Jane blinked, stared up at Carol, and put one hand on the floor beside her, as if testing the truth of what her eyes told her. “Wow, what am I doing down here?”
Carol helped her to her feet. “I suppose you don’t remember?”
“No. Did I tell you anything more about myself?”
“No. I don’t think so. You told me you were a girl named Millicent Parker, and then you told me you were a girl named Linda Bektermann, but obviously you can’t be both of them and Laura, too. So I suspect that you aren’t any of them.”
“I don’t think so, either,” Jane said. “Those two new names don’t mean anything more to me than Laura Havenswood did. But who are those people? Where did I get their names, and why did I tell you I was any of them?”
“I’ll be damned if I know,” Carol said. “But sooner or later, we’ll figure it out. We’ll get to the bottom of all this, kiddo. I promise you that.”
But what in God’s name will we find at the bottom, down there in the dark? Carol wondered. Will it be something we’ll wish we’d left buried forever?
* * *
Thursday afternoon, Grace Mitowski worked in the rose garden behind her house. The day was warm and clear, and she felt the need for some exercise. Besides, in the garden she wouldn’t be able to hear the telephone ringing and wouldn’t be tempted to answer it. Which was fine, because she wasn’t psychologically prepared to answer the phone just yet; she hadn’t decided how to deal with the hoaxer the next time he called and pretended that he was her long-dead husband.
Because of last week’s torrential rains, the roses were past their prime. The last flowers of the season should have been at the peak of their beauty right now, but many of the big blooms had lost a fifth or even a fourth of their petals under the lashing of the wind-whipped rain. Nevertheless, the garden was still a colorful, cheery sight.
She had let Aristophanes out for some exercise.
She kept an eye on him, intending to call him back the moment he headed off the property. She was determined to keep him away from whoever had poisoned or drugged him. But he didn’t seem to be in a rambling mood; he stayed nearby, creeping among the roses, stirring up a moth or two and chasing them with catlike single-mindedness.
Grace was on her hands and knees in front of a row of intermingled yellow and crimson and orange flowers, hand-spading the earth with a trowel, when someone said, “You have a magnificent garden.”
Startled, she looked up and saw a thin, jaundice-skinned man in a rumpled blue suit that hadn’t been in fashion for many years. His shirt and tie were hopelessly out of style, too. He looked as if he had stepped out of a photograph taken in the 1940s. He had thinning hair the color of summer dust, and his eyes were an unusual shade of soft brown, almost beige. His face was composed entirely of narrow features and sharp angles that gave him a look halfway between that of a hawk and that of a parsimonious moneylender in a Charles Dickens novel. He appeared to be in his early or middle fifties.
Grace glanced at the gate in the white board fence that separated her property from the street. The gate was standing wide open. Evidently, the man had been strolling by, had seen the roses through a gap in the poplar-tree hedge that stood on the outside of the fence, and had decided to come in and have a closer look.
His smile was warm, and there was kindness in his eyes, and he seemed not to be intruding, even though he was. “You must have two dozen varieties of roses here.”
“Three dozen,” she said.
“Truly magnificent,” he said, nodding approval.
His voice wasn’t thin and sharp like the rest of him. It was deep, mellow, friendly, and would have seemed more fitting if it had issued from a brawny, hearty fellow half again this man’s size. “You take care of the entire garden yourself?”