Size 42.

It was a plain brown sports coat, elegant but understated, the kind of jacket that, even new, seems to smell slightly of pipe smoke and autumn in New England. The kind of jacket that seems to rustle like fresh fallen leaves when you put it on.

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Camilla, dressed as a man

It was the kind of jacket that Arthur T. Lyman had always favored, and as Camilla eased it over her ample shoulders, perhaps she felt a little closer to her father, a little less lost.

Camilla had been devastated by her father's painful, hacking death from cancer in 1968. She had been consumed by grief and the loneliness that padded along never far behind it like a surly dog. Being at Ricefields, that sprawling mansion in decline, had only made matters worse.

She wasn't alone, of course. Mousy was there. But in a way, that had been worse for Camilla. That was certainly the impression shared by Doris Maitland and her family.

Camilla Lyman always insisted on the perfect pedigree when it came to choosing her dogs. When she decided, for instance, to raise Clumber spaniels, an awkward breed of field dog with a perfectly tragic face, she had flown to England to retrieve the perfect breeding stock rather than rely on American breeders. She certainly knew her dogs. But when it came to people, she was far less discerning. She was forever picking up strays, people on the margins, lavishing gifts on them and also laying heavy burdens on them. That was something that investigators found time and again as they dug deeper into the missing heiress's past.

Camilla with her clumber spaniel, Raycroft Sheriff

Tom, the high-strung gay man she had met at a party someplace, was a perfect example. She had practically adopted him. She had set him up in an apartment in the Ricefields carriage house. In exchange, he ran errands for her, and paid her bills for her, a task she loathed beyond all reason. And then the relationship, such as it was, ended. There was Lee, a quirky little dog handler from somewhere in Pennsylvania. Camilla had taken him under her wing for a time, feted and dressed him and then, for reasons that remain a mystery, simply dropped him one day. And then there was Doris and her family.

Camilla had met Doris through the dog show circuit not long before her father's death, and for reasons that Maitland never really understood, but never really questioned, Camilla was particularly drawn to Maitland's children. Looking back, Maitland said, Camilla seemed to know that her father's time was growing short. Perhaps she was looking for an antidote to the brutal, brittle Brahmin coldness that she knew would seep into every corner of Ricefields. Or perhaps she was just looking for companionship.

Her relationship with the Maitlands developed the same way the others had, with gifts. Doris's young son had developed an interest in dogs and Camilla, in her usual flamboyant generosity, provided the boy with a purebred cocker spaniel, with the proviso, of course, that once the dog had a litter of pups, the pups would be Camilla's.

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