“Darraugh and Mother fought in an interminable, intolerable way after MacKenzie’s death. She called MacKenzie ugly names, cruel names, to my son and suggested MacKenzie could never have fathered a child. Darraugh came to me. I said of course he was MacKenzie’s son. But Darraugh didn’t believe me, and he felt Mother’s words bitterly, felt them as my betrayal of himself and of MacKenzie. He ran away from home. We hired detectives such as yourself, but couldn’t find him.

“I finally fled to France, where I stayed for almost a year, until I learned that Darraugh had suddenly reappeared at Exeter. One of the masters inspired his confidence, it seemed. It was still years before he talked to me again, but when he married, his wife acted as a peacemaker. Elise was a lovely girl. She softened all o? us-well, she softened Darraugh and me. Certainly not Mother, who kept trying to make us despise her for having been a typist when Darraugh met her. When we lost Elise, to leukemia, Darraugh froze over again.”

I pulled over to the side of the road to clean off the headlights and the buildup of snow at the bottom of the windshield. When I got back into the car, Geraldine asked if I’d found anything else in the pond.

“Bits of Crown Derby. One of Kylie Ballantine’s masks.”

“That was my doing,” she said. “How strange it is to talk about all of this so calmly, when I held it fast inside me for five decades. We all bought masks to support Kylie after she lost her teaching position at the University of Chicago. And then, after Calvin brought Renee home, Renee made it clear to me that I had only been one of Calvin’s loves. Only one of the women who traveled this road to Eagle River with him all those years ago. I threw the mask in the pond in the middle of a night much like this one.”

She was quiet for a bit; I thought she’d gone back to sleep, but it was the past she’d journeyed to. “I don’t believe Calvin ever took Renee to the cottage. The family’s agreement with the government had expired, as I said, and Calvin wouldn’t come here if it wasn’t his private home anymore. Besides, he was busy establishing himself in political and social circles with his new wife: after the hearings, he became a public darling. I couldn’t help noticing him, you know. Even when I returned from France and found my wits again, I couldn’t help noticing his comings and goings. It was a small balm to the spirit to know that even if Kylie Ballantine and a dozen others had lain with him on the bearskin rug before the cottage fire, Renee herself never did so.”

“So Catherine doesn’t know about this cottage?” I cried out. “Have we come all this way for nothing?”

“I would much prefer it if you didn’t shout at me, young woman. Calvin didn’t have much interest in children. He didn’t care that Darraugh might be his son, and he paid little heed to his and Renee’s boy. But when Catherine was left to Renee’s care and to his, he became as proud as if he had just invented children and she was the first example ever created. He was growing old, but Renee was still young. Renee had always worked for his firm; he let her take over more responsibility. She was in her element, hiring and firing, buying and selling. Calvin devoted himself to the girl. He used to take Catherine to Wisconsin to fish and ride, until he stopped driving some four years back.”