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and the heavy hopsack covers on the chairs, these clearly were from another time.
    The bed had not been slept in. We had tried the lights. They didn't work.
    "She didn't pay her bill, I guess." The deputy coughed again.
    The dust, the cobwebs, that pervasive cloying stench. We went with flashlights to the first floor, and the cellar is the place that you suspect you ought to check first but you always wait until last.
    We stood inside the pantry on the first floor in the back, the stench even worse there. I strained to muster control as I pulled the door. The smell was like a veil that struck us, wafting up. We went down slowly, board by creaking board.
    You know I'm a trained observer. I've been taught to stop emotion, just to take in what I see. But that's difficult, especially when you're staring by the aid of flashlights, and you see only one object at a time, the horror mounting until you don't think you can bear it.
    First, the woman's headless body on the floor, the stench like old potatoes that have turned to liquid in their jackets. Something has seeped from her. The urge to vomit is uncontrollable.
    Then, for no reason you can understand, you scan up with your flashlight, and you see her head jammed in the noose, the white hair dangling, flesh now viscous on her cheeks, her open eyes dissolving toward you.
    But that isn't it yet, not the final detail, for once more without a reason you can understand, as if you know that it will be there, you aim your flashlight toward a corner, toward a tiny table meant for dolls and set for tea, where tied to a toy chair, slumped, is another body, small and lonely, a young girl. You know this from the long hair and the bow and dress; you wouldn't know it from the face which has been food for insects. And that isn't it yet, not the final detail, for the clothes she wears are not from our time, but rather from the old days, straw hat, button shoes and yellowed crinoline, a moth-eaten satin party dress, as if she wore a costume or had been compelled to act a part she didn't like, the bow around her neck so tight her blackened tongue is bulging out.
    "My Christ," the deputy moans behind me, and the bile that spews up in my mouth is bitter, scalding.
***
    "All right, help me understand this."
    We are in my office downtown, its lights glaring painfully. Although the night outside is cold, filled with sudden autumn gusts, I have opened all the windows, turned the fan on, anything to clear the stench.
    "She killed the child, then hanged herself, that much is obvious," I say. "But why? I'm new here. I don't understand this. What would make her do it?"
    I hear the rattle of the fan.
    The doctor clears his throat. "Agnes lived there since the house was new. She and her husband built it."
    "But I thought that…"
    "They had money then," the doctor goes on without pause. His voice is weak. "He was a banker. They were prosperous."
    "The husband?"
    "Andrew was his name. In 1928. The world was theirs. They had a child, a daughter who was three. She died that fall. Diphtheria. I know this from my father who was the doctor in charge of the case. He couldn't save the daughter, and he watched the parents ruined by their loss. The husband left one day. The wife became a recluse. It's so easy now in retrospect to understand. You see, from time to time there have been children missing, usually in autumn, just as now. That girl we found, for instance. All the people who've been looking for her. You'll soon have to notify her parents. I don't envy you. My guess is that as Agnes aged, as she became more lonely and reclusive, she went crazy. She tried to find a substitute for what she'd lost. She kidnapped children, but of course she couldn't let them live to tell what she'd done. She killed them but believed that they were still alive, her own child."
    "The way children play make believe with dolls?" I ask.
    "If that analogy helps you. This is sickness so bizarre it threatens sanity to think about it.