Allen drifted into the front room. Like the kitchen, it had been sanitized in the time since Cam had vanished. It had the same faint stink of cleaning products, leavened with just a hint of stale cigarette smoke.

There was an old rug rolled up in the corner. A few boxes stacked beneath the picture window. An antique coffee table and a couple of Chippendale chairs — real Chippendale chairs, in all probability — were pushed into a jumble near the woodstove. But there was nothing really of Cam left in the room. He let himself wonder for a moment how Cam might have felt about that. If she were hiding out some place, living under an assumed name, perhaps, would she be pleased to see that her old identity had been so thoroughly scoured from her own front room?

chapter continues

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Allen turned around, and glanced up the stairs. He made his way passed the attic door. He had been warned about the attic. "You don't want to go there," the caretaker had told him. "Bees."

He opened the door to Cam's room. A pair of heavy drapes blocked out the afternoon sun. It hardly seemed possible, but the room was darker even than the windowless second-floor landing where they stood. He reached through the doorway and flipped on the light switch. For a millisecond it almost seemed as if the light racing from the sconces on the walls got lost on its way to the corners of the room.

"It was pretty much the way she left it," Allen later said. .

It wasn't the Spartan simplicity of the room that jarred him. He had expected that. Though he had never been in the room before, he always visualized the one robust and mannish dresser, the overstuffed chair. Even the absence of a mirror was expected.

Nor was he surprised by what he found her closet, the self-consciously plain sports coats, and the ties hanging neatly on the tie rack at the back of the closet door, the coolly masculine button-down shirts and the cuffed slacks.

Cam's cross-dressing was certainly no secret.

She seemed to take great delight in appearing in public in the guise of a man. While that was known to have distressed her blue-blooded relatives when they caught a glimpse of her on television, it didn't seem to trouble the other eccentric handlers or dog owners a bit.

Allen always thought it was ironic that people who spent all their waking hours fretting and fussing to make sure that every minute detail of their dogs' breeding and pedigree was in evidence, who devoted themselves to the proposition that a poodle born to be a poodle should be the best poodle possible, had no difficulty at all accepting a person who, in the middle of her life, simply up and decided to become a different person altogether.

In a strange way, Allen would later say, he felt an almost perverse sense of admiration for Cam. She had managed to take that uniform that others might find so constricting and turned it on its head. It takes a special kind of person to take a plain tweed coat and turn it into a battle flag of in-your-face eccentricity, he thought.

What did surprise him was the collection of stuffed animals.

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