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“I’m sorry for them, but very glad for me, Mrs. Smith.”

“The black rally on Holloman Green?”

“Exactly.”

“God loves peace,” she said simply.

“Then why doesn’t He issue more of it?” asked the veteran of military and civilian warfare.

“Because having created us, He moved on to someplace else in a very large universe. Perhaps when He did create us, He put a special cog in our machinery to make us peace loving. Then the cog wore down, and whammo! Too late for God to return.”

“An interesting theory,” he said.

“I’ve been baking butterfly cakes,” Eliza said, leading the way into her mock-antique kitchen. “How about I make a fresh pot of coffee and you try some?”

Butterfly cakes, he discovered, were little yellow cakes Eliza had gouged the hilly tops off, filled the hollows with sweetened whipped cream, then cut the tops in two and put them back the wrong way up; they did look quite like fat little wings. They were, besides, delicious.

“Take them away, please,” he begged after scoffing four. “If you don’t, I’ll just sit here and eat the lot.”

“Okay,” she said, stuck them on the counter and sat down as if she meant to stay. “Now, what brings you here, Lieutenant?”

“Desdemona Dupre. She said you were the one I should talk to about the Hug people because you know them best. Will you fill me in, or tell me to go take a running jump?”

“Three months ago I would have told you to go take that jump, but now things are different.” She toyed with her coffee cup. “Do you know that Bob isn’t returning to the Hug?”

“Yes. Everybody at the Hug seems to know that.”

“It’s a tragedy, Lieutenant. He’s a broken man. There has always been a dark side to him, and since I’ve known him all my life, I’ve known about his dark side too.”

“What do you mean by a dark side, Mrs. Smith?”

“Utter depression — a yawning pit — nothingness. He calls it one of those, depending. His first fully fledged attack happened after the death of our daughter, Nancy. Leukemia.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“So were we,” she said, blinking away tears. “Nancy was the eldest, died aged seven. She’d be sixteen now.”

“Have you a picture of her?”

“Hundreds, but I put them away because of Bob’s tendency to depression. Hold on a minute.” Off she went to return with an unframed color photograph of an adorable child, obviously taken before her illness ate her away. Curly blonde hair, big blue eyes, her mother’s rather thin mouth.

“Thank you,” he said, and put the picture face downward on the table. “I take it he recovered from that depression?”

“Yes, thanks to the Hug. Having to mother the Hug held him together. But not this time. He’ll retreat into trains forever.”

“How will you manage financially?” he asked, not realizing how longingly he was looking at the butterfly cakes.

She got up to pour him more coffee and plopped two cakes on his plate. “Here, eat them. That’s an order.” Her lips seemed dry; she licked them. “Financially we have no worries. Both of our families left us with trust funds that mean we don’t have to earn livings for ourselves. What a horrific prospect for a pair of Yankees! The work ethic is ineradicable.”

“What about your sons?”

“Our trusts pass to them. They’re good boys.”

“Why does the Professor beat them?”

She didn’t attempt to deny it. “The dark side. It doesn’t happen often, honestly. Only when they carp at him the way boys do — won’t leave a touchy subject alone, or won’t take no for an answer. They’re typical boys.”

“I guess I was wondering if the boys are going to join their father in playing with the trains.”

“I think,” Eliza said deliberately, “that both my sons would rather die than enter that basement. Bob is — selfish.”

“I had noticed,” he said gently.

“He hates sharing his trains. That’s really why the boys tried to trash them — did he tell you that the damage was disastrous?”

“Yes, that it took four years to rebuild.”

“That’s just not true. A little boy of seven and another of five? Horse feathers, Lieutenant! It was more a business of going around picking things up off the floor than anything else. Then he beat them unmercifully — I had to wrestle the switch off him. And I told him that if he ever hurt the boys that badly again, I’d go to the cops. He knew I meant it. Though he still beat them from time to time. Never in a furor, like he did over the trains. No more sadistic punishments. He likes to criticize them because they don’t measure up to their sainted sister.” She smiled, a twist of the lips that didn’t register amusement. “Though I can assure you, Lieutenant, that Nancy was no more a saint than Bobby or Sam is.”

“You haven’t had it easy, Mrs. Smith.”

“Perhaps not, but it’s nothing I can’t handle. So long as I can handle life, I’m okay.”

He ate the cakes. “Superb,” he said with a sigh. “Tell me about Walter Polonowski and his wife.”

“They got themselves hopelessly tangled in a religious net,” Eliza said, shaking her head as if at incredible denseness. “She thought he’d disapprove of birth control, he thought she’d never consent to birth control. So they had four kids when neither of them really wanted any, especially before their marriage was old enough to let them get to know each other. Adjusting to life with a stranger is hard, but a lot harder when that stranger changes in front of your eyes within scant months — throws up, swells up, complains, the works. Paola is many years younger than Walt — oh, she was
such
a pretty girl! Very much like Marian, his new one. When Paola found out about Marian, she should have buttoned her lip and kept Walt on as a meal ticket. Instead, she’ll be raising four kids on alimony peanuts, because she sure can’t work. Walt is not about to give her a cent more than he has to, so he’s going to sell the house. Since it’s encumbered by a mortgage, Paola’s share will be more peanuts. Adding to Walt’s troubles is Marian, who is pregnant. That means Walt will have two families to support. He’ll have to go into private practice, which is a genuine pity. He does really good research.”

“You’re a pragmatist, Mrs. Smith.”

“Someone in the family has to be.”

“I’ve heard a rumor from several people,” he said slowly, not looking at her, “that the Hug will cease to exist, at least in its present incarnation.”

“I’m sure the rumors are true, which will make the decisions easier for some Huggers. Walt Polonowski, for one. Maurie Finch for another. Between Schiller’s attempted suicide and finding that poor little girl’s body, Maurie Finch is another broken man. Not in the same way as Bob, but broken all the same.” She sighed. “However, the one I feel sorriest for is Chuck Ponsonby.”

“Why?” he asked, startled at this novel view of Ponsonby, the man he had simply assumed would be the Prof’s heir. No matter how the Hug changed, Ponsonby would surely survive the best among them.

“Chuck is not a brilliant researcher,” Eliza Smith said in a carefully neutral voice. “Bob has been carrying him ever since the Hug opened. It’s Bob’s mind directs Chuck’s work, and both of them are aware of it. A conspiracy between them. Apart from me, I don’t think anyone else has the slightest idea.”

“Why should the Professor do that, Mrs. Smith?”

“Old ties, Lieutenant — extremely old ties. We come from the same Yankee stock, the Ponsonbys, the Smiths and the Courtenays — my family. The friendships go back generations, and Bob watched quirks of fate destroy the Ponsonbys — well, so did I.”

“Quirks of fate?”

“Len Ponsonby — Chuck’s and Claire’s father — was enormously rich, just like his forebears. Ida, their mother, came from a moneyed Ohio family. Then Len Ponsonby was murdered. It must have been 1930, and not long after the Wall Street crash. He was beaten to death outside the Holloman railroad station by a gang of itinerants who went on a rampage. They beat two other people to death as well. Oh, it was blamed on the Depression, on bootleg booze, you name it! No one was ever caught. But Len’s money had vanished in the big crash, which left poor Ida virtually penniless. She funded herself by selling the Ponsonby land. A brave woman!”

“How did you come to know Chuck and Claire in particular?” Carmine asked, fascinated at what could lie behind public façades.

“We all went to the Dormer Day School together. Chuck and Bob were four classes ahead of Claire and me.”

“
Claire?
But she’s blind!”

“That happened when she was fourteen. Nineteen thirty-nine, just after the war broke out in Europe. Her sight had always been poor, but then she suffered retinal detachments in both eyes simultaneously from retinitis pigmentosa. She literally went totally blind overnight. Oh, it was a terrible business! As if that poor woman and her three children hadn’t gone through enough already!”

“
Three
children?”

“Yes, the two boys and Claire. Chuck’s the eldest, then came Morton, and finally Claire. Morton was demented, never spoke or seemed to realize that other people lived in the world. His light didn’t go out, Lieutenant. It was never switched on. And he had fits of violence. Bob says that these days they’d diagnose him as autistic. So Morton never went to school.”

“Did you ever see him?”

“Occasionally, though Ida Ponsonby was afraid he’d fly into one of his rages and used to shut him up if we came over to play. Mostly we didn’t. Chuck and Claire came to Bob’s or my house.”

Mind reeling, Carmine sat battling to maintain his calm, to keep the strands of this incredible story separated as they must be — a demented brother! Why hadn’t he picked up that there was something wrong in the Ponsonby ménage? Because on the surface there was nothing wrong, nothing wrong at all! Yet the moment that Eliza Smith said three children, he
knew.
It began to fall into place. Chuck at the Hug, and mad brother somewhere else…Aware that Eliza Smith was staring at him, Carmine forced himself to ask a reasonable question.

“What does Morton look like? Where is Morton now?”

“Looked like, was, Lieutenant. Past tense. It all happened at once, though I guess there was a little time in between. Days, a week. Claire went blind, and Ida Ponsonby sent her to a blind school in Cleveland, where Ida still had family. Somehow there was a link to the blind school there — an endowment, I think. It was difficult to get into a blind school back then. Anyway, no sooner had Claire gone to Cleveland than Morton died, I think of a brain hemorrhage. We went to the funeral, of course. The things they inflicted on children in those days! We had to tiptoe up to the open casket and lean in to kiss Morton’s cheek. It felt clammy and greasy” — she shuddered — “and it was the first time in my life that I smelled death. Poor little guy, at rest at last. What did he look like? Chuck and Claire. He’s buried in the family plots at the old Valley cemetery.”

Carmine sat with his hypothesis demolished to ruins. No way in a fit Eliza Smith was making any of this up. The Ponsonby tale was true, and all it amounted to was a well-attested fact: that some families, for no reason that made sense, suffered whole strings of disasters. Not accident prone: tragedy prone.

“Sounds as if there’s a weakness in the family,” he said.

“Oh, yes. Bob saw that in medical school, as soon as he’d done genetics. Madness and blindness ran in Ida’s family, but not in the Ponsonbys. Ida went crazy too, a little later on. I think the last time I ever saw her was at Morton’s funeral. With Claire in Cleveland, I didn’t visit the Ponsonby house anymore.”

“When did Claire come home?”

“When Ida went completely mad — not long after Pearl Harbor. Chuck and Bob were never drafted, they spent the war years in pre-med and medical school. Claire had been in Ohio for two years — long enough to learn Braille and find her way around with a white stick the way blind people do. She was one of the first ever to have a guide dog. Biddy’s her fourth.”

Carmine got to his feet, devastated by the magnitude of his disappointment. For one moment he had genuinely thought it was all over; that he had done the impossible and found the Ghosts. Only to discover that he was as far from the answer as ever.

“Thanks for filling me in so well, Mrs. Smith. Is there any other Hugger you think I should know about? Tamara?” He took a breath. “Desdemona?”

“They aren’t murderers, Lieutenant, any more than Chuck and Walt are. Tamara is one of those unfortunate women who can’t pick a good man, and Desdemona” — she laughed — “is British.”

“British says it all about her, huh?”

“To me it does. When she was a kid, they starched her.”

He left Eliza at her front door and plodded back to the Ford.