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shared flue, drawing Merlin to the hearth.
    Something on the roof was testing the copper spark-arresting hood atop the chimney. Having installed it himself, Grady knew that it couldn’t be easily removed.
    Because no fire currently burned, the damper was engaged between the smoke chamber and the firebox. If something got into the flue, it could not penetrate the steel-plate damper and enter the bedroom.
    Abandoning the chimney hood, the roof-travelers scurried down the west slope.
    As the noises faded toward the back of the house, Merlin hurried out of the bedroom. Grady reached the top of the stairs just as the wolfhound arrived at the bottom.
    Descending, he wondered if he had locked the back door after they had come in from the dog’s late-afternoon exercise. Then he wondered why he was apprehensive.
    He could not deny that something less than fear but more than mere disquiet gripped him as he sought Merlin through the first floor and found him in the kitchen. The dog stood at the door. He wanted to go outside.
    Grady hesitated.

Nine

    T he potatoes were stored in a walk-in room within the windowless cellar, behind a stout oak door with iron hardware, as if they were a treasure worth guarding.
    Deep shelves lined the smaller room. On the shelves were many well-ventilated baskets that each contained three layers of spuds.
    The highest shelves held only a few baskets. Standing on a step stool, Henry Rouvroy put the two suitcases full of currency on a top shelf, flat on their sides and against the wall.
    After climbing off the stool, he could not see the precious luggage overhead. He returned to the kitchen. In a day or two, he would find another and better hiding place for the money.
    Because he didn’t care for potatoes, he would throw away that starch stash and rip out the shelves. Properly refitted, the potato cellar would be an excellent place to keep a woman when eventually he got one.
    In Jim and Nora’s bedroom, he selected underwear, socks, jeans,a flannel shirt, and work boots from Jim’s limited wardrobe. Although Henry was less work-toned than his twin brother, everything fit him.
    The shirt was from Walmart, not from L.L. Bean. The jeans were cut for working and for horseback-riding, not for Sunday in the park. The boots had no style whatsoever. The disguise was perfect, but for a moment he felt displaced, cast down from his rightful position.
    Leaving his shoulder rig and pistol on the bed with a spare magazine of ammunition, he wrapped his expensive clothes and shoes in the shirt that he had been wearing, and tied everything together with the sleeves. He would bury those garments in the grave with his brother and sister-in-law.
    Posing in front of a free-standing mirror, Henry addressed his reflection: “Look at you, Jim—back from the dead.”
    To his ear, at least, he sounded like his brother.
    If those who knew Henry in his former life could see him now, they would not recognize him. The clothes alone would ensure that they looked through rather than at him. He could pass for a hick from fly-over country, with whom they had nothing in common except that they, too, were born of man and woman.
    In the kitchen, at the sink, he gathered up the potatoes that Nora had been peeling, and he tossed them in the trash can.
    After examining the contents of the pantry and refrigerator, Henry found excellent sausages, acceptable cheeses, fresh eggs, a jar of red peppers, and an unfortunate but edible loaf of white bread made of flour so bleached that it glowed as if radioactive.
    He opened three different Cabernet Sauvignons, none known tohim. Only the third proved drinkable. If this was the best wine that Jim and Nora could afford or, worse, if this was their idea of a good wine—well, sadly, then they were better off dead.
    Henry planned to spend two weeks laying in a three-year supply of canned and packaged food. He hoped that somewhere in a hundred-mile radius would be a specialty grocer and spirits vendor