the garage or basement to escape the heat. He ate little and barely spoke, while Nate’s mother did her best to make it appear as if all were as usual.
Eventually, regaining energy, he’d begun to leave the house again, taking long walks on the trails over by the Audubon. He would depart before dawn and return around lunchtime. When he didn’t come back one afternoon, Nate’s mother called him at the supermarket where he worked after school and asked if he would go looking for him.
A quarter of a mile into the woods, Nate had come to the aqueduct that spanned the marsh, its concrete surface spotted with graffiti left by the kids who drank there on weekends. He and his father had crossed this bridge together countless times before, just meandering on a weekend afternoon, scouting out parts of the river they might row down if they had a boat. Until recently, Nate had thought nothing of their idyll of a companionship; it had simply always been there.
He crossed the bridge and continued along the path that followed the ridgeline into the forest. The Audubon preserve was a mile or so farther along, accessed from a road on the far side. Not many people walked up through this area so he wasn’t surprised not to meet anyone on the trail. But he only went so far. He didn’t walk all the way to the far end of the path that led down to the water’s edge; and he didn’t explore under the arches of the bridge on his way back or search up along the riverbank as he could have, as he might have. Rather, he stood at the aqueduct’s black, wrought-iron railing looking out over the turning leaves, wishing his father wouldn’t keep making his mother worry so.
The next morning, the police sergeant said only, “Up by the aqueduct,” when Nate’s mother asked where his father had hanged himself. The officer didn’t mention when his father had done it. And so Nate had no idea if he’d still been alive as he’d searched for him, too self-conscious to even call to him aloud.
About the months that had followed, Nate didn’t remember much. Luckily, his closest friends treated him with kid gloves for only a week or two before starting to give him the same shit they always did, returning his life to at least a semblance of what it had been.
He thought of them now, Emily and Jason and Hal, tempted once more to ditch this tutoring nonsense and call them to see if they’d started hanging out yet.
As he walked farther toward Winthrop Street, the houses grew sparser, this being the oldest, wealthiest part of town, made up mostly of estates.
Charlotte Graves, 34 Winthrop, along with a phone number. That’s all Ms. Cartwright had written on the note card. When he had called the woman to set up the appointment, she had been curt to the point of rudeness and offered no directions.
The mailbox bearing that number stood between two driveways, leaving it unclear which house it belonged to. The driveway to the left led down to a white-columned mansion stretched out along the river-bank, recent by the looks of it but built in a neoclassical style that invited you to forget the fact. Its thick cornices and stately windows and the perfect lawns that surrounded it were somehow resplendent even in the light of an overcast day. The other drive was a weedy track heading up to a barn and a shingled little box of a house, which looked as if it had been built centuries ago and not much cared for since.
A tutor of history, Nate thought. What were the odds?
He knew which his father would have picked. Which house he would have talked his way into, putting everyone at ease, charming them with his glittering words. For all Nate knew, his father already had. For all he knew, the mansion’s owners were among those in Finden whom his father had convinced to lend him boats or vintage cars, a habit he’d got into during that last spring of adventure.
Slowly, he headed down the hill to the mansion, where he climbed the steps to press the brass bell. The first ring produced no response. Glancing through a window, he didn’t see much of anything inside. He leaned over and, pressing his hand to the glass to block the reflection, saw that the entire front room was empty, not a stick of furniture in it. No