"There must have been two dozen of them, all sizes and colors," he later said. There were puppies and ponies, giraffes and teddy bears, a lifetime's worth huddling together on the bedspread. Some of them had to have been fifty years old.

Young Camilla with her dog

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There was one among them that caught Allen's eye. It was the oldest of the bunch. Tattered almost beyond recognition, it seemed to resemble, as much as a stuffed animal can resemble a real beast, the descriptions he had heard of the little black mop of a dog Cam's father had given her when she was just a child. Perhaps Arthur had given her the stuffed dog as well, he thought. It seemed so strange to him that Cam Lyman, who had worked so hard to erase every trace of the person she had been — even to the point of trying to wipe away her own gender — would have clung to this girlish menagerie.

"There was just one more thing I wanted to take a quick look at," Allen later said.

Ignoring the caretakers warning of bees, Allen made his way to the attic.

She had almost been right. In the corner of the attic, just above the eaves, there was what appeared to have once been a papery wasp's nest. There had been an early frost that year, and the hive was dormant. On the dusty pine plank floor, there were half a dozen or so wasp carcasses.

There didn't seem to be much else up there. The place stank of mold and all the wood that wasn't saturated from the last rain looked as if it were dry-rotted. It was dark, but enough light oozed through holes in the old roof to let him make out shapes, the rigid swan-necked outline of an old floor lamp against one wall, a stack of cardboard boxes under a round curtained window, and an object that, in the shadows, looked sort of like a man-size praying mantis.

Moving closer, Allen realized that it was an old wooden oar from a racing scull. It had to have been Arthur Lyman's. Back when Arthur was at Harvard, sculling was almost a required course, and while Arthur was hardly Olympic material, he had always worked harder at the sport than a young man of his good breeding was supposed to, and as he got older, he always looked back with a certain pride on his days with the crew.

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