“And yet you seem to know things about Eben Chamberlain despite never having met him. His sexual orientation, for one thing.”

Her cell chimed. She glanced at the screen. Her lips didn’t move as she read the text, but it seemed to take effort to stop them.

“That’s just small-town gossip,” she said, flipping the phone over, hiding its light. She took a sip of greenish wine cooler. In addition to the cup-holder, the chair had a storage compartment for the television remote control. For all, I knew, Lynda kept a snub-nosed thirty-eight inside.

When I leaned in the rocker, I brushed some fir needles loose from the garland on the mantle.

“What about Bruce Jewett? What do the local gossips have to say about him?”

The phone chimed, and again, she checked it before replying.

I was detecting a pattern.

“He’s one of those end-of-the-worlders,” she said. “Not a Jesus freak waiting for the Rapture. He’s looking forward to the Boogaloo when it’s open season on darkies. Now me, I don’t see color, but for Bruce everything is racial. The man stays up all night stroking his gun.”

“In fairness, he owns some expensive guns.”

“Huh?”

“He’s making fun of you, Gram,” said Tina from the window. But there was a hint of a smile on her face, as if she didn’t mind.

The ballet continued to play from concealed speakers about the room. The piece had moved into a section full of harps and horns.

I knocked a few more dead needles onto the rug. “I was under the impression that Jewett’s family used to own all this land. He seemed to take pride in the fact that his ancestors were the original settlers. But as I was driving up here, I talked to some guys who were logging his upper woodlot. They wouldn’t be relations of yours?”

“They would.”

“It seemed puzzling to me that he’d given permission for them to rape that nice forest.”

For the first time her smug expression gave way to something else: anger. “Have you ever been raped, Warden?”

The question—and the fierceness with which she asked it—made me blush with embarrassment.

“Because if you had,” she said, “you wouldn’t use that word to describe cutting down a few fucking trees.”

The phone chimed—seemingly with irritation—and again Lynda checked the screen. This time, she felt compelled to answer. Her quick thumbs typed in a long sentence. Within a second of sending it, the phone chimed with an immediate response.

“Your granddaughter told me you had information that might help me,” I said.

“Did she?”

“But since you and your family didn’t know the professor and weren’t living in Stratford at the time—”

“Do you have a family, Warden? A wife?”

“Not yet.”

“I saw you weren’t wearing a ring, but lots of men don’t wear them, especially the tomcats. What about children?”