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cautiously circling the room, still confused because there were no high cabinets.
    The small traveling clock beside the cot read 11:25. When, in fact, was the last time I had a good New Year’s Eve? It was a long time ago, when I had been in New York only about two years. I had gone to a party in the West Village, filled with young actors and actresses and designers and writers, all hungry, all dedicated, all expounding youthful theories. As I rocked, I pictured the apartment and the food and the drinks, but I couldn’t remember a single name. Where were they all now?
    A knock on the cottage door brought me out of my reverie. For a moment I was afraid. Then I heard Jo calling my name. She walked in carrying a bottle and several manila envelopes.
    “I just couldn’t be alone on New Year’s Eve,” she said, “and I found some old table wine.”
    I went into the small kitchen and brought back two glasses. The wine was terrible, but so what? Seeing Jo slump into the rocker, I sat on the cot.
    “Last New Year’s Eve, Harry and I consumed a whole bottle of pear brandy.” She paused and rocked. “Well,” she added, “maybe it was the year before.” She laughed crazily, despairingly, and then: “But there won’t be any pear brandy ever again . . . will there?”
    Pancho began to circle the rocker. Jo put her glass on the rocker arm, then decided it was not secure and placed it on the floor. Pancho flew away.
    “I thought,” she said, tapping the manila envelopes she held on her lap, “that we should start looking through it all tonight.”
    She stood up, walked to the cot, placed the envelopes down on it, and returned to the rocker. I could see the writing on the top envelope: “1980–1981.”
    Her request startled me. It was New Year’s Eve, almost midnight. She had brought in some wine, seeking company. It wasn’t the right time to start digging through old letters.
    I looked at her skeptically. She stared back at me—defiant, a bit frightened, a bit pleading.
    Suddenly I realized why she had brought the envelopes to me. If her neighbor—that woman Mona Aspen—had been murdered in the same manner as Harry, it might mean that the police were right. Perhaps a pack of homicidal house thieves was prowling the area, breaking into houses for valuables. Harry’s murder might have been just a random event; he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jo didn’t want to believe that.
    I opened an envelope and shook a few items out onto the blanket. The first was a letter in a torn envelope. It was written to Harry from a woman in California who asked for advice in the raising of Russian blues. Her handwriting was very hard to read. I could see a mark on the upper-right-hand corner of the letter, signifying that Harry had answered it and noting the date when he had answered it.
    The next item was a request from a man in Madison, New Jersey, who wrote that he had met Harry at a cat show in Philadelphia and now he needed an out-of-print book on eye disease in cats. Did Harry know where he could get hold of a copy? Again there was the telltale mark on the corner indicating that Harry had responded—but there was no way to tell what his response had been. I started to look at the next item—a note attached to a newspaper clipping—when I heard Jo say: “Please, I didn’t mean you should start right now. I thought . . . I mean, we must drink the wine, at least until midnight.” I put the clipping down.
    Jo started to rock furiously in her chair. She closed her eyes and said, “Mona Aspen was a wonderful woman. Did you know that?”
    “I didn’t know her at all,” I replied.
    “I thought maybe you had been to see her horses and met her.”
    “Was she a breeder?”
    “No. Mona’s place is down the road. It’s a layover barn. Trainers send their sick and broken-down racehorses to her. She nurses them back to health. Years ago there used to be many horse farms around here—layover barns, breeding