“Are you going to show Duff the glasses?”

“Maybe.”

“You’d better be prepared for trouble. That Waterson girl will tell her mother and there’s a good chance it will go on from there.”

“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

He sighed. “I’ll phone you as soon as Jim gets to town. And if anything else happens, please call me.”

“I will.”

He took something from his coat pocket, concealing it in his fist, then reached out and put it in my hand. It was a pair of rosary beads.

“Keep them,” he said. “Maybe they’ll do you some good.”

He drove off, even more embarrassed now, and I went into the house. Jack, seemingly exhausted after his morning literary labors, was taking a nap while waiting for me to fix lunch. I took a package of cold cuts and a carton of milk out of the refrigerator and put them on the table with a loaf of bread. Then I opened the door of the old wood stove and threw the rosary beads in where I had thrown the bottle of holy water a couple of nights before.

Afterward I went upstairs to Duff’s room and searched his closet and bureau drawers, but I couldn’t find any part of a Union army uniform. The notebook was on top of the bureau, but nothing had been added to what I had read before. I wondered if it was possible for Duff or anyone to write consistently in a hand so different from his own. I also wondered if Duff knew that I had read his most recent notes.

Also on the bureau now was a key, similar to the one that fitted my bedroom lock. I tried it in Duff’s door, but it didn’t work. Then I went to the storeroom, pulled aside the wardrobe that concealed the door and tried the key.

It unlocked the door. I opened the door and ahead was a flight of stairs. I went back to my room, got my flashlight and then, without waiting to think about it, went back to the storeroom and up the stairs.

I advanced cautiously, shining the light on each step. If anyone had preceded me recently, they had done so without leaving footprints on the dusty treads or dislodging a lot of cobwebs. That was one consolation and another was the thought that spiders probably couldn’t live long in that almost airless passage.

At the top was one large, windowless room, piled high with the same kinds of things that filled the second-­floor storeroom. There were many more pieces of antique furniture, more chests and trunks and hundreds more books stacked on the floor. Most of the things were collected at the far end of the room, leaving plenty of open space near the stairs for the General’s meetings, if they had been held there.