“What else could it be?” Fitz snatched a look up and down the road, as if they might have missed something. “Dick said you take Franklin through the village till it ends and you’re there. So this has to be it, right?”

“It looks like Disneyland,” Corey said.

She said, “It does. And this is only the gatehouse. Imagine,” she said, “just imagine what the big house is going to be like.”

The others had begun to gather in a scrum around Ken’s car, the adults alert and eager, the kids looking sheepish, as if they’d been the cause of some catastrophic loss and here was the evidence of it staring them in the face. She noticed Nancy Eggers in particular—she was the last one to emerge from any of the cars and she stood there in a slouch, gazing vacantly at the empty gatehouse, as if it had nothing to do with her. She was pretty enough, with her big eyes and the lipstick she’d begun to wear, her black hair cut in a pageboy and pinned up on one side with a barrette, but when was the last time anybody had seen her smile? You would have thought she was going off to prison instead of a new life that would make the old one in Boston look like something out of a Dickens novel.

“Where is everybody?” Royce demanded, his voice high and querulous. “I thought at least somebody’d be here to greet us or let us in or whatever. Should we try the gate?”

“Are you sure this is the right place?” Charlie had come up to stand there with the other men on the edge of the pavement, gazing dubiously at the gate. He was wearing blue jeans and a flannel shirt open at the collar, as if that was what rural life would expect of him. “I wouldn’t want to see you get an ass full of buckshot, my friend. These are good country folk out here, never forget that.”

Just then she became aware of the sound of an automobile coming up the road behind them and swung round expectantly. It wasn’t Dick. And it wasn’t Tim. It was a stranger in a battered station wagon, and when he pulled up to the stop sign she flagged him down. She took in his tortoiseshell glasses, the baseball cap, a face of angles and gouges and a straggle of hair the color of Fitz’s. In the next moment she was leaning into the open window. “Excuse me,” she said, “but is that”—pointing across the street to the stone turrets and mute gate—“the Hitchcock estate?”

“Private property, as far as I know,” the man said, squinting up at her. He paused. “That’s why they’ve got the gate.”