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was just somebody who thought the house was still open for tours. I grabbed my cell phone out of my purse and headed through the house to look.
    â€œHello? We’re closed for tours until further notice,” I called out.
    Nothing.
    I made my way up the wide staircase, careful not to step on the stair that creaked. When I got to the top I repeated my words. Still nothing. I pushed the various bedroom doors open. There was nobody there.
    I must have heard some noise from outside and thought it was inside. That made the most sense. In fact, now I wondered if this was what had happened to Sylvia that night. I’d have to ask Duran if the noise she heard was inside or outside the house.
    It was an old house. Old houses make noise, that’s a given.
    I shook it off and went back to my office. Really, since it was daylight and people were still milling about, I thought no more of it. I logged on to the Internet and found the GenWeb page for the county of Dubuque. GenWeb is a network of genealogical pages for each state. Each page has a host and various collections of things like wills, biographies, and census records for that particular state. I e-mailed the host and told her that I had a photograph taken in 1930 and wondered if she’d take a look at it and see if she could tell me where the photograph was taken, or if she knew somebody else who could. It wasn’t as much of a long shot as it might seem. If somebody e-mailed me with old photographs of New Kassel, I could most likely tell them what building was what, or at least what street the photo had been taken on. When you specialize in an area, you specialize in the area.
    I shut down my computer and started to rifle through the box I had set at my feet. More receipts. I’m not sure why the woman kept every piece of paper ever given to her, but she did. Just when I was getting really bored, I found a hand-drawn picture that had been yellowed by age and obviously colored by an preschooler. In bold red outlines was the Gaheimer House. The green shutters had been colored in crookedly. A bright yellow sun with giant rays peeked out of the corner, and three people stood on the sidewalk out front. One was Sylvia, one was her sister, Wilma, and the other was a little girl.
    Me.
    I must have colored this for Sylvia when I was about four or five. In crooked letters I had written To Silvera. Love Torie .
    There was no way I was going to cry. If I started to cry I might not stop, and I wasn’t sure I had the energy for it, anyway. How bad is that, when you’re too tired to cry?
    A few hours passed, and I’d made my way through that box started on another. This one was more recent. There were things in it from this past year. I had to pay more attention to this box, because there might be things in here that I would need. If I came across an owner’s manual for the new refrigerator, though, I was going to throw it out.
    What I found unsettled me all the way to my toes.
    Made out to Sylvia Pershing were ten receipts for the last ten months from one Michael J. Walker, PI. Private investigator?
    Sylvia had hired a private investigator? For what reason? And why didn’t I know about it? How could I not have known about it? I searched my memory for anything unusual. Could I remember a time in the past ten months that somebody unusual had come to visit the Gaheimer House? Oh, gee, just a couple hundred tourists every week or so.
    I wondered if the sheriff knew about this.
    Then I wondered if Mr. Walker knew about Sylvia’s death, and if he didn’t, why hadn’t he called here? Had he called here? Think. Think. Had a man called and hung up when I told him Sylvia was dead?
    Not that I could remember. Was he still on retainer, then?
    The phone rang, and I picked it up. “Torie,” I said.
    There was silence on the other end. “Hello?” I said. Just breathing. I slammed the phone down, irritated. I hate when people do that. Of