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focus his writing on the home front, illuminating the zeitgeist of a generation coming of age in the early 1950s. His work has been required reading in English classes at colleges nationwide ever since.
    Amid considerable buzz in the country’s literary circles that he was working on his first novel, David Coleville’s spectacular career ended when he shot himself to death at Alban House during a party in the summer of 1956, the same night my aunt Fate disappeared without a trace.

CHAPTER 6

    David Coleville and my mother, in love with each other the year before he killed himself right here at Alban House? I can’t explain exactly why, but I felt as though the entire world had shifted on its axis because of what I now knew.
    That summer night in 1956, when Coleville took his own life and my aunt disappeared, had always been shrouded in a kind of mystery that was hard to define, like a shameful family secret better buried than aired. My mother had never said a word about it, never hinted that she even knew Coleville, much less loved him.
    When I was in school, Coleville’s work was part of the English class curriculum. The fact that he committed suicide at my home always came up, with the other students and even the professors looking to me for additional insight into what was generally believed to be a tragedy for modern literature. But I had no insight to give.
    I had asked my parents about it when I was younger but was always rebuffed in the sternest of tones. My brothers and I whispered about it—did the writer kill Aunt Fate and then kill himself? Did she run off when she found his body? We, and all of history, knew what had happened to Coleville, but nobody knew what had happened to my aunt. It was as though the family closed ranks around that night in a secret agreement to keep silent about whatever had gone on.
    That’s why Jane’s revelation that my mother had intended to talk to a journalist about it the day she died was so stunning to me.
    “What were you going to say to him, Mom?” I whispered into the air.
    And then I took a quick breath in as an icy thread crept its way through my veins. My mother died the very day she was planning to talk about something the family had kept hidden for decades. I shook my head, trying to shake off the thoughts that were taking hold. Were the two connected somehow? It just couldn’t be. Could it?
    I tried to reason it out. What possible relevance could a decades-old tragedy have today? I hadn’t even thought about Coleville’s suicide and my aunt’s disappearance for many years. Decades. By the time I was an adult and had a family of my own, it had simply become part of the past, and not even my direct past. It was just one more scandalous tragedy at Alban House, and frankly, after my brothers’ deaths, I didn’t even care about it anymore. Theirs was the Alban House tragedy that haunted me, not something that had happened before I was even born.
    But now, as I sat cross-legged on the floor of my mother’s closet, I let my mind drift back to what I knew about that night: He was found in the main garden in front of the house during a summer solstice party, the same night my aunt Fate disappeared. That was the standard family line about the incident. But it certainly didn’t say much, did it?
    There would have been a police investigation into the suicide as well as into my aunt’s disappearance. I can’t believe my grandparents wouldn’t have launched a massive search for her, paid anything, done anything to find their daughter. I know I would have. Did they? I didn’t know.
    I looked at the letters spread out before me, hoping that I could find some answers within them. The first letter was dated September 1955 and referenced my mother’s and Coleville’s recent time together at Alban House. That told me Coleville visited here the summer before his suicide. That’s when he and my mother must have met.
    I began reading the other letters, one by one. No major