The Mafia boss buried his wife two months ago, but when a three-year-old girl described Bruno’s unmistakable bent collar, he realized she may have seen something impossible.

Beacon was a town built of brick and river mist. Once an industrial center for wool mills and hat factories, it had settled into a quiet retirement of antique shops, independent galleries, and ramshackle boarding houses along the sloping hills above the rail yards.

Julian stepped out of the car near the corner of Ferry Street, pulling his black cashmere coat tight against the cold drizzle. He left the security team three blocks behind, taking only Frank.

"The local station agent remembers her," Frank muttered, checking his phone as they walked past a shuttered iron foundry. "A woman with a dark woolen headscarf and a heavy hound. Paid cash for a taxi to the lower falls three mornings a week. She buys penicillin, gauze, and powdered milk from the mercantile on Main."

They reached an 1880s Victorian house painted in peeling gray lead paint, its gingerbread trim rotting beneath damp ivy. A hand-lettered cardboard sign in the lower bay window read: Rooms by the Week. No Transient Lodgers.

Julian did not knock. He turned the brass knob of the front door; the lock had long since been stripped by settling floorboards.

The interior smelled of boiled cabbage, damp wool, and kerosene. At the end of the narrow central hallway, a woman sat in a rocking chair beneath a single hanging bulb, knitting an endless scarf of yellow acrylic yarn. Her cataract-milky eyes drifted up toward the two tall men in custom wool coats.

"Mrs. Gable?" Frank asked softly, flashing a gold badge he had kept from his precinct days.

"Top floor," the old woman rasped without breaking the rhythm of her needles. "Corner room over the cistern. Don't make a racket. She paid her two weeks in silver half-dollars, and the dog don't take kindly to heavy boots."

Julian’s heart surged against his chest like an engine redlining. He took the wooden stairs three at a time, heedless of the creaking risers. Frank followed close behind, his hand resting inside his left lapel.

At the third-floor landing, the hall ended at a chipped pine door marked with a brass numeral 4.

Julian stood before the wood. For two months, he had visited a marble mausoleum at Saint Patrick's Cemetery, laying white lilies upon a granite slab carved with the name of his thirty-year-old wife. He had endured condolences from senators, investors, and false friends. He had slept in an empty four-poster bed that still carried the faint trace of her sandalwood perfume.

His hand reached out, his long fingers trembling as he rested his palm against the rough pine.