Doubtful after what they had learned from the operator at the telephone company. Nathaniel had suggested going there to look up Mrs. Wilcox’s address in the listings, reasoning that a banker’s house would have a phone. He found an L. A. Wilcox at 414 Port Republic, and asked one of the operators if that would be Lucien Wilcox, who had owned the bank. She replied that it was, although Mr. Wilcox had died two years ago. His widow lived there now—poor woman, she’d outlived two husbands. Had she? Nathaniel asked, attempting to sound ingenuous. That wouldn’t be Judith Wilcox, whose first husband died in the war of cholera, would it? Why, yes, it was, replied the operator; then, her face clouding, she asked the boys who they might be, and Nathaniel told her they were old friends of the family, and left immediately. He was proud of his detective work; hell, he’d told his brothers, he could get a job with the Pinkertons.

Some ten minutes had gone by when the maid returned. Opening the door, she said, “Pleaseya, coomin year.” They entered a dim hall with a central staircase, and were brought to a sitting room whose walls were painted in stripes of sunlight falling through the louvers of shutters closed over closed windows, apparently to keep out the heat, though the opposite effect was achieved. The stifling air was made more so by a strong smell of cologne and medicine, the scents of boudoir and pharmacy combined. At the far end, an elderly woman, holding a cane in one hand and wearing a dark blue dress with lace sprouting from collar and cuffs, sat enthroned in an oval-backed chair.

“Thank you, Arthurlene,” she said in a near whisper, then turned her small head to gaze directly at the boys. The shadows blurred her features, but a single slash of the barred light fell across her eyes—two steel-gray buttons fastened under gray brows bushy as a man’s. “Would you gentlemen care for some lemonade? I would think lemonade would be in order on a day like this,” she said; her accent reminded them of their mother’s, adding a syllable to one-syllable words, two to three.

“Lemonade would be fine, ma’am,” answered Nathaniel, and his manner of speech, compared to hers, sounded harsh, rushed, and somehow impolite.

“Three lemonades, if you please, Arthurlene,” she said to the maid, and then, after looking at her great-nephews for another ten or fifteen seconds, murmured, “And so you are Elizabeth’s boys.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Forgive me for making you wait in this ghastly heat. I wasn’t prepared to receive callers.”

“Oh, we didn’t mind.…”

“You’ll also have to forgive me for not standing up. I’ve an arthritis that afflicts me, heat or frost. Come closer so I can have a better look at you.”