“He wouldn’t see you. He wouldn’t open the door.” The Judge notices a silk scarf in one of the boxes; when he narrows his eyes he realizes that the blobs of orange are lilies, like the ones which grow in his own yard. “How long do you plan on staying?” he asks March.

Gwen stops chewing so she can hear the answer. Her whole life depends on this.

“I thought a week.” March looks around at the accumulation of a lifetime. “But there’s so much to do. And so much of what’s left in the house was Alan’s or mine. I found all my sweaters, every one I ever wore, from kindergarten on up, folded into two boxes in the attic.”

“Richard should have come with you,” the Judge says.

“Oh, no.” March pours more coffee. For some reason, just the mention of Richard’s name makes her feel flushed, as if she’d already betrayed him, somehow. It was going up to the attic, that was the problem. She keeps seeing dust, out of the comer of her eye. She keeps hearing the door shut, the way it used to when she and Hollis sneaked up there; she keeps feeling the way she did whenever he was near. “Richard had classes. Midquarter exams. He couldn’t leave.”

“I don’t care what he had. He shouldn’t have let you come back alone.”

Gwen puts down the bag of cookies. This judge guy is more interesting than she would have imagined.

“Cookie?” March offers the Judge, hoping to change the subject.

Bill Justice takes two bites of a Mint Milano, and when there’s only a small piece left, he whistles.

“Sister,” he calls.

March and Gwen look at each other, confused.

The Judge whistles again and holds out the piece of cookie, and then, all of a sudden, he gets a pained expression. His whole face falls.

“Where’s the dog?” he asks, and when March looks blank he tosses the cookie bit on the table. “Shit,” he mutters. “Where’s the damned dog?”

The Judge rises to his feet and heads for the door. He’s already pulling on his overcoat when March and Gwen reach him.

“Judith got a dog last winter,” the Judge says. His breathing sounds off and he’s having trouble finding his car keys. “A West Highland terrier.”

“A West Highland terrier?” March feels a bit dazed.

“A little white dog,” the Judge says, impatient. “Have you seen her?”

Now that it’s mentioned, March remembers Judith saying something about a dog she got for Christmas. Judith had been planning to come out to California for Thanksgiving, and she worried about putting the dog in the kennel.

“There was something out on the porch last night,” Gwen pipes up, but when her mother and Bill Justice look at her, expectantly, she feels silly. “But it was a rabbit.”

“I didn’t remember there was a dog,” March says. “There was no sign of it when we got here.”

“Oh, fuck,” the Judge says.

March gets goose bumps from the sound of those words coming from Bill Justice. It is so unlike him to speak in that manner, that she feels she has done something terrible, perhaps even criminal, in forgetting Judith’s dog.

The Judge opens the hall closet and takes out a leash neither March nor Gwen noticed when hanging up their coats; then he goes outside without bothering to say goodbye.

“It probably died because of us,” Gwen says. Her voice sounds sad, but also accusatory, as if the whole thing were really March’s fault.

March grabs a sweater. “Look around the yard,” she tells her daughter. “I’m going with the Judge.”

Bill Justice is already backing out of the driveway, but March runs over and taps on the window. When he stops, she gets into the Saab and they drive slowly along the road, windows open, calling over and over again for Sister, the little white dog.

“I wasn’t thinking,” March says as they drive too fast over the bumps. Or perhaps the problem was that she was thinking too much about subjects she shouldn’t have allowed past the first circle of her mind. Just as before, Hollis is taking up too much room. “I was so upset about Judith.”

Instead of listening to her excuses, the Judge is peering into the bushes as he drives. At the turnoff, they head for the village, driving so slowly that other cars honk, then pass them by. They keep the windows open and continue to whistle and call out. They try the main roads, and most of the back roads; they drive past the schoolyard and the park and St. Bridget’s Hospital. The Judge stops to phone Bud Horace, the animal control officer, from the pay phone outside the Red Apple market, but Bud has no reports of a white dog being sighted. At last, the Judge decides to look down by the Marshes. The sky is already purple; the first few stars have appeared, suddenly, as if someone had thrown a handful of silver across the edge of the world.

“Hard to believe this is where Alan wound up.” The Judge shakes his head. They drive along the salty blacktop, then turn down a dirt path.

“Sometimes I forget I have a brother,” March admits.

“Well, you’ve got one,” the Judge says. “And that’s where he lives.”

There is a ramshackle house at the very edge of the Marshes; it’s fashioned out of wooden shingles that are the color of a dove’s wings. Most people say it’s the Founder’s house, and that Aaron Jenkins built it with his own two hands, although others remember stories of a fisherman who lived down here at the turn of the century, a nasty fellow who set out eel traps and refused to speak when greeted by anyone from the village.

“It’s parkland,” the Judge tells March, “but the town council lets him stay. Once or twice a year someone from social services comes over, but he won’t open the door for them. The ladies on the library committee pay for his expenses. Judith was the one who started that, and she usually brought him his groceries. She tried to check on him once a week or so.”

“I had no idea. She never talked about him.”

March looks out at the thick grass and the reeds. She has always blamed Alan for driving Hollis off, with his cruelty and his jealousy. Now she wonders if she herself wasn’t guilty of the same exact sin she has always blamed on her brother. Perhaps she also has carried a grudge too long.

“Well,” March says, “with Judith gone, Alan can sell the house and Fox Hill and have enough money to take care of himself. That was his one good deed-allowing Judith to live there.”

“He wasn’t the one who let her live there.” The Judge watches, closely gauging March’s reaction. “It was Hollis.”

Well, there you have it-she truly didn’t know who owned Fox Hill. She has turned to the Judge, riveted.

“Alan sold the place right after Julie died; he was desperate for money, he was drinking it all up, and he got a nice offer from some corporation based in Florida. That corporation turned out to be Hollis. I was coming over to tell you today. You’ve been left all of Judith’s personal effects, but Hollis owns the house.”

The Judge clears his throat. He has always disliked Hollis, but not for the reasons other people might have, because of his mean streak. The Judge, after all, has seen men at their worst and at their best in his courtroom. As far as he can tell, the problem with Hollis is that he has always blamed others for what’s wrong with his life. He never takes any responsibility, and a man like that, the Judge knows, simply cannot be saved. Truth is, he wouldn’t want to be.

“It appears that Hollis got everything he wanted,” the Judge says now.

“It does look that way,” March says.

“Well, let’s hope so, at any rate. Let’s hope he’s satisfied.”

The Judge stops the car to call out his window for the dog; then he puts the car in park and gets out. March gets out too. She’s shaken by the proximity of the past. There is her brother, on the other side of these reeds. There is Hollis, beyond the hilltop and the trees, the owner of the house where she grew up and now sleeps, the owner of everything the eye can see. He was so poor and neglected when he came to them that he did not know it wasn’t necessary to stand by the back door, like a dog, to get his dinner.