Ms. Chigwell swallowed her tea in large gulps, her throat muscles working, her left hand clenching and unclenching. Finally she felt enough in command of herself to speak again.

“Well, as you can tell, I never married. My mother died when we were seventeen. I kept house for my father and then for Curtis. I even learned to type so I could help them with their work.”

She smiled mirthlessly. “I didn’t try to follow what Curtis did at that company he worked for. My father had been a great country doctor, a master diagnostician. I suspect all Curtis did was take people’s temperatures when they felt ill to see if they had a legitimate excuse to leave work early. By 1955, when he started in with these detailed records of his, I no longer knew anything of what went on in the medical world—the changes were too vast from my childhood days. But I still knew how to type, so I typed whatever he brought home for me.”

Her story made me shiver a little. And mutter a little word of thanks to my mother’s spirit. Fierce, intense, prickly, she’d been difficult to live with, but my earliest memories included her strong belief in me and what I could achieve with my life.

Ms. Chigwell must have seen some of the thought in my face. “Don’t pity me. I’ve had many fine moments in this life of mine. And I never indulge in self-pity—a far greater weakness than tea, and one Curtis is most subject to.”

We sat quietly for a while. She poured herself a second cup and drank it in slow, measured sips, staring sightlessly into the fire. When she had finished she put the cup down with a decisive snap and moved the tray to one side.

“Well, I mustn’t keep you with my maundering. You’ve come a great distance and I can tell you’re in a fair amount of pain, even though you’re trying to hide it.”

She stood upright with only a slight effort. I copied her slowly and stiffly and followed her up the carpeted stairs to the second floor. The upper landing was lined with bookshelves. Clearly a great many of Ms. Chigwell’s fine moments had come from books—there were easily a thousand of them, all neatly dusted and carefully aligned on their shelves. How she’d ever known something was amiss among this orderly infantry was amazing. It took someone axing my front door to bits for me to know I’d suffered a home invasion.

Ms. Chigwell nodded toward an open door on my right. “Curtis’s study. I came in here last Monday evening because I smelled fire. He was trying to burn his notebooks in his waste can. An appalling idea, since the waste can was leather, and it, too, began to burn with a terrible odor. I knew then that whatever was bothering him had to do with those records. But I thought it would be most wrong of him to back away from the facts by destroying them.”