42.

George Kleeman was a tall, slightly stooped over man, in maybe his midseventies. Quite thin, except under his belt, where he looked like he’d swallowed a beer keg. A long skinny neck stuck up from the collar of his white shirt, and long skinny arms stuck out from its short sleeves. His tie was dark blue and polyester and so were his pants.

Kirsten sat across from Kleeman at a wooden picnic table under a shade tree beside the small, spotless brick post office on the north edge of Waterton. “I bought and paid for this table myself,” he said, “so’s my people could eat their lunch out here. You ever try and get somethin’ useful like this outta the postal service? Hah! We did better when it was the government.”

Kleeman’s people were either out on their routes or inside, sorting mail or manning the surprisingly busy window. Kirsten had been waiting about a half hour and there’d been scarcely a moment when a car wasn’t driving away and another one pulling up.

She asked, again, whether Kleeman knew of an Angela Morelli or her farm.

“You asked me that three times now, cutie,” he said. He was studiously wiping his wire-framed glasses with a handkerchief.

“I know,” she said, “but—”

“I’m thinking, darn it. I’m not stupid, or forgetful. Hah!”

“Sorry.” She sat back. “I just thought maybe you were wondering if you should answer. You know, concerned about confidentiality or something.”

“So far you haven’t asked me what kinda mail she got, or how often, or who it’s from. What’s confidential about a person having a mailbox out in front of their house? Or the mail carrier going up their walk now and then?”

“Right. I couldn’t have put it better myself.”

“Hah!” He put on his glasses, one wire earpiece at a time, squinting as though it were a pretty painful process. “If an Angela Morelli got mail through this office in the last thirty years,” he said, “I’d remember it. Doesn’t mean she wouldn’t be out there if I didn’t. Would just mean she never got mail that came through here. I’d remember it if she did.”

“Well, then,” Kirsten said, “how about—”

“Hah!”

“What?”

“Did I answer your question?” he asked.

“Well, not really. But I thought—”

“You thought I was some old fool out in the sticks didn’t know squat.” He smiled then, and she suddenly realized he was having a great time. Maybe, like Eleanor Baggs, he was taking a break from a game of solitaire. “Okay,” he said, “the answer’s no. I never heard of anyone named Morelli in my district, Angela or anything else.”

She couldn’t help but like this guy. “All right, then,” she said, “how about a three-hundred-pound Italian woman who lived in a rundown house on a rundown farm near Waterton, and a few years ago went to a nursing home and her house was sold, and she died? How about that?”

“Does she have to be Italian?” he said.

“Are you putting me on again?”

“Nope. There was a woman like you described, lived five miles north of here. Two, three years ago she got to where she couldn’t walk and had to go into a nursing home … or die. Said she didn’t have a dime. And no relatives. Somebody had to take her in, and Green Meadows did, because a lawyer came and said her place was sold and paid for two months on the spot. Said the payments would keep coming, each month in advance. And they did. Cash money. By mail. Hah! Who says you can’t trust the U.S. Postal Service?”

“What was the woman’s name?”

“She was pretty sick by then. Heart failure, mostly. Not talking much. The lawyer said her name was Anna Bergstrom. She had no identification, no Social Security number, no Medicare, no nothing. Never had a visitor and only lasted six months. When she died the cash came for a cremation.”

“I’m just wondering,” Kirsten said. “How is it that you know all this?”

“Hah! Made it all up!” He obviously enjoyed the look on her face and then said, “Actually, no, I didn’t. Thing is, I own Green Meadows Nursing Home, and a couple more, too.”

She shook her head. She asked where the woman’s home was and who bought it, and Kleeman gave her directions and said the place had sat empty for a long time. He thought someone was living there now, but whoever it was never got any mail.

“You about wrapped up with your questions?” he asked.

“Almost. What was this lawyer’s name?”

“Hah! Who said it was a ‘he’? It was a lady lawyer … if she was a lawyer. Kinda pretty, too, but big and strong looking. Too big for my taste, and she had this big phony smile on her face all the time. Like she thought someone was gonna take her picture.”

“What about a name?”

“Oh. ‘Jane Adams’ is what she said. Never left a phone number or an address. Even the cash came in an envelope with no return address. And that big old Anna didn’t look much like a Bergstrom, either. Truth is, she looked more like a Morelli, now that you mention it. Anyway, she’s dead now. And her bills were paid. Hah!” He stood up, obviously anxious to go.

“One more thing,” Kirsten said. “If there was no way for you to contact this so-called lawyer, how did she know to send money for a cremation?”

Kleeman rested his palms on the table and leaned toward her. “You know what? I always wondered about that myself.”

*   *   *

Kirsten had a difficult time finding her way, even with George Kleeman’s crude, hand-drawn map on the passenger seat. She went past cornfields and pastures, and the occasional farmhouse, and finally came to the abandoned railroad tracks marked on the map. Just beyond that she turned onto a side road—gravel and apparently not well-traveled—and about a mile later came to the place where “Anna Bergstrom” had lived.

She had a vague notion of how big an acre was—“a little less than a football field,” Dugan had once told her—and the property looked to her to be several acres, surrounded on three sides by fields from which the crops—something growing low to the ground, like beans—hadn’t yet been harvested. She saw no corn on the property, but otherwise it was just the sort of place the Realtor Eleanor Baggs had described when she said city people see a house with a stand of corn along a country road and call it a farm.

She approached from the west and drove on past the house until, about four-tenths of a mile east of it by the odometer, the road first rose a little and then dipped sharply down to an old one-lane bridge over a narrow river. There were lots of trees along the river’s banks, going off in both directions from the road. Past the river the road rose up again and then ended, making a T with a crossroad, also gravel.

She turned around and drove back. Away from the river the land was flat with only an occasional tree, usually near the road. The house was set back about fifty yards at the end of a straight, narrow drive. There was no fence along the road, but the entrance to the driveway was built up over a metal culvert set into a deep drainage ditch that ran alongside the road, east almost to the river and west as far as she could see. The ditch, and a chain strung across the drive between iron posts, probably barred most vehicles from the premises.

There were shade trees up near the house and, farther out, rows of evergreens that made a windbreak along the west and north sides of the property. Apparently this had been a working farm in the past, because she could see a barn—sagging now to one side, no paint at all on its weathered gray sides, a section of the roof caved in—and a few other equally tired-looking sheds. Farther out, in the corner where the two rows of evergreens met, sat a three-sided shed about the size of a two- or three-car garage, with a roof that sloped back from the open front. It lacked paint, too, but at least the walls stood up straight.

If there were any tractors or machinery or vehicles on the property at all, they were inside the barn or one of the other buildings. There were no animals in sight, either. And no people.

One indication the house was inhabited, though, was that the grass—or weeds or whatever—was mowed short all the way out to the farmer’s fields. She parked and walked over for a closer look at the barricade across the drive. It was a thick heavy chain, showing no sign of rust, with each end secured to its post by a large, sturdy-looking padlock. Not much short of a tank would get through or over that barrier, and it struck her that a person would have to be pretty strong just to lift one end of the chain to fasten it in place.

She was wondering whether to walk up to the house when her cell phone rang, from the front seat of the car. She ran back and dug it out of her purse. “Hello?”

“Kirsten?” It was Michael, talking way too loud. “Is that you?”

“It is, and you don’t have to shout.”

“Oh, sorry.” Much better. “I’m on the cell phone, out in my car so no one will hear. There’s … there’s a problem here.”

“A problem? What problem?”

“It’s Tony. Father Anthony Ernest. He always sleeps late and when he didn’t show up for breakfast I didn’t think much about it. But now it’s almost eleven o’clock … and nobody knows where he is.”