Greg Siner

Besides, there was an air of mystery to the place, a kind of campy intrigue that at first had appealed to both Young and Siner. After all, it had been in that very kitchen that Camilla Lyman was last heard from before she vanished, apparently into the thin air. Young and Siner both relished the mystery, and loved to regale their occasional guests with tales of Camilla's eccentricities, how she would wander the hallways at night, dressed in old men's clothing, like the ghost of her dead father.

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Greg, who fancied himself a raconteur, always managed to add a few flourishes to the story. In fact, he was outside in the kennel at that moment, Young knew, telling the story in all the flamboyant detail he could manage to his friend Vera who had stopped by on her way back to the city to fetch the little lapdog she had left with them for a few days.

It helped that Greg had known Camilla Lyman, though only slightly. They had met several times at various dog shows, she with her Clumber spaniels and he with his Irish water spaniels. Greg always took great delight in relating how Camilla had gobbled handfuls of dog steroids in order to appear more mannish, steroids distilled from bull semen, he would always take pains to point out. His voice would take on a grand theatrical timbre when he related how she ordered in her will that her body was to have been cremated and her ashes sprinkled from a lowing flying plane over Madison Square Garden during the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. Most of all, he loved the fact that he could add a certain authenticity to the story by confiding to the listener that he had once, years earlier, shared a lonely truck stop dinner with Camilla Lyman after they bumped into each other on the way back from a dog show.

"She seemed so lonely," he would always say in a soft and confidential tone as if that observation lent depth and gravitas to the stories.

Most of all, he was titillated by the notion that no one really knew what had happened to Camilla Lyman, whether she had simply gone underground, vanishing into the shadowy netherworld of the anonymous European transsexual community, or whether she had, as some had suggested, been murdered for her money.

Yes, Young had to admit, that there was a certain cachet to the old Lyman place, the kind of high drama and intrigue that made many of the couple's gay friends from the city green with envy and made them wish they too had a country house with such an improbably operatic history.

All the same, it was slowly dawning on Young that, perhaps, when he bought the 36-acre estate for $265,000 — a fraction of what Lyman had spent on it — he had bitten off more than he could chew.

And that is what he was thinking about, inside that tiny little room, when Greg Siner burst through the door.

"Gardner!" The younger man stammered.

Young didn't look up at first. He was accustomed to Greg's periodic flights of high drama and had learned over the years to ignore them. Besides, he was a bit preoccupied by the spreadsheet on his computer, which showed him plummeting toward insolvency.

"Greg, we're going to need to talk about the well, I'm not sure that we can afford to...."

"Gardner," Greg repeated breathlessly. "I found Cam."

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