“He told you these things?”

She gave a brittle laugh. “Good heavens, no. I kept in touch with him through servants’ gossip: it’s how the wealthy have always kept track of each other. One’s servants know everything that one does, and their friends are the servants in the other great houses. Until Renee built a thick wall of silence around his illness, I would know whatever Calvin did; Lisa could tell me. If she wanted to punish me, it was with tales of great events Renee and Calvin had taken part in, with him glowing proudly over Renee. If Lisa wanted to comfort me, she told me of their quarrels.”

I thought of my mother’s words on the worries of grand ladies. I was glad of the poverty I’d grown up in, glad of having to earn every dime I’d ever spent. You pay a high price for money, too high a price.

We fell silent while I concentrated on the road, stopping every thirty or forty miles to clean the headlights. By the time we reached Wassau, it was midnight, but the snowplows were out and the road became easier to negotiate. I pulled over at a truck stop for a cup of bitter coffee and a detail map of the north woods. Back in the car, I handed the map to Geraldine and asked her to see whether she could piece together the route to the lodge. She couldn’t read the map, she said: the print was too small, even with her glasses.

She dozed off again. I had started the journey exhausted; the cones of snow swirling into the headlights hypnotized me into drowsiness. I turned on the radio, but only picked up all-night revivals of religion. I pushed the tape player in case Marc had been listening to something.

An old man’s scratchy voice came through the speakers. “Oh, no, young man, no tape recorders. You may take some notes, but no one puts my words on tape.”

A younger, deeper voice responded, “Very well, sir.”

Several loud clicks followed, and then the young man spoke again, his voice muffled. “I’m writing a book about Kyhe Ballantine. I found a letter from her to Armand Pelletier in which she mentions a meeting with you.”

The Saturn fishtailed madly. I fought for control, spinning the steering wheel in the direction of the skid. By some miracle, we ended up in the middle of the road, facing south, but we weren’t in the ditch.

“That’s Olin,” Geraldine sat up in surprise, ignoring the car’s gyrations. “And Marc Whitby,” I agreed.

I pulled over as close to the edge of the road as I could without going into the ditch and rewound the tape to the beginning. Marc apparently had put his tape recorder in his pocket or a briefcase, but hadn’t turned it off, he’d recorded the whole conversation.

Olin laughed thinly. “The Negro dancer-what was her name? Ballantine, yes, that’s right. She was very exercised. But I told her she had made a gross error in judgment if she thought weeping and shouting would change my mind: emotional women have always disgusted me. And an emotional Negress is a terrible parody of feeling.”