Anything Goes

couple hours’ train ride out of the city. Who’d have thought...“ He gazed out the window as though it were as foreign as a desert or an arctic landscape. “I’m just the tiniest bit afraid of trees, you know. You can never tell what they’re going to do.”
    That made her laugh, as she knew he intended. “Trees don’t do anything, Robert.”
    He grinned. “They get hit by lightning and splinter. I’ve read about that. And they drop leaves and bark that somebody has to pick up and discard. And sometimes peacocks nest in them overnight and mess up your car. That happened to me once at the Breakers.”
    In another life... Lily thought. Our other life.
    “Here you are, folks,“ the taxicab driver said, taking a sharp turn between two stone pillars that were nearly covered with ivy. “Honeysuckle Cottage.”
    Lily gawked at the structure, wondering how anyone could have misnamed it so badly. It wasn’t a cottage. It was a great hulking monster of a mansion. And if there was honeysuckle growing anywhere, it was having to put up a good fight with the weeds, coarser vines and acres of ivy that almost entirely obscured the facade of the house and most of the windows. Aside from the few random turrets sticking up bravely through the greenery, it looked more like a burial mound with extremely luxuriant foliage than a house.
    Lily counted out the driver’s tab and added a frugal, but not downright stingy tip. “You’ll come back for us in an hour?”
    The taxi driver was counting the pile of change she’d given him. “Uh-huh,“ he said reluctantly, grinding the gears and chugging off.
    Lily and Robert stared at the house for a long moment and Robert was the first to spot what might be a front door. He pushed aside an especially aggressive vine and knocked firmly. They heard footsteps, a crash that sounded like a small table falling over and a muffled curse, before the door opened.
    The man standing in the semidarkness was small, elderly and had badly dyed black hair and a matching pencil-thin moustache. “You must be Miss Lillian Brewster and Mr. Robert Brewster. Come in, please. We’ll talk in the library.”
    They followed him gingerly down the dark central hall, alongside a massive staircase and into a room at the back of the house. Robert amused himself by pretending to be blind and having to feel his way. Lily gasped as the stranger ushered them into the library. This room was magnificent. It was flooded with light from a pair of French doors and ranks of large windows in the back wall. Lily walked forward and realized the room presented a breathtaking panorama of a long green lawn and a superb view of the Hudson River, curving gently below them. None of the voracious vines were allowed to obscure the view from this room. The other walls were covered with bookshelves with elaborately etched glass doors protecting them from dust.
    “I’m Mr. Elgin Prinney, Esquire,“ the elderly man said as he fastidiously swatted a large handkerchief at the seats of three chairs grouped at the end of a long, gracefully proportioned library table. “Please sit down.”
    Lily had to make a real effort to tear her gaze away from the river. She sat down in the chair facing the windows.
    Pretending to fuss with the lock on his document case, Elgin Prinney secretly studied the young pair. A very good-looking young man who seemed frivolous but pleasant. And a girl with obvious good breeding who was far too thin and tired-looking for her own good. At least she loved the view. He hoped they really were the young people that he’d been searching for.
    “I believe you’ve brought the documents I requested when you telephoned me?“ Mr. Prinney said.
    Lily opened the small case she’d been clutching for hours. She removed two baby books, hers and Robert’s, which had family trees filled in on the front pages. Each book also had a formal invitation to their respective christenings, giving their parents’ names and the dates of Lily’s and Robert’s births. She’d also managed to acquire copies of birth records from city hall, an obituary noting their mother’s death and a more recent death certificate for their father.
    October, 1929. Cause of death: suicide by defenestration.
    She handed these items to Mr. Elgin Prinney, Esquire, and took a long envelope from her handbag. This contained her father’s will, a picture of him from a newspaper clipping, another picture of him with Lily and Robert on the long porch of