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“Did he leave a forwarding address?”

“Not with me. You could check the post office.” He rubbed his chin. Can I ask what your interest is in all of this?”

I took out my card. “I’m director of a museum up in Seaboard. I’m trying to trace the origin of some counterfeit coins.”

He glanced at it. “Right. You’ve had a couple of murders up there. Bad business all around.”

“Where could I find this Wally Marsden?”

“Wally lives over on the other side of Route Two. Go right on Bear Creek Road. First place on the left. Kind of run-down. Can’t miss it.”

We left Chief Ballard and ambled over to the post office playing tourist as we went. We duly took in the glacial potholes worn into beautifully patterned granite bedrock along a green-banked river. We strolled along the Bridge of Blooms, an old railroad structure, now a marvelous linear garden of color and scents. Diantha took pictures of the displays with her remarkable little camera.

I paused to read the names on a war memorial dedicated to those from the town who had perished in recent conflicts. As I went down the list, I tried to imagine their faces, where they were born, how they died, the heartache. These are the real heroes, I thought to myself, the ones who gave all. Yet how small were their names. Compared with the very wealthy who, after some ingenious swindle of one kind or another, have their names emblazoned in huge lettering in granite on the outside of some building as proof of their magnanimity. And sometimes all over the interior as well, so that one cannot escape their futile, ostentatious benefaction. Futile because, as Felix so aptly pointed out, after a while a name is only a name.

It’s another reason I’m glad I turned down Elgin Warwick and his mummification scheme, even if his money is “old.” (The robber barons at least made and built things, unlike the latest crop of super-rich.)

But I digress.

The interior of the post office looked much as it would in Key West or Attu in the Aleutians what with special issues advertised on the walls and the usual array of packing materials.

Yes, Mr. LeBlanc did leave a forwarding address, a box number in Zurich, but a couple of things forwarded there had come back.

In Diantha’s formidable vehicle, we drove over to Route 2 and followed Chief Ballard’s directions. Sure enough, we arrived at a ramshackle sort of place, two old barns, one virtually collapsed near the road and, well up from there, a porched cottage set back against a wooded hill. We drove into a clearing between them and parked beside a spanking-new pickup big enough to be a trailer truck.

I morphed into my private eye persona and made my way through a litter of junk that included an overturned ski mobile, a rusting lawn mower, old tires, what might have been a hay baler, and assorted car parts. I mounted uncertain steps to the paint-blistered porch. I knocked on the screen, though there was a man standing just a few feet away in the gloom of the interior.

“Wally Marsden,” I said neutrally.

“Who wants to know?”

“A friend of Alain LeBlanc’s.”

I guessed the man to be in his late thirties. He had stringy light hair, dissipated eyes, bad teeth, and wore a sleeveless T-shirt tucked into oil-stained jeans. He pushed open the screen and came out far enough to stand in the doorway.

“How do I know that?”

“You don’t. I’m not exactly a friend. He did some work for my company.”

His eyes stayed skeptical and puzzled at the same time, as though trying to gather his wits. “He did lots of work for lots of people.”

“Actually, Mr. Marsden, I owe Alain money and I’m trying to find out where to reach him.”

“He left a forwarding address at the post office.”

“I know, I tried.”

He glanced down at the yard. “Who’s that down in the four-by-four?”

“My wife.”

He nodded. “Nice.”

“I think so.”

“You say you owe Alain money?”

“I also have a piece of jewelry I want to send him.”

“How much money you owe him?”

“Depends.”

A sly smile came and went. “Depends on what?”

We didn’t entirely drop the pretense. I said, “I need to know a few things.”

“I’m listening.