"Wait a minute. It had my address and everything?"

The cop nodded.

"Did it have my full name?"

"It did."

"Then this is really weird."

"Why is that?"

"Because one of the first things she asked me was what Del was short for. Why would she ask me that if she already knew?" Then something else popped into my head. "Was she even from Chicago?"

"Was that what she told you?"

"Yeah. She was from Chicago, but was moving to Boston for a nursing job at Mass General."

"Her license gives an address in New York, but she did have a boarding pass from a plane originating in Chicago." He wrote something down. "We can check on the Mass General job."

My head was swimming and the interrogation ended soon after that. I think they realized I was harmless. They told me that someone else might be around to ask me questions, but for now they were done.

I tried to calm down, with little success. I thought about giving my mother a call, but wasn't really sure what I would say. I usually refrained from mentioning my father to her. I wandered aimlessly through my apartment for the next hour, and must have opened the fridge a half dozen times looking for who-knows-what. I had absolutely no idea what was going on and what to do. That dilemma was solved when my phone rang. It was the alarm company that serviced my father's house. I had kept the alarm in place until I had time to do something about the house. They told me that the burglar alarm had gone off and they had dispatched the police to the scene. I told them that I would get in my car now, but that I wouldn't be there for close to two hours, and asked them to give the police my number.

I grabbed my wallet, keys, and jacket, and headed out the door. If it turned out to be a break-in, it wasn't random. I knew it had something to do with Izzy. What the hell was going on here? Was it really related somehow to my grandfather? The man had been dead for seventy years. We were a couple of generations past that. What could possibly have come to light now? What did Izzy know that I didn't?

Being a Sunday, the traffic was light in the city, and I made good time getting to the Mass Pike. Usually I took Route 2 when I went to visit my mother—and previously my father—in Northampton. It was a more scenic route. But today speed was on my mind, and Route 2 was going to be a slow road. It was a sunny day in the middle of Columbus Day weekend, and the traffic would be crawling with all the leaf-peepers on the road. The colors were spectacular this year—not always the case—and people were feeling the oncoming winter. The perfect conditions for clogged back roads in New England.

The Northampton police called soon after I got on the highway to let me know that, in fact, someone had tried to break in, but was scared off by the piercing scream of the alarm. The police had done a quick walk-through to determine that the house was empty, and had stationed a car outside. When I arrived, an officer would go in with me and we could determine if anything was missing.