“A key to someone else’s house? I never heard such a ridiculous suggestion.” She sounded fierce, but her eyes were moving uneasily between me and the house.

I pulled out my cell phone. “I agree it sounds ridiculous, but that’s what Catherine told me. Let’s call her to check on that. All I really want to know was if Mr. Bayard did go to Larchmont, if he did see Mr. Whitby. I’m trying to find the person who last saw him alive.”

Ruth looked again from me to the house. Hers wasn’t really an indecisive nature: after a moment’s further hesitation, she ordered me to come with her. I followed her through the side door to an areaway where people left coats and muddy boots. Beyond that, another door opened onto the kitchen, where the two deliverymen were drinking coffee and laughing with someone out of my field of sight. On our right, I could see the food cartons stacked in a pantry.

Ruth whisked me past a back staircase, whose narrow pine steps presaged perilous journeys for anyone carrying laundry or logs or whatever had to be hauled up and down. We passed through a swinging door into the body of the house, where the hall immediately widened. Something dark and highly polished, with thick blue runners down the middle, replaced the pine flooring. Our feet whispered in the blue pile.

Ruth moved so fast that I almost had to trot to keep up with her, so I got only a blurry sense of a dining room with a vast table loaded with silver, followed by a series of doors to smaller rooms, and pale walls hung with art of the kind people like me see only in museums.

When we reached the east end of the hall, Ruth opened the door into a small anteroom and commanded me to remain there. She continued down a right turn in the hall, heading to the front of the house.

The little room was primly furnished, with a couple of hard chairs standing in front of an empty grate. Mullioned windows gave a view of the back of the property. A series of gardens stair-stepped down to a small stream, beyond which lay New Solway’s communal wood. I stared out the window at the bare trees.

A couple of deer stepped out of the woods into the gardens. A Border collie raced out to drive them back into the woods. A man appeared, whistling the collie to his side. The two disappeared toward the outbuildings.

With the live figures gone from the landscape, I turned away, looking for something to read or do as the minutes ticked past. The room held that sense of despair you feel in any waiting area. No one worked or lived here, they only waited for someone to make decisions about them. Like at the doctor.

I abruptly went down the hall in the direction Ruth had taken. This took me to the main entryway, where an ornately carved staircase rose from a marble floor. Life-sized portraits of bygone Bayards were hung on the walls.