Nicholas was at home in Paradise, tending to his apple trees and his bears and his sad daughter and sadder wife, and Simon was here. The letter in her sleeve crackled and whispered, but the beat of her heart was louder.

The noise was tremendous, everyone talking and shouting and laughing as they recounted the morning's races, each of them with their own story that must be heard above all others as they tumbled out of the carioles.

They stopped for dinner at a farmhouse that belonged to Paul Lehane's aunt or maybe it was Jamie MacDonald's brother, the whole crowd of them moving into the warmth where they shed coats and furs like snakes frantic to be free of old skin. As soon as hands emerged from mitts a servant with one brown eye, as bright as a sparrow's, pressed a pewter cup of hot cider against chilled fingers.

In a far corner someone was tuning a fiddle. The house was full of comforting smells: lamb stew and new bread and beans cooking in molasses over a fire of apple wood and aged oak, coffee and hot milk and cider and too many people. The tiny windows dripped with steam and rattled with noise. Someone upset a basket of kittens and they scattered with tiny red mouths open in alarm.

Lily picked up a gray kitten with a tail as long as its body and found a spot on the bench that ran around the great tiled oven, as tall as a man. Then she pulled out her letter and broke the seal.

“Dearest Lily,” her mother had written in her strong, slanted hand.

“Ho,” cried a girl Lily had not yet met, the flush on her cheeks having less to do with cold and more with brandy, by the smell of her. “Are we here for a school lesson then?”

She tried to snatch Lily's letter away, would have snatched it had Simon not caught her hand and swung her around with a laugh.

“You need something more to drink, Meggie,” he said, and winked at Lily over his shoulder. “Coffee, I think, and lots of it.”

Lily pushed herself harder against the warm tile and bent her head over the lines her mother had put down on the paper.

I write to you today with news that is both tragic and strange, because you will want and need to know the particulars, but also simply because to put them down on paper requries careful thought and ordering of the facts, a process which, I hope, will resolve some of my own confusion.

“From home?”

Lily started, losing the sound of her mother's voice just as easily as she had found it in the words on the page. Daniel Fontaine, a man with her brother's name and none of his understanding, stood before her. He came from a wealthy family, Lily remembered. More money than sense, Simon had said of him. But good with horses. Simon was on the other side of the room, pouring coffee for Meggie while she leaned in toward him, her face turned up like a calf wondering at the moon.

“Yes,” she said, turning the paper away from his curious gaze.

“Good news or bad?”

Lily gave him a pointed look. “I won't know until I've read it,” she said and he turned away, affronted but trying not to show it.

Within a few sentences the shock of what her mother had to report had settled deep in Lily's bones: Dolly Wilde was dead, and had been—Lily struggled to count the days—for more than a month.

. . . at first we believed them all, mother, father, and child as well as both the Fiddlers, to have been the victims of some unthinkable and inexplicable act of robbery or retribution or kidnapping, but I must put your mind at ease straightaway: Nicholas had gone to Johnstown some days before the incident, in order to take care of some business with the county, and he took with him Callie and Zeke. Dolly's condition made travel impossible, and so Cookie stayed behind with her.

Just when we were almost resigned to the idea that all five of them were dead, the three travelers returned. In truth, we were very relieved to see them, not only because we feared the worst, but also because the suspicion entertained by some—though most assuredly not by me—that Nicholas or Zeke might have been responsible for Dolly's death could be set aside.

There was an inquiry in the trading post in which the known facts were laid out for all to hear. They are few and insufficient, so that no reasonable person can draw even a preliminary conclusion. Two days before your father found Dolly half-frozen on Hidden Wolf, Cookie came to the trading post for a pound of lard and a half pound of salt, and with her came Dolly. Anna McGarrity, who served them at the counter, reported that Dolly seemed fevered and started easily, but that has been the case with her for so long that Anna took no special note. Cookie said nothing of the trip to Johnstown, but again that fact was not alarming in itself. You will remember that Cookie is not a talkative person, and rarely volunteers information if not asked directly.

Constable McGarrity is in the unfortunate position of having neither clues, nor hope of any, though speculation is rife in the village. Some believe that Dolly finally lost the last of her reason and attacked Cookie and then wandered away in confusion or fear or both. The proponents of this theory believe that Cookie's body won't be discovered until the warmer weather comes and with it the thaw. Others of lesser understanding suppose that Cookie led a troublesome mistress onto the mountain to abandon her there and lost her way home in a storm called up by a vengeful and quick Almighty; still others that a stranger—for what man among us would do such a thing?—came upon them and took advantage of two women without means of protecting themselves.

Not one of these possibilities—for they must at least be taken into consideration, no matter how unlikely they may seem—has any basis in observable fact. Only Zeke entertains any real hope that his mother might still be found alive, and in fact he came to me just last week to ask if I would write down an advertisement to be placed in the Johnstown and Albany papers, in his own words, which I give you here: