The collie lay down and Augusta slipped off a shoe and rubbed his freshly buzzed back. He let out a contented moan, a moan so human that it reminded her of having a man in the house, something she didn’t really know anything about.

Augusta had spent a good bit of the last few months looking up charitable organizations and writing checks and shipping them off to help others get back on their feet. She’d never been the type to give to others all that much. As the Rockwell money had been made by people now dead, Augusta’s notion of money was that it was tied to independence and forever dwindling. She’d worked hard to protect her inheritance, which she never saw as selfish because she was a single mother with three children to support and then she was the aged mother who didn’t want to be a financial burden. But now, suddenly, with a tragedy hitting home, those sentiments felt like flimsy rationalizations. She was giving and it felt good.

And amid all of the grief and loss, weirdly she felt—for the first time in a long time—hopeful. Yes, she had sent Esme and Atty out to find replicas of their old life, but that was mainly to keep them busy. Change was coming and it would be bigger than the trappings of interior decor.

Augusta couldn’t tell what was next, but she knew that it was going to be swift and absolute. Maybe she was preparing for death, but it didn’t feel like it. Instead she was pretty sure she was going to take one more swing at living. She simply didn’t know how.

Right now, she was thinking about what to say to Atty. She felt like she had to rehearse things because she didn’t know how to approach the girl. She was an edgy person, that Atty. And not edgy as in cutting edge. No. She was edgy in that she had edges—sharp ones. She’d even been an edgy baby. Her cry sometimes sounded more like a caustic criticism than a baby crying. Augusta wanted to reach out. How much longer did she have to make a connection with her granddaughter?

The hurricane certainly made her aware of the very fine scrim between life and death. It reminded her of the play Our Town. Liv had once had the role of Emily in a high school production. Her daughter was onstage—a dead girl, wandering around the edges of her life. It had been disconcerting to watch, but worse because Liv had been so convincing. This was right after Liv had broken things off with a very bad young man—that Teddy Whistler—who’d upended their lives and finally ended up in a detention center. Maybe Liv had felt dead a little. Later—months or even a few years—Augusta would find herself in some small ordinary act and imagine that some ghost was watching her, envying her this simple domesticity. And now she envied her own life, because she and Jessamine could surely have died in that storm. Her life felt so newly frail.

And her daughters were set to converge on the old homestead? She was quietly overjoyed. Maybe the newness of living her life would be getting the chance to raise the girls again—this time as grown women. Surely, she’d do a better job this time around.

That was when she heard the knock at the front door.

She wasn’t expecting her daughters quite yet. Ingmar started barking. Augusta was surprised by this sudden display of typically masculine protectiveness; Ingmar’s fluffiness and dainty snout had feminized him in some way. Augusta shushed him and moved to a window and saw a young man holding a box. He stood there for a few moments and then backed up and stood in the small front yard, looking at the house itself, searching it.

Actually, he wasn’t a young man, really. He was probably middle-aged or nearly so. But she realized that she was old enough now to think of anyone middle-aged as young. He didn’t appear to be evangelical. The God peddlers, as her mother used to call them, usually traveled in pairs and avoided the wealthier neighborhoods, where God was already assuredly in place.

The box was large and square enough to contain a cake or a hat. Was he bearing a gift?

She decided he was probably bringing a gift to someone else. Maybe an old boyfriend of Esme’s had heard she was getting divorced and back in town.

Or maybe he was at this door by mistake.

In any case, he seemed harmless.

She walked to the door, vaguely self-conscious that the house might smell like Indian food. Esme had recently cooked one of those dishes that smelled like body odor.

By the time she opened the door, the man was heading back to the sidewalk.

“Hello!” she called. “Can I help you?”

He turned around and looked at her as if he expected to recognize her but didn’t.

“Who are you looking for?” she asked.

“Augusta Rockwell,” the man said and then he walked toward her, extending his hand. “I’m Bill Huckley.”

She took his hand and shook it.

“I think you knew my father, Herc,” Bill said. “Hercule Huckley the Third. My mother refused to keep the tradition going. I got lucky.”

Augusta drew in a sharp breath, prepared to say something—but what? She felt a little light-headed. There was too much sun, too much glare bouncing off the cars. The grass looked glassy. Herc Huckley.

“Are you okay?” Bill asked.

“Yes, yes,” she said, smiling.

“So are you Augusta Rockwell?”

“Ah…” She turned around for a moment, looking over her shoulder at the house. She felt like it was a boat that had lifted anchor and was now slowly floating away from her—so slowly that it was almost imperceptible. Or was she the one moving?

Herc Huckley. She remembered him clearly. A pale young man back then, sandy-haired, a little doughy. She could see him clearly sitting at the thick-legged table in the rental he’d shared with Nick Flemming—she’d met Nick on a bus in a snowstorm. The night before John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. She could see Nick’s face clearly in her mind too; she could smell the wet wool of his coat.

She felt exposed suddenly. Her cheeks flushed. She wasn’t allowed to know Nick Flemming, not at all. Ru, as a teenager, had read sci-fi novels—dank, brittle things picked up at the used-book store—that talked about different universes, and that was where Nick Flemming and Herc Huckley belonged. None of her daughters had ever heard these names.

She looked at Herc’s son and saw little resemblance, but it was there when he smiled at her. A crinkle around his eyes, one errant dimple.

“It is you. Isn’t it?” he said, boyish with hope.

She nodded, clamped her hands together. “It’s been so long!” She laughed nervously. “Your father was a law student at George Washington when I met him.” She didn’t add the rest: He was friends with someone I knew well.

Ingmar was sniffing through the screen, trying to get the stranger’s scent.

“And Flemming?” Bill said softly. “Nick Flemming?” His expression was hard to read.

Was he coming to tell her that Nick was dead? Was this the way she would find out, once and for all, that it was truly over? She felt unsteady, glanced up and down the street. “Do you want to come in?” She didn’t want him lingering in the yard. She wasn’t supposed to say Nick Flemming’s name—not ever.

Bill looked down at the box in his hands. It wasn’t for Esme or someone else on this street. It was for Augusta. The realization shook her.

“Sure,” Bill said. “You know it wasn’t easy tracking you down!”

The house was dark compared with the bright day, almost tomblike. “I apologize if it smells like Indian food and mildew, and for the lack of furniture. Storm damage. We haven’t quite…” She trailed off, looking for a specific word.

“Rebounded?” Bill offered.

“No, but it does start with an r,” she said. “I won’t be able to think of the word until I stop searching for it directly.” The mind is a bear trap, she thought to herself, yawning open and then suddenly snapping shut.

“Memories work that way too,” Bill said, and for the first time he looked older to her, truly middle-aged. The harder edges and contours of his face had been wiped clean when they were outside, bleached by the sun. But now, in the cool dark of the house, his face was shadowed. He looked heavier—or maybe more weighed down.

Ingmar nosed him impolitely, but backed off when Augusta told him to go lie down. He wandered a few yards away and plopped on the hardwood.

They sat in the beach chairs, and he balanced the box on one knee, his hand spread flat on its lid.

“I forgot to ask,” she said. She wanted him to tell her if Nick was dead or alive, but she didn’t want to appear anxious. “Do you want something to drink?”

He shook his head then glanced back toward the front door, as if he was having second thoughts about being here at all. “I’m fine. I don’t want to take up too much of your time.” He lifted the box then and put it on the glass-topped garden table between them. “I found some papers going through my father’s things. He kept this footlocker in the basement office of the bar he inherited from his father.”

“How is your father?” she asked. Grown children only went through their parents’ old things when they had to.

“Physically, he’s very healthy, but he has Alzheimer’s. It’s fairly advanced.”

“I’m so sorry.” Augusta deeply feared the disease. She didn’t want to be the husk of someone long gone. There but not. A demanding physical reminder that our frail memories are what make us who we are. “And Flemming?”

Bill shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. Augusta was immediately relieved. She’d have preferred the news he was robustly alive, but this was hopeful. “Hurricane Sandy leveled the bar,” Bill explained. “It’s just a footprint now, and when I helped clear what was left, I found the footlocker and these papers.”

Papers. The box was filled with papers. Augusta nodded. “I see.”

He then slapped his knees and rubbed them like he’d once been an athlete and the knees pained him. “Maybe I shouldn’t be here.”

“What papers?” Augusta said.

“Your name shows up. And I think, I don’t know, I think maybe some of what’s written might make a difference to you.” Ingmar was back, wedging up close to Bill, indicating that he wanted to be petted. Bill obliged, distractedly. “Or maybe it’s filled with things you already know. Maybe it’s stuff you’ve made peace with. But, well, I don’t know if I’m here because I want to help you or because I’m hoping you can help me.”

She looked down at the box, reached out to touch it, but then pulled her hand back to her lap. “Help you? How?”

“Help me understand my father, who he once was, what kind of person he was. I just feel like…” He crossed his arms on his meaty chest. “I need to know him or I can’t really know myself somehow.”

“Well, I don’t know that I’m going to be much help,” she said. “I didn’t know your father all that well. We met a few times. Briefly.”

He leaned in then, elbows on his knees. He lowered his voice and said, “But you’ve heard of The Amateur Assassins Club, haven’t you?”

Her heart started beating so quickly she wanted to put her hand over it, as if saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Instead she locked her hands in her lap. Her face must have revealed some recognition because he scooted forward to the very edge of the chair. Ingmar lifted his snout and sniffed the air as if he sensed change as a scent.

“The Amateur Assassins Club,” Bill said again. “Those words mean something to you. Don’t they?”