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was doing it at my place because nobody else would have him.
    Which under the sad circumstances of course I denied, but he was right. Cross a good-looking, smart-as-a-whip slime toad with a pit viper and presto, you’d have Victor; by the time the brain tumor showed up on his head scans, the only personal-relationship bridges he hadn’t burned were the ones he’d dynamited.
    Still, he was my son Sam’s father, so we took care of him.
    And then we buried him, which at least solved the getting-rid-of-him problem … or so I believed then.
    Fast-forward once more, though, to just recently, and to me in that very same big old house. It was a bright, breezy morning in mid-October, six years to the day since Victor had died; his death-iversary, Sam always called it. Busy trying to prepare for a trip, I was getting a few towels out of the linen closet in the upstairs hall when someone spoke to me, the familiar voice saying my name faintly but distinctly.
    Instantly the hairs rose on my arms. “Victor?” I whispered. Which was ridiculous. And yet …
    Glancing nervously around, I even scanned the hall’s pressed-tin ceiling and crown moldings, two of the many antique features—a fireplace in every room, hardwood floors aged to the glowing amber of good whiskey—that had attracted me when I’d first seen the two-hundred-year-old dwelling.
    But of course no one was there. The hall window looked out toward Passamaquoddy Bay, a long, narrow body of water that separates Moose Island—the two-by-seven-mile chunk of granite where Eastport, population 1,545, is located—from the Canadian island of Campobello.
    Directly across, I could see the huge shoreline estate where the Roosevelts spent summers back in the 1940s. From the rambling shingled mansion with its wide swath of grass sloping down to the beach, they swam and sailed, played croquet, and walked the windswept shore as if they were any other vacationing family.
    Nowadays the estate is a park; thousands of people visit it. But the voice I’d heard couldn’t have come from over there, either. A storm had washed every hint of haze out to sea just the night before, andeven though the razor-bright fall air made the island look near enough to step practically out my front hall window onto, it was really almost two miles distant.
    “Jake.” Again, more insistently this time. Telling myself it must be what Sam would’ve called a Fig Newton of my imagination, I tried to ignore it, instead letting my gaze wander down to Key Street, where a double row of maple trees lining the thoroughfare glowed reddish gold in the morning sun.
    Behind them, antique clapboard houses like my own presided over autumn lawns; in the gardens, the last straggling asters and chrysanthemums flung their bright heads this way and that in the breeze. Beyond, a jumble of downtown roofs jutted at angles, soft charcoal scribbles of woodsmoke blowing horizontally out of their chimneys.
    Then came the bay itself, still choppy after the chaotic squalls of the night before. A little red scallop dragger bobbed energetically on the flowing tide.
    “Jake.” The window was open, gauzy white curtains billowing, but the only sound coming from there was the growl of a nearby leaf blower. Frowning, I glanced up the stairs to the third floor, where a framed-in hatch led higher still, to the attic.
    But that area couldn’t possibly be occupied. Days earlier, I’d taken the stepladder from its usual place propped against the hatch, hauling it downstairs to patch the trim around the leaded-glass fanlight over the front door.
    And so far I’d neglected to haul it back up again. Besides, I knew that voice, and its owner couldn’t be talking: not to me, not to anyone.
    Not even on his deathiversary. But there was no denying that I thought I’d heard him, and when the phone rang I jumped a foot.
    Answering distractedly, I was still busy trying to convince myself that what just happened couldn’t have. Because first