Friends accused me of being a young man with an old soul—the “youngest old fart” they’d ever met—and maybe they were right. For much of my youth, I had suffered under the delusion of having been born too late. I was a displaced person from the era of the Voyageurs who had set out across the Great Lakes in bateaux in search of furs; I was a temporal fugitive from the age of the Klondike Gold Rush when men literally bet their lives against nature with more than riches on the line. Sometimes I still succumbed to this mode of thinking. An overfondness for nostalgia was the crack running down the middle of my character.

I saw Chamberlain’s farmhouse, in other words, through some heavily clouded lenses.

Only as I neared the circular drive did I feel myself pulled forcibly back to the twenty-first century. Two newish-looking vehicles, both recently washed of salt and sand, reflected the sun like colored mirrors. One was a forest-green Toyota Land Cruiser; the other was a Mini Cooper Clubman with a hard top and a chassis the color of French vanilla ice cream. The Land Cruiser must have belonged to Mrs. Chamberlain; the luxury SUV suited a wealthy woman who had grown up on the South African veldt.

Who drove the Mini, I couldn’t guess.

Shadow had passed from comatose sleep into a more fitful state; he twitched his tail and growled as if dreaming. Lizzie had said he would doze for four or five hours—time enough for me to conduct my courtesy interviews. The wolf was ahead of schedule, and what would I do if he awakened in a bad temper, willing to break his teeth on the steel gate?

I decided to park some distance from the house to minimize possible disturbances to his rest.

As I stepped outside, I saw my breath sparkle in the afternoon sunshine. I loved the cold because it always made me more conscious of my animal self: strong heart pushing warm blood through my arteries, network of nerves sending electric messages from my fingers and toes to my brain, thin skin that was no defense at all against the elements.

I closed the door quietly and surveyed the massive house with genuine appreciation.

The front shrubs had been securely wrapped in burlap against the coming storms or covered with tent-shaped wooden shelters. The drive had been marked with reflective rods to guide the plowman so he wouldn’t tear up the lawn when he pushed aside the inevitable snow.

An antique sleigh had been parked beneath the elms. Its bells jingled in the breeze.

The front porch was stacked with a pile of wood that looked entirely decorative. Fir boughs trailed along the rails. Every window on both floors boasted its own green wreath.

The professor was dead. And Mariëtte Chamberlain had implied she lived elsewhere. So whose house was this that it should be so elaborately decorated?