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scarred banquet table, was John Dutton, a nonagenarian historian for Windsor County. He was scrutinizing record books and reading aloud the details of land records and property transfers, road construction and subdivisions to a transcriptionist that Wade used from time to time. John was a deliberate man with a face that showed its age like dried, cracked earth. Entries handwritten a hundred years ago are difficult for most people to decipher; John Dutton, with amazingly sharp lucidity, was able to read the faded sepia-colored ink in the old ledgers. He declaimed names aloud with beautiful cadence and deliberation, and they were invariably proper English names: Evangeline Peabody sold 6.2 acres to Lawrence Saunders for sixty-two dollars; William Mathews subdivided a five-hundred-acre parcel of woodlands and wetlands and sold a seventy-five-acre meadow to Alida Buchanan; a class 4 road runs across the northern ridge of Robert Bacon’s land one hundred yards from the property line. Seeing that John was in the midst of his stentorian declarations, I suggested to Wade that we talk in the records room.
    He gestured his assent, and I followed him into an adjacent office with one entire wall neatly filled with dozens of green and red leather binders. The room smelled like glue and carbon paper. We sat down opposite each other at a rectangular monk’s table.
    He scrutinized me. “Miss Rural Elegance, you look tired.”
    “I’m a wreck. Can’t sleep. Nightmares.”
    “Maybe you should read two books at night instead of one.”
    “I do. Last night I started with a Josephine Tey mystery and then around three I switched to this book about what the world would be like if none of us were in it.” I paused and ran my hands over the table bearing the scars of what was probably life at the mills in the nineteenth century. Thinking for a moment of all those hardscrabble lives, I said, “I just keep seeing her. I keep seeing Angela where I found her. It was like he … it was like he dug up the fresh snow so he could lean her against that tree. So that somebody like me would find her propped up and bright pink when the melting began. When the sun was thawing her face.”
    “So you think he thought about it, that he planned it … how she was going to look in three months’ time?”
    “I do.”
    I heard a gust of early-spring wind slamming against the town hall, the rafters creaking. Wade had a lost look on his face and for a moment he reminded me of an emaciated, contemplative figure in one of Paul’s better-known paintings, owned by the Whitney Museum. And then I remembered.
    “Before I forget, Paul wants you to call.”
    Wade hunched down in his chair. “Yeah, I know, he left one of his frantic messages. Worrying about something insignificant.”
    “Worrying about you, mostly, I would say.”
    “What’s to worry? I have no other life. No lover. He sees me every day and night.”
    “That’s just it. Maybe he thinks you will … go off eventually and leave him.”
    “How could I do that? He needs me. I’ve repeatedly told him that I’m terminally single.” Wade paused thoughtfully. “He’s just generally afraid of things.”
    “Elderly fright, I think they call it.”
    The biographical content on Wikipedia and other Internet sources gave conflicting information about Paul’s actual age. He claimed to be seventy-five, but both Wade and I hedged that he was closer to eighty—Paul guarded his real age as zealously as an over-the-hill starlet. The wind had brought with it a raw draft of cold that seeped into the room. I rubbed my hands together. “Jesum … chilly in here,” I said.
    Wade indicated all the leather-bound folders of land transfers, of births and deaths and marriages. “It can get a bit breezy from all the ghosts trafficking in and out of this place,” he remarked.
    “Come on!”
    “I’m telling you. It gets really weird in here sometimes when you’re alone. Winter nights especially. I often