I didn’t think Julius Arnoff would tell me anything, but the young associate might. I called Larry Yosano, both his home phone and his mobile, but only got voice mail at both places. I left a message with my own cell phone number.

Of course, Geraldine Graham would know. She’d also know what her mother was referring to when she talked about theft against her household. I called Anodyne Park. Ms. Graham was resting, Lisa told me, and couldn’t be disturbed.

“I really just wanted to know if Augustus Llewellyn’s family worked at Larchmont Hall before he became rich and famous.”

“Who are you working for?” she hissed. “Does Mr. Darraugh know you’re with the newspapers, trying to dig up that old dirt? We never knew the Llewellns. Mrs. Graham met him socially through Mr. Bayard. And if you try to say something else, the lawyer will deal with you, or Mr. Darraugh will take care of you himself.”

I hung up, more bewildered than ever. Had Geraldine been Llewellyn’s lover? But what did that have to do with her mother’s letter to Calvin Bayard?

Geraldine had met Llewellyn socially through Calvin Bayard. Which is also how she had met Kylie Ballantine. Who’d been fired from the University of Chicago because Olin Taverner demanded it of the university’s president. Olin was Geraldine’s cousin as well as a neighbor, even though he spent most of his time in Washington in those days.

Amy Blount had given me her photocopy of Taverner’s letter to the university, along with the picture of Kyhe Ballantine dancing for the Committee for Social Thought and Justice benefit. I still had the copies in my briefcase.

I took them out and studied them. Dancers in Western tights and toe shoes, faces obscured by African shields or masks-who had known one of them was Kylie Ballantine? Or, for that matter, where she was dancing? The shot was of the stage, not of the audience. All you could tell was that it was an outdoor venue, because evergreen branches appeared behind the wings.

Who had taken the picture? Who had sent it to Taverner? I dropped it on my desktop. The more bits and pieces about New Solway that I gathered, the more confused I became. And what about Edwards Bayard’s conviction that Calvin wasn’t his father? The gossip he’d overheard as a child-did that have anything to do with this story, or was it just gossip?

Amy had included a few notes on the Committee for Social Thought and Justice. She said not much had been written about it because it wasn’t as well known as other left-leaning groups of the forties and fifties, “not like the Civil Rights Congress, where Dashiell Hammett sat on the board, and Decca Mitford and Bob Truehoft did groundbreaking legal and social work for African-Americans out in Oakland.” She’d found one article in the Journal of Labor History, part of the oral history of black labor organizers of the forties, which included reminiscences about the beginnings of the group.