Precisely what happened in the house that day remains a mystery.

The way O'Neil told the story, Cam had wanted to enter one of her 58 Clumber spaniels in a dog show in New Brunswick, Canada. Raycroft Sheriff, her prized Clumber spaniel, had been on the ascent in the ring all year. The dog, known as Bear outside the ring, had won two prestigious Best of Breed awards earlier in the year, and Lyman was carefully grooming him to be the king of all the Clumbers. The New Brunswick show would have been a key step along that road.

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Camilla's prize Clumber spaniel, Raycroft Sheriff

Cam, as Allen had learned, could be obsessive. She used to scour the kennel club newsletters the way compulsive gamblers read the sports pages, devouring them, tracking every dog and every breeder, and she knew that — for a host of reasons — the competition at the Royal Canadian Kennel Club show in New Brunswick was, to put it gently, slight.

The way Cam figured, all she had to do was show up and there was no question that she and Bear would be in the center ring, him standing in a full point with his liver-colored locks tumbling over his collar while she knelt beside him in her herringbone jacket and silk tie, basking in the unabashed adulation of all the other handlers and owners.

George was supposed to have handled it all. That was George O'Neil's job. He handled things. To everyone else, he might have been an odd little man with a big ego and a bigger mouth. But to Camilla he was her trusted lieutenant. To her, he was an expert in everything, and he lived to balance her checkbook, arrange for her travel and the upkeep of her dogs, and above all to suffer her eccentricities, and as he always noted, they were many.

This time, however, George O'Neil failed her.

Truth be told, it wasn't really George's fault. There had been a postal strike in New Brunswick and there was simply no way that he could have gotten the registration papers mailed to the kennel club on time

It was no secret to anyone who knew Cam that she was prone to flying into rages even over small annoyances. As Mary Margaret had put it, "she had a very short fuse...losing her temper over little things. They were big things to her."

To Cam, O'Neil's postal mishap was a very big deal.

And when O'Neil tried to explain what had happened with the application over the phone, Cam Lyman began to shout and curse and scream at him and then, he later said, the telephone suddenly went dead.

It wasn't until the next day, O'Neil said, that he took the 20-minute drive from his home in North Kingstown to Camilla's Hopkinton estate.

The Hopkinton estate

Not only was Lyman missing, so was the briefcase she always had at her side, a briefcase crammed, he believed, with stocks and cash and heirloom jewelry worth about $300,000. There was one other thing, O'Neil would later add to the account of events. The telephone had apparently been ripped out of the wall.

Authorities would later note one minor detail of her disappearance that struck them as odd. Almost from the moment she moved in at Hopkinton with her pack of show dogs, Camilla Lyman had become a kind of bane of the neighborhood biddies, people in Hopkinton said. Neighbors, put off by her nocturnal habits and angered by the constant yelping of her dogs, complained loudly and often to the authorities. And yet, on the day that she disappeared, there is no record of anyone complaining about the dogs, authorities said. It was as if the dogs hadn't noticed that she was gone.

Of course, neither did anyone else, at first.

It wasn't until several months later — after a distant relative failed to receive Camilla's traditional holiday card and potted poinsettia and became concerned — that anyone bothered to look for her.

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