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collection.”
    “But of course,” Lister replied, bowing slightly as he bade them to enter. “Are you familiar with Orson Fowler?” he asked.
    “A little,” Charlotte replied as she stepped into a paneled entrance foyer in which a phrenological bust was displayed on a pedestal.
    “I bought this house in 1966 from a descendant of a follower of Fowler’s. It had been vacant for thirty-one years.” He clapped a palm to his shiny foreskull. “Mama mia, what a mess. Nobody had bothered to drain the pipes, and there was water damage everywhere.”
    “It’s a wonder you were able to restore it,” said Charlotte, looking at the walls, which appeared to be in excellent shape.
    “It’s taken me almost thirty years,” he said. “Fortunately, the phrenological collection had been stored in the garden house, so it was spared the water damage. It’s also taken thirty years to catalogue everything.”
    “There were—what was it. Jack?—something like thirty thousand documents alone,” said Jerry. He turned to address Charlotte: “Most of them went to the Museum of the City of New York.”
    Lister corrected him: “Thirty-three thousand documents, and”—he paused, one hand resting on the knob of the inner door—“five hundred and two skulls.”
    As Lister opened the door, Charlotte stepped across the threshold into her second bizarre museum of the morning. The museum was set in a large, high-ceilinged room that appeared to comprise half of the first story of the eight-sided building. Directly ahead was a door that opened onto the stairwell of a spiral staircase that was illuminated by sunlight from the glass-walled belvedere overhead. A sentence had been painted on the wall above this door in gold lettering: “In this museum of skull and race; a grand bazaar of head and face.” The displays were arranged on shelves lining the diagonal walls that comprised four sides of the octagon. They consisted of shelf after shelf of human skulls, punctuated only by the tall windows that illuminated the room. Looking around, Charlotte had the feeling of being in a Roman catacomb that had become so overcrowded that every inch of wall space was taken up by skulls. Seeing them, the thought struck her that the skull in the cemetery might have been stolen from here as a prank, but then she noticed that the skulls on display had yellowed from age, whereas the one Jerry had shown her had been as white as a freshly laundered sheet.
    Lister stood with his hands in the pockets of his jeans, surveying the room. “The phrenologists believed that the shape of the skull reflected the underlying shape of the brain, and that certain parts of the brain represented particular traits, such as piety, sympathy, and leadership. The original owner of this house collected skulls and cranial reproductions in order to study the correlation between skull shape and personality traits. We’ve got the skulls of presidents, savages, pirates, saints, murderers—you name it. He called his collection his ‘Phrenological Cabinet.’” He led them over to a skull on a lower shelf. “For instance, the phrenologists believed in studying the skulls of criminals in order to identify the cranial characteristics of the criminal personality.” He nodded at a skull on the shelf directly in front of them. “This is a reproduction of the skull of Dr. Harvey Crippen. He was a doctor who poisoned his wife, dismembered her body, and buried her under his cellar floor. It was the most famous murder case of the day.”
    Charlotte and Jerry looked at Dr. Crippen’s skull, which to Charlotte’s untutored eye gave no hint of the murderous propensities of its former owner, and then followed Lister to another shelf.
    “And here we have the devices that phrenologists used to take their measurements: craniometers, cephalometers, callipers, measuring frames, et cetera,” Lister went on. “For each skull reading, the phrenologist would measure sixteen different skull