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"Sam," she said, "how does it feel to be back here?"

"It feels excellent," I said. "Terrific. Why am I here?"

Deirdre looked confused. Her face puckered, an expression you might find attractive if you were looking to be attracted. I could imagine my father finding it attractive. Her hair was long and blond, as my mother remembered it, almost down to her shoulders, and Deirdre stroked it nervously with one of her gloved hands. "You're here because I asked you to meet me here."

"I know that," I said, "but why did you ask me to meet you here in the first place?"

Right then the birch trees started creaking and swaying, double time, in an uptick of wind, making such a racket that Deirdre and I momentarily forgot what we were saying and looked at them. They were silvery white and so different from the trees around them. The pines and maples were all clumped together and sturdy, but the birches were thin and lonely, each of them far apart and like an only child among larger, happier broods. I knew from Mr. Frost that the birch was supposed to be the most New England of trees, and if that was so, then I couldn't help thinking that New England was a very bad idea.

Then the wind died down and the birches stopped making their noises and we returned to our conversation, which was, basically, why was I there?

"Because this was where the Emily Dickinson House was, Sam," Deirdre said very slowly, as if I were having trouble keeping up. "You burned her house down. It's ironic."

"You're right, it is ironic," I said, except I wasn't talking about the house: I was talking about Deirdre herself. She was clearly my double, my doppelganger in bumbling. She and I were our own matching set. I wondered if my father had fallen in love with her because she was like me, and fallen out of love with my mother because she wasn't, and if love itself wasn't something we, the products of love, then make impossible for our parents because we can truly be like only one of them. Maybe this is why people have more than one child: so that neither of the parents will feel jealous and lonely.

"Does my father know you've asked me to meet you here?"

"He doesn't know anything about anything," Deirdre said. "He doesn't want to see me anymore."

"Why not?"

"Because of you," Deirdre said. Her voice shifted when she said that, and I could tell Deirdre's hatred for me was the only thing preventing her from crying. "Because after what happened at the house, he felt ashamed. He said he couldn't do it anymore. He told me he couldn't ever see me again, and no matter how much we loved each other, it was over."

"Maybe you're not really in love."

"We were in love," Deirdre said. "Things were good."

"They weren't so good for my mother."

"Things were good," she insisted, "until you came home and messed everything up."

"Deirdre," I said, "did you try to burn down the Edward Bellamy House?"

As I said earlier, I've now become something of a reader and have read my fair share of detective novels and even a few essays on how to write detective novels, and so I now know that this shouldn't have worked: you can never ask a suspect if she's guilty, and you can never expect her to confess if she is; you must catch your suspect in the act, red handed. I know this now, and next time, if there is a next time, I'll do things differently and by the book. But remember, I was a bumbler and didn't know that I couldn't ask this sort of question, and Deirdre was a bumbler and didn't know that she couldn't answer it.

"I tried to," she said, dropping her face into her red-gloved hands.

"How about the Mark Twain House?"

"I tried to," she repeated, her voice muffled in her gloves. "I just can't do anything right."

"Why did you do it?"

"Because I knew this would happen," she said, lifting her head out of her hands and looking straight at me. "I knew when you came home, Bradley would feel guilty and get rid of me and go back to your mother. I had to do something."

"So you tried to set fire to those houses, thinking I'd get blamed for it," I guessed.