In his prime, when his political connections and his personal tenacity had landed him a series of high-profile government jobs, among them commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections, Arthur always kept the oar with him. It was a fixture in every office he ever had.

Mass. Dept of Corrections patch

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Allen's father had mentioned that to him once. They had known each other, though only slightly, in the late 1950s, after Allen's dad had retired from the FBI. He had taken a job as senior investigator for the Massachusetts Organized Crime Commission, and Arthur T. Lyman was a member of the board.

Arthur Lyman portrait

Lyman, his father had told him, may have been a true aristocrat through and through, but he had a real keen mind and if it hadn't been for a couple of hundred years of unfortunate breeding, he might have made a good Irish cop. The old man found it sort of touching that, in addition to the sculling oar, Lyman always kept another talisman with him: the gold-plate badge in a leather wallet he had been given when he took over the prison system.

Allen had always had the impression — he couldn't put his finger on just why — that under other circumstances, his father and Arthur could have been friends. But back in those days in Boston, Irish cops and board member Brahmins kept at least an oar's length apart, badge or no badge.

Allen gently moved the oar aside, and pulled open the top box. There were a few credit card receipts from Cam in there, none of them dated later than 1983. There was a Christmas card from Cam's sister in Maine. That too was from the early 1980s. And there were photographs, scores of them: Cam as a chunky little girl in a frilly white party dress, her father smiling in the background; Cam on a pony, her father holding the reins; Cam and her father with Ricefields John, her first champion dog.

He reached deeper into the box. There, at the bottom, he found a cracked dry leather wallet. He flipped it open and studied the still-bright gold-plate badge.

Instinct is a remarkable and mysterious thing.

It was possible that Cam could have walked away from the decaying old house, Allen thought. There was a chance that she could have changed her name and her appearance, maybe even her gender. Given all that he had learned about her, it was even possible that she might have walked away from her prized dogs.

But there was no way, Allen realized that after making a point of keeping it with her all these years, just as her father had, there was simply no way Cam would have walked out and not stuffed that badge in her pocket before she went.

He remembered mulling over the meaning of the artifacts. The caretaker, it seems had been wrong. There were no bees in the attic. But he was beginning to think that perhaps there was evidence of a dead WASP.

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