As we were leaving, she pulled me aside and said, “He’s so different from your description, Miranda. So much better and so much more annoying!”

We visited her together after that. When Hugh did our shopping he invariably brought back a variety of Ding Dongs, Pinwheels, Twinkies, and other sweets for her. When I told Frances he was the one who bought her the junk food, tears came to her eyes. But the poster won her heart forever.

Seeing it the first time, I asked how the hell he’d found it. Hugh said only that he’d been lucky. His assistant Courtney later admitted Hugh had all of his European contacts on the lookout for months before they tracked one down in Wroclaw, Poland. It was a large color poster from the Ronacher Theater in Vienna advertising a 1922 performance by The Enormous Shumda, “world renowned” ventriloquist and, of course, the great love of Frances Hatch’s life. On the poster he is standing with arms crossed, looking huge, confident, and mysterious in a tuxedo and full-length cape. He’s a handsome man with gleaming black hair combed straight back and a wicked little goatee. When Frances saw the picture, she touched her cheeks and exclaimed, “That goatee! He always put Florida Water on it first thing in the morning before he did anything else. You never smelled anything so good in your life.”

As we drove out of New York City that day, she started talking about him again. “In a funny way, Shumda gave me Crane’s View. Not directly. He was gone years before I ever came up here. But Tyndall lived here, and he was Shumda’s biggest fan.”

I turned around and looked at her in the backseat. She was wearing a tomato red wool cap and a fur coat that had seen better days.

“Tyndall, the oil man?”

Frances nodded. “Yes. We met him in Bucharest in the twenties. Back there he was just another fan of Shumda. We kept in touch over the years. In the early fifties he invited me for a weekend to Crane’s View. I fell in love with the place and kept coming back. It was the perfect escape from New York and Lionel was always glad to have me.

“They had a murder there last year.” She didn’t say anything for a while and when I turned to check her, she was asleep. That was one of the few symptoms of her almost hundred years: she fell asleep faster than any person I’d ever known.

We rode in comfortable silence a long time. I looked out the window and watched the city turn into suburbs and then almost country. Hugh put his hand on my knee and said softly. “I love you. Know that?”

I looked at him and said, “No one in the world could be happier than I am right now. No one.”

We didn’t wake Frances until we saw the first exit sign for Crane’s View. In fact, we didn’t wake her at all: a mile before the turnoff, we both jumped when she called out, “Take the next right!”

I turned the rearview mirror to see her. “How’d you know when to wake up?”

She patted away a yawn. “Lionel Tyndall always had a crush on me. He was as ugly as an egg salad sandwich, but that was okay. I’m no prize in that department myself. No, my mistake was sleeping with him a few times. He didn’t know what he was doing. But I did and that made him unreasonable. The guy didn’t know the difference between his big head and his little one. Now go right, Hugh. That’s it. We’re almost there.”

She continued talking as we drove toward the town. I didn’t know what to expect, but what was there pretty much fit what I had imagined. Crane’s View itself was cute and small. The stores in the town center were the basics—food, clothes, hardware, and newspapers—with a couple of specialty shops. It was a town built on hills and from those hills you often caught glimpses of the Hudson River below. Driving around that first day, I kept thinking, It’s a nice place, a real 1950s small upstate town. But there was nothing special about it. I wondered why Frances said she loved it. Crane’s View was everything Frances Hatch wasn’t—quiet, slow moving, unsurprising.

“Stop here! This is the place for lunch. They’ve got the best pizza in the county.”

Hugh braked hard and swerved into a parking spot in front of a dumpy-looking pizza joint. We got out of the car and Frances led the way inside. We were welcomed by the delicious smell of hot garlic. A couple of town studs leaned against the counter and gave us the slow once-over. We each ordered a slice of pizza; when they arrived, they were each as big as an LP record. Frances shook crushed hot pepper all over hers. We took soft drinks out of a refrigerator and sat down at a scarred table.

While we were eating, a handsome man in an expensive-looking double-breasted suit came in. He stopped when he saw us and his face lit up with a big wholehearted smile.

“Frances! What are you doing here?”

“Frannie!”

He came over and they embraced. “I am really happy to see you, old woman! Why didn’t you call and say you were coming? We coulda had a dinner or something.”

“I wanted to see the look on your face when you saw I was still alive. Frannie, these are my friends Miranda and Hugh. This is Frannie McCabe, chief of police. I’ve known him for twenty-five years. How are you, Chief?”

“Good! I’m a married man again. Magda and I finally did it, though I had to carry her kickin’ and screamin’ to the altar.”

“Good for you! Magda McCabe, huh? That’s a nice name. Listen, we’re going to my house after lunch. Is everything all right over there?”

He crossed his arms and looked at the ceiling, exasperated. “Frances, have we had this conversation before? You know I keep an eye on the house for you! How many times do I have to tell you? It could use a paint job, but we’ve talked about that. Otherwise it’s fine. You going to start living there again?”

“No, but they may. That’s why we came up to see it.”

McCabe pulled out a chair and sat down. “It’s a nice house, but if you’re going to live there, it needs work. Definitely a paint job, and the basement gets damp. I could introduce you to some people who’d do the job right and not charge too much.”

Frances finished her pizza and brushed off her hands. “Frannie is the king of Crane’s View. He knows everybody. If they’re not in his family, they used to be in his gang. He was a juvenile delinquent when he was a kid. That’s how we got to know each other: he broke into my house when he was fifteen but I happened to be there at the time.” She turned toward him. “Why don’t you go over there with us?”

“I would, but I have too much stuff to do. There’s a zoning meeting this afternoon and I gotta be there. The company that bought the Tyndall house sold it after the murder there last year. Can’t say as I blame them. Now a consortium’s sniffing around. They want to tear it down and build a hotel or something. What’s a dull little town like ours going to do with a hotel? Who’s going to stay there, Rip Van Winkle?

“Anyway, I gotta go. If you two need anything, she has my phone number. I wish you were moving back, Frances. I’d rather visit you here than down at that creepy apartment in the city.”

They kissed and we shook hands. Starting for the door, he was called back by the smirking counterman, who held out the pizza he’d ordered. McCabe grinned and went back for it.

“Is there much crime here? You mentioned a murder before.”

His smile evaporated and he stared at me before answering. “That was a one-time thing. There were a lot of extenuating circumstances. Crane’s View is a quiet town. Dull most of the time. Lotta blue-collar people here, some commuters. Everyone works hard. On the weekends they mow their lawn or watch a game. I’ve been a cop here a long time. The worst crime we have is, once in a while someone gets his car boosted. That’s all.

“Listen, I really gotta go. Ms. Hatch, I will talk to you soon. And let me know if you folks are going to move in. I’ll send some people over before you do to straighten the house up so at least it’ll be livable when you first get in.”