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than Fifth Avenue, but those were fascinating too. And expensive. The uninhabited house would be a gold mine to anyone missing a few scruples.
    "I take it they were well off?"
    "Loaded. Erik Hoffrnann's father had made a pile in the Philippines, around the turn of the century." Paul paused, the recollection coming back to him. The hidden repositories of memory: He'd forgotten he knew any of this. "And Erik inherited it all. Major bucks."
    He served himself some salad, ground a bit of pepper over it. "We'd all go up there, my parents and Vivien and Freda would talk, cook, drink, and we kids would run around the house and the woods. A fabulous place. It wasn't really designed to be a residence—mainly it was intended to host large hunting parties and wild-game banquets. The main room is the size of this whole house, with a balcony around three sides of it, a fireplace I could park the MG in."
    "So, what—your aunt wants you to fix up the place now? What's the matter with it?"
    "Last spring she moved to San Francisco. Since she's been gone, the house has apparently been vandalized, and she needs someone to spruce it back up."
    "Paul, this sounds great! You're perfect for the job!" She ripped a piece from the loaf of French bread and swabbed her plate with it. "It sure wouldn't hurt to have some money coming in, would it?"
    "No, it would not exactly hurt," Paul agreed.
    But for all the enthusiasm he felt for the memories of Highwood, there was something unpleasant in the recollections. Out of Lia's sight, under the table, one hand or the other had been ticcing constantly, the uneasiness telegraphing itself to his muscles without conscious intent.
    Paul punched his mother's number and visualized the old black dial phone ringing on the desk in her apartment. He couldn't hope that she hadn't been drinking, only that she hadn't been drinking heavily. She had taken Ben's death hard, entering a protracted mourning accompanied by fairly serious and tenacious alcoholism. Twenty-nine years later, neither the drinking nor the mourning had ended.
    Now she was seventy, a plump woman of medium height, her hair mostly gray, lines of bitterness and disappointment in her face. Only rarely, in the right light, could you catch a glimpse of the insouciant, funny, gregarious journalist and young mother that the old photos showed.
    "Paulie," she said. "Well. To what do I owe the honor?" A stock reproach. The exaggerated precision of her speech suggested this was one of her heavier nights.
    "Profuse apologies and a spirit of repentance, okay, Ma? How're
    things in Philly?"
    "Things in Philly have a distinctly autumnal cast. It's November. What month is it there?"
    "We've finally got the cold weather. It was global warming until Friday."
    "I take it you're calling about Vivien—Kay told me she'd called.
    What did you two cook up?"
    "I haven't talked to Vivien yet. Kay said maybe I should talk to you first—I mean, I hardly know Vivien, and now I'm supposed to call her up. Kay said she's squirrely. I can't remember."
    Aster laughed. " 'Squirrely'? Vivien's not squirrely, she's nuts. Cracked. Always has been. Runs in the family."
    "How so?"
    "A woman would have to be cracked to live alone in that house all those years." She sounded irritated at his obtuseness. "Living up on that hill. Every time there was a storm, some tree branch would fall and bring down the power lines. Then in winter—plowing three quarters of a mile uphill. Ask Dempsey how many times he went up there to fix pipes that had frozen because the lines went down and the furnaces quit."
    "We used to have a great time up there," Paul reminded her.
    "Sure we did. It's a nice spot. It's a gorgeous house." She seemed about to qualify her comments but appeared to run out of criticisms. She paused, and through the receiver Paul heard the clink of ice in a glass.
    "So Ma—how much are you drinking nowadays?"
    "As much as I like."
    "I thought you said you were going to cut back. I thought the