still the light was dim. Shadows were thrown across the floor and up on the walls.
The room was a young man's room, mementos of an expensive youth on display everywhere. The banners above the bed and the desk were those of Andover and Princeton, the trophies on the shelves for such sports as sailing, skiing, tennis, and lacrosse. The room had been preserved-eerily preserved-as if it had once belonged to a Renaissance prince. A microscope sat alongside a chemistry set, a volume of Britannica lay open, most of the page underlined, handwritten notes in the margins. On the bedside table were novels of Dos Passos and Koestler, beside them the typewritten title page of an essay authored by the celebrated inhabitant of that room. It was called: The Pleasures and Responsibilities of Sailing in Deep Waters.
Submitted by Joshua Appleton, Senior. Andover Academy. March, 1945.
Protruding from below the bed were three pairs of shoes: loafers, sneakers, and black patent leathers worn with formal clothes. A life was somehow covered in the display.
Bray winced in the dim light. He was in the tomb of a man very much alive, the artifacts of a life preserved, somehow meant to transport the dead safely on its journey through the darkness. It was a macabre experience when one thought of Joshua Appleton, the electric, mesmerizing Senator from Massachusetts.
Scofield glanced at the old woman. She was staring impassively at a cluster of photographs on the waU. Bray took a step forward and looked at them.
They were pictures of a younger Joshua Appleton and several friends-the same friends, apparently the crew of a sailboat-the occasion identified by the center photograph. It showed a long banner being held by four men standing on the deck of a sloop. Marblehead Regatta Championship -Summer, 1949.
Only the center photograph and the three above it showed aR four crew members. The three lower photographs were shots of only two of the four.
Appleton and another young man, both stripped to the waist-slender, muscular, shaking hands above a tiller; smiling at the camera as they stood on either side of the mast, and sitting on the gunnels, drinks held forward in a salute.
Scofield looked closely at the two men, then compared them to their associates. Appleton and his obviously closer friend had a strength about them absent in the other two, a sense of assurance, of conviction somehow. They were not alike except perhaps in height and breadthathletic men comfortable in the company of each's peeryet neither were they dissimilar. Both had sharp if distinctly different features-strong jaws, wide foreheads, large eyes, and thatches of straight, dark hair-the kind of faces seen in scores of Ivy League yearbooks.
There was something disturbing about the photographs. Bray did not know what it was-but it was there. Instinct.
"They look as if they could be cousins," he said.
"For years they acted as though they were brothers," replied the old woman. "In peace, they would be partners, in war, soldiers togetherl But he was a coward, he betrayed my son. My beautiful Joshua went to war alone and terrible things were done to him. He ran away to Europe, to the safety of a chateau. But justice is odd; he died in Gstaad, from injuries on a slope. To the best of my knowledge, my son has never mentioned his name since." "Since?... When was that?" "rwenty-five years ago." "Who was he?" She told him.
Scofield could not breathe; there was no air in the room, only shadows in a vacuum. He had found the shepherd boy, but instinct told him to look for something else, a fragment as awesome as anything he had learned. He had found it. The most devastating piece of the puzzle was in place, the quantum jump explained. He needed only proof, for the truth was so extraordinary.
He way in a tomb; the dead had journeyed in darkness for twenty-five years.
He guided the old woman to her bedroom, poured her a final brandy, and left her. As he closed the door she was sitting on the bed chanting that unsingable tune. Appleton Hall... way up onAppleton Hill.
Notes picked out on a harpsichord more than a hundred years ago. Notes lost, as she was lost without ever knowing why.
He returned to the din-dy lit room that was the resting place of memories and went to the cluster of photographs on the wall. He removed one and pulled the small picture hook out of the plaster, smoothing the wallpaper around the hole; it might delay discovery, certainly