Annie saw that winter had already played havoc with the driveway. Bumping up the hill toward the darkened house—could the old man have gone to sleep so early in the evening?—she recalled the ravages of those long-ago winters when ice and snow dislodged, then tumbled stones into the gutters, making the road nearly impassable; a car would lift and fall as the wheels gripped and lost traction, then slide and swing abruptly sideways, its front wheels spinning in mud, its back ones caught precariously on the uneven surfaces of rocks. Uncle Greg must have given up; the road had never been as bad as this. She opened her window the better to see, and poked out her head. For an instant, the air took her breath away, Hudson Valley winter air with its lung-drowning dampness, summer’s humidity gone dead and inhuman, and she felt on her forehead and nose stinging particles of hard snow as though the block of the invisible sky was being chipped away.

The frozen fields spread out on either side of the road, black where clumps of evergreens sat in their pools of darkness, faintly luminous with snow beneath the leafless branches of deciduous trees that her grandfather had planted in another century.

The car lifted its snout, wheels spun, the motor coughed, and she gained a level area where the road circled the house. A faint light flickered from an upstairs bedroom. He was not dead!

During her first three days in New York, she had phoned Uncle Greg several times, morning and evening, from the Murray Hill Hotel where she had taken a room.

When, at five this afternoon, there still had been no answer, she determined to do what she knew she must do, to drive up to Nyack, to discover the corpse.

She had listened too long to the ringing of the phone, gazing across the inner court of the hotel to a window facing her own. There, next to a half-emptied bottle of milk, she had seen a pair of long white feet resting on the sill. Was that person dead too? Lying on the floor of his room with his feet so neatly, so madly crossed, next to the remains of his last meal? The hotel was not as her father had once described it to her. The grandeur she had imagined, and which she had decided to enjoy for a few days no matter what the cost—at least if it was within reason—was gone, leaving only whispers of itself in the cavernous rooms, the marble bathrooms, the ragged faded carpeting along its dusty corridors. The lobby was full of old people staggering with age, dismayed by drunks, starting nervously at the clang of elevator doors. Here and there, vaguely criminal-looking men in tight blue or gray suits surreptitiously ground out their cigarettes on the floor.