Alice was about to tell Charlie to quit being dumb when she realized that she was the one being dumb, that Charlie was, in fact, being perceptive: Mrs. Flood’s near faint; the three sugars; the call me Nana. Alice felt guilty. As if she’d been manipulating the older woman, toying with her emotions, haunting her basically, even though it had been her intention to do none of these things. It was still so strange for Alice to think that people could mistake her for Camilla, a response she found both deeply eerie and deeply flattering. On the inside she couldn’t have felt less like Camilla, who was so dynamic, so sexually powerful, so morally complex. Whereas she, Alice, was so dull, so virginal, so “what-you-see-is-what-you-get.” She assumed that their internal differences would be reflected on their external selves, but evidently they were not. Evidently she could pass for Camilla. And the fact that she could thrilled her. It disgusted her that it thrilled her, but, still, it thrilled her.

Thirty seconds later, Mrs. Flood returned with a plate piled high with oatmeal-raisin cookies. Alice and Charlie stayed the bare minimum required by politeness, then hurried off to the car.

• • •

Alice dropped Charlie off at the house, then continued over Greeves Bridge and into town. The trip to Darien had been an out-and-out bust. She’d learned nothing except that Camilla had been a cute baby (no surprise, irrelevant), was fond of artsy-craftsy decorative-type objects that produced a pleasing jangling sound when the wind blew (sort of a surprise, even more irrelevant), and had occupied in the past the room that Alice occupied in the present (a definite surprise, but most irrelevant of all since it was Richard who was responsible for room assignments, not Camilla). She decided to stop by the library.