razor scars on their wrists. On another occasion, her mother had downed sleeping pills like handfuls of candy.

Bet you can't eat just one, Mom.

"My parents used to take separate vacations," said Isabelle. And so they had. Her father had gone off to the circus of his high-profile law practice down in LA, and her mother had gone insane.

The red cedar house in the woods had the steeply pitched roof and filigree of a Swiss chalet. Oren Hobbs was sitting on the doorstep when Ferris Monty came home.

The little man seemed resigned to his fate. His feet were dragging as he left his Rolls-Royce and crossed the yard to face his visitor. Without the exchange of a single word, the two of them entered the house.

The dust and debris of the large front room was the giveaway of a long malaise, but Oren could chart the past few days of recovery by inroads made in the mess and by the garbage bags lined up at the door. These signs of a brighter mood would not square with the anxiety of a murderer whose crime had recently come to light with the bones. He sank down in an armchair, and Ferris Monty stood before him, eyes cast downward, like an aged schoolboy awaiting punishment.

"I took a long look at those three pictures of you in the bank."

"I guessed as much." Monty slowly raised his eyes. "But tell me, what did you think of the other triptych?" His smile was strained. "The photographs in the post office?"

Oren's voice was calm. His eyes were cold. "I noticed the way you were looking at my brother when he took those shots-the ones in the bank."

"But the postmaster's pictures are miles more interesting. They give up a secret relationship. Your brother was very good at capturing secrets."

Oren nodded. "There's a word for what you are."

"A phebophile," said Monty. "One who preys on adolescent boys. That's the word you want. It doesn't describe me. I'm hardly a virgin, but I can assure you that all of my lovers have been consenting adults. I never touched that boy. I'd never set myself up for that kind of rejection."

Monty removed his toupee to reveal sparse strands of gray on a wrinkled scalp. He seemed even less normal without the fake hair-more insectile. The sheriff had correctly likened him to bug larvae.

The little man looked down at the black hairpiece in his hands. "A beautiful boy like that would run from the likes of me." His eyes wandered to Oren's boots. "And your brother could run very fast. He needed speed… considering what he was doing, shadowing people, following them around for hours-days. I think that's why he always wore sneakers. He imitated everything else about you, Mr. Hobbs-your walk, the way you combed your hair, clothes-everything but your cowboy boots."

"You just admitted to stalking my brother."

"I always kept my distance." Monty backed away as Oren rose from the chair. "I can help you, Mr. Hobbs." He tripped on one of his garbage bags and fell backward to land on his tailbone. "Today I led you into the post office." There was a trace of whimper in his voice. "I all but led you there by the hand and pointed out the pictures on the wall. I know you've seen them a hundred times… but today you actually studied them, didn't you?"

Oren moved toward him.

By hands and feet, Monty scuttled backward, eyes wide and frightened as he dragged his rump across the rug, and backed up to the wall. "You saw the pictures of Swahn secretly passing a letter to the town lunatic." His eyes were begging now, hands rising to ward off anticipated violence.

Seconds ticked by-half a minute.

Oren was motionless, arms at his sides. He knew how to wait.

Monty slowly lowered his hands. "You're disgusted by the idea that I could love Joshua. But I think you'll take my help. I know something about Swahn's letter."

Sarah Winston hardly paid attention to her husband. Addison had become accustomed to her hundred-mile stare, and so it raised no interest in him when her gaze went over his head to the high bookshelf that ran around the wall of the tower room.

A group of birder logs was missing.

Which ones?

Could Addison have taken them? No, her husband had nothing but contempt for this side of her life. Isabelle must have borrowed those Bird-land chronicles.

If he should look up and see that empty space on the shelf, he might wonder where the books had gone; and then he might take an interest and open the others. What then? Would he commit her to another hospital?

He was talking in the lecture mode that followed her every binge. She nodded absently, lowering her gaze to meet his eyes. And now husband and wife were connected. She could still hold him this way. At core, Addison was a romantic man, blind to the changes of her aging and alcohol-

| ism. His smile was a constant thing, even in moments of anger, but she knew all of the subtle nuances.

She wished he would stop it, drop it-yell if he liked-but stop smiling.

Isabelle and Nickel Number Two had followed a well-worn trail past Evelyn Straub's old cabin. After a while, it should have led her to a landmark in one of her mother's journals, but she had been lulled by the slow rhythm of the horse and the warmth of the summer sun. Intoxicated by lush green forest and birdsong, trills that ran up and downhill-distracted by the novelty of happiness-she had overshot the clearing.