“And you told me that your son Duff was in your car and that he disappeared and you saw the man. And then you said the man was in your kitchen and after he vanished without a trace, your son Duff was there.”

“What are you suggesting, Father?”

“What suggests itself to you, Mrs. Caine?”

At that moment another priest came into the room. He was young, not much over thirty, and slight, with thin shoulders under his too large cassock. He had a bad complexion, extending up to the line of his receding blond hair that seemed rather long in the back for a priest. He also seemed petulant, perhaps annoyed at being summoned.

“This is my assistant, Father Peter Jackson,” said Father Fogarty. “Mrs. Caine, Father, of the famous—or should we say infamous—Caine family.”

“I don’t think one could describe Miss Hannah Caine as infamous,” said Father Jackson after greeting me coldly.

“No, she was a good woman,” Father Fogarty said. Father Jackson had been staring at the whiskey bottle. The old priest got up and put the bottle and the glasses away.

“It’s a pity you couldn’t have had your way after Aunt Hannah’s death,” I said. I was angry and sorry I had come. I didn’t want to believe what he was seemingly trying to make me believe. I told myself there was nothing remarkable in the resemblance between the man I had seen and the photograph. In an old black-­and-­white photograph, any dark-­bearded man might look like another.

“What do you mean, ‘I couldn’t have my way’?” Father Fogarty asked.

“Aunt Hannah was buried in the Caine graveyard against your wishes, wasn’t she?”

“She was not. She was buried in Cainesville Cemetery, the Protestant one, but I blessed the grave, so it’s just as snug a place for her as if she was resting in ours. The undertaker here, John Nichols, found a letter she had sent him twenty years ago requesting that she be buried in Cainesville instead of in the plot behind the farmhouse.”

“But there’s a new grave in the family yard.”

“Well, it isn’t Miss Hannah’s, I’ll guarantee you that. I saw her coffin being put into the ground right here in Cainesville.” Father Fogarty paused. “Where approximately in the yard is this new grave, do you remember?”

“Near the fence on the far side, opposite the gate.”

Father Fogarty nodded. “They’ve dug up the General again.”

“What?” Father Jackson was astounded.