The day of her funeral was one of those sharp blue and white winter feats when the sky and sun blind you every time you look up. The air smelled of wet stone and the many chestnut trees that surrounded the cemetery. Once in a while a strong cold breeze blew up and the trees shuddered. Because of the intense sunlight, most of the people at the ceremony wore sunglasses. One might have mistaken the group for a bunch of the famous or infamous gathered one last time to say goodbye to someone who was probably wearing sunglasses too inside the wooden box.

And it was wooden. Jitka didn't like funerals, ceremony or extravagance. "What would I do in a fancy coffin? Dance? Show off for the bugs?"

So she was buried in the same kind of simple one she had chosen for Pauline years ago. The two lay next to each other in the Crane's View Cemetery. Mr. Ostrova was on the other side.

There was a large turnout, which wasn't surprising. Frannie stood next to Magda and Magda's daughter, Pauline. I hadn't seen him since our last showdown and was surprised at how well he looked.

I was also surprised to see Edward Durant there. He was not looking well. We stood next to each other during the service. He carried a cane that he incessantly shifted from hand to hand. He told me he had remained in touch with the Ostrovas over the years and frequently was invited to their house for dinner.

A Czech priest from Yonkers performed the ceremony. I kept looking at Magda and her daughter, wondering what was going through their minds. Sometimes Magda rested her head on Frannie's shoulder and sometimes the two women embraced, but there were few tears. I think Jitka would have liked that because she overflowed with good nature and common sense. I imagined her watching over us with arms crossed and a pleased smile on her face.

When it was finished, Frannie separated from Magda and came over. Putting an arm around my shoulder, he said, "How you doin', stranger? You finish your book, or what? We don't see you much these days." His voice was light and playful.

"To tell you the truth, Fran, I kind of got the feeling you'd rather be left alone."

"You've got a point there, but you coulda called and asked how I was doing."

"You're right."

He poked a finger into my chest. "I've been cooking, you know?"

"Really? Oh that's good news, Frannie! I'm so glad to hear that."

"Yeah, well there's more. After you left, Magda started coming over a lot. She's the one got me cooking, cleaning up the house, going out again . . . We talked, you know, did things together. And . . . I don't know. We hit it off really well." He stopped and took a quick deep breath. He had something big to say and needed a lot of air for it. "We're going to get married, Sam."

Before I had a chance to reply, Magda came up. Earlier she had been standing so far away that I hadn't really seen how good she looked. She had lost weight, and her high Slavic cheekbones stood out prominently. She had always been attractive, but now she looked much younger and almost beautiful. For some reason I looked at her hands and saw that her fingernails were painted a sassy Chinese red.

"How are you, Sam?"

"I'm okay. Congratulations! Frannie just told me you're getting married!"

She frowned, then quickly smiled. "Frannie wants to get married. I haven't decided yet. I think he's just grateful to me for pulling him out of his space walk and back into the mother ship. I told you before, he's got a lotta kinks to work out before I agree to sign that contract!"

He pinched her cheek. "You know you love me."

"Loving's not the question – living is. Love builds the house, but then you got to furnish it. Sam, listen, we're all going down to Dick's Cabin for a meal. That was Ma's favorite place so we thought it was a good idea. Will you come? And would you ask Mr. Durant too? She always had a big crush on him."

"Of course. But are you going to get married?"

They looked at each other and a shyness passed between them that was charming. After all they had been through together, they were back to courting. Nothing had been decided. Frannie was eager, Magda honestly hadn't made up her mind. "She didn't say no."

"That's right, I didn't say no. You go ahead now. I've got to say goodbye to the people. Remember, Frannie, you promised to tell him. Now's a good time."

We watched her walk away. "She was so good to me, Sam. Did everything to take care of me. But those kinks she was talking about? I've got to tell you some things. I promised her I would and I've wanted to for a long time anyway. Let's take a ride before we eat. Drive around a little bit."

Durant was very pleased to be invited to the restaurant. When I told him about Jitka's crush on him, his face went blank. Only after a while did he give a small smile. "Funny. I had a crush on her too. Ostrova women have magical powers over Durants."

"Drive up to the Tyndall place."

I looked at McCabe and raised an eyebrow. In all the time I had spent in Crane's View recently, I had avoided going back there. By accident I drove past once but looked away because it brought back bad memories.

Lionel Tyndall had made a fortune in oil in the twenties. He had owned houses all over the country but preferred Crane's View because it was so close to New York. His was one of the largest houses in town, one of those Colonial behemoths you passed out on Livingston Avenue as you were entering the town limits. Oddly, there wasn't much land around his place.

Tyndall died in the early fifties. His large and greedy family went to war with one another over his vast holdings. The legal suits and countersuits continued for years. During that time, the house stood empty. Town kids started breaking in almost immediately after Tyndall's death. What they found became legend.

Lionel Tyndall was a collector: books, magazines, furniture so large it could only have lived in a house of twenty-five rooms. He loved magic and was an amateur magician and ventriloquist. As a boy I'd heard marvelous tales of kids entering rooms full of elaborate decaying theater sets and mysterious objects with names like the Madagascar Mystery and the Heart of God, but I never saw them. These things were gone by the time we began snooping around inside, and the stories only enhanced the sense of danger and mystery attached to the house.

What I remember was the smoky, dusty smell of the place. Light came in through the windows and played across the impossible number of objects still in there. Boxes of children's toys, a desktop covered with playbills from Broadway shows, a velvet chair that had been stabbed full of kitchen utensils – spatulas, carving knives, soup ladles stuck in backward. Who would think of doing something like that?

Kids and bums. Part of the danger of the house was you never knew who would be there when you snuck in through the broken basement door. Vagrants loved the place because there was a roof over their heads, grand furniture to sleep on, a vast array of things to steal.

Once when we were there two miserable, evil-looking men, both wearing porkpie hats, suddenly came around a corner and scared the shit out of us.

"What are you kids doing here?"

"Same thing you are, mister," said dangerous twelve-year-old Frannie McCabe.

The two looked at each other and, as one, disappeared back into the house's shadows. We continued our scouting party. Soon, though, we started hearing strange sounds coming from rooms not far away – high laughter, furniture being struck, fragile things breaking. We figured where it was coming from and sneaked up to the door.

Racing through the dappled, split light of a cavernous room, the two men chased each other, playing a kind of ghostly tag. They were like children, laughing, scrambling, screeching, jumping over furniture, sliding on the wooden floors, tripping over rolled-up rugs.