“Have you had lunch?” Brad Bell asks.

“Yes,” Holly says. A hastily gobbled chicken salad sandwich on the short ride from her hotel to this fashionable neighborhood.

“Would you like tea or coffee? Oh, and we have pastries from Two Fat Cats. They are excellent.”

“Tea would be wonderful,” Holly says. “Decaf, if you have it. And I’d love a pastry.”

“I want tea and a turnover,” the old man says. “Apple or blueberry, doesn’t matter which. And I want real tea.”

“Coming right up,” Brad says, and leaves them.

Dan Bell immediately leans forward, eyes fixed on Holly’s, and says in a low conspiratorial voice, “Brad’s terribly gay, you know.”

“Oh,” Holly says. She can think of nothing else to say except I was pretty sure he was, and that seems rude.

“Terribly gay. But he’s a genius. He’s helped me with my researches. I can be sure—I have been sure—but Brad’s the one who provided the proof.” He wags a finger at her, marking off each syllable. “In… contro… vertible!”

Holly nods and sits in a wing chair, knees together and purse on her lap. She’s starting to think that Bell actually is in the grip of a neurotic fantasy and she’s running up a blind alley. This doesn’t irritate or exasperate her; on the contrary, it fills her with relief. Because if he is, she probably is, too.

“Tell me about your creature,” Dan says, leaning even further forward. “In his article, Dr. Morton says you call it an outsider.” Those bright, exhausted eyes are still fixed on hers. Holly thinks of a cartoon vulture sitting on a tree branch.

Although it once would have been difficult for Holly not to do what people asked her to do—almost impossible—she shakes her head.

He sits back in his wheelchair, disappointed. “No?”

“You already have most of my story from the article Dr. Morton published in Psychiatric Quarterly, and from videos you may have seen on the Internet. I came to hear your story. You called Ondowsky a thing, an it. I want to know how you can be so sure he’s an outsider.”

“Outsider is a good name for him. Very good.” Bell straightens his cannula, which has come askew. “A very good name. I’ll tell you over our tea and pastries. We’ll have them upstairs, in Brad’s workroom. I’ll tell you everything. You’ll be convinced. Oh yes.”

“Brad—”

“Brad knows everything,” Dan says, waving that driftwood hand dismissively. “A good boy, gay or not.” Holly has time to muse that when you’re in your nineties, even men twenty years older than Brad Bell must seem like boys. “A smart boy, too. And you don’t have to tell me your story if you don’t want to—although I would love for you to fill in certain details I’m curious about—but before I tell you what I know, I must insist that you tell me what caused you to suspect Ondowsky in the first place.”

This is a reasonable request, and she runs down her reasoning… such as it is. “Mostly it was that little spot of hair beside his mouth that kept bugging me,” she finishes. “It was as if he put on a false mustache and was in such a hurry when he peeled it off that he didn’t get all of it. Only if he could change his whole physical appearance, why would he even need a false mustache?”

Bell waves his hand dismissively. “Did your outsider have facial hair?”

Holly thinks, frowning. The first person the outsider impersonated (that she knew of), an orderly named Heath Holmes, didn’t. The second one didn’t have face hair, either. His third target had a goatee, but when Holly and Ralph confronted the outsider in the Texas cave, his transformation hadn’t been complete.

“I don’t think so. What are you saying?”

“I don’t think they can grow facial hair,” Dan Bell says. “I think if you saw your outsider naked—I assume you never did?”

“No,” Holly says, and because she can’t help it: “Oough.”

That makes Dan smile. “If you had, I think you would have seen no pubic hair. And clean armpits.”

“The thing we met in that cave had hair on his head. So does Ondowsky. So did George.”

“George?”

“What I call the man who delivered the package with the bomb in it to the Macready School.”

“George. Ah, I see.” Dan appears to meditate on this for a moment. A little smile touches the corners of his mouth. Then it fades. “Head hair is different, though, isn’t it? Children have hair on their heads before puberty. Some are born with hair on their heads.”

Holly sees his point, and hopes it really is a point and not just another facet of this old man’s delusion.

“There are other things the bomber—George, if you like—can’t change the way he changes his physical appearance,” Dan says. “He needed to put on a fake uniform and wear fake glasses. He needed a fake truck and a fake package reader. And he needed a fake mustache.”

“Ondowsky may also have fake eyebrows,” Brad says, coming in with a tray. On it are two mugs of tea and a pile of turnovers. “But probably not. I’ve studied pictures of him until my eyes are practically rolling down my cheeks. I think he may have had implants to normalize what would otherwise have just been fuzz. The way baby eyebrows are just fuzz.” He bends to put the tray on the coffee table.

“No, no, your workroom,” Dan says. “Time to get this show on the road. Ms. Gibney—Holly—will you push me? I’m rather tired.”

“Of course.”

They pass a formal dining room and a cavernous kitchen. At the end of the hall is a stair-chair, which runs up to the second floor on a steel rail. Holly hopes it’s more reliable than the elevator in the Frederick Building.

“Brad had this put in when I lost the use of my legs,” Dan says. Brad hands Holly the tray and transfers the old man to the stair-chair with the ease of long practice. Dan pushes a button and begins to rise. Brad takes the tray back and he and Holly walk along beside the chair, which is slow but sure.

“This is a very nice house,” Holly says. Must have been expensive is the unspoken corollary.

Dan, nevertheless, reads her mind. “Grandfather. Pulp and paper mills.”

The penny drops for Holly. The supply closet at Finders Keepers is stacked with Bell copier paper. Dan sees her face and smiles.

“Yes, that’s right, Bell Paper Products, now part of an overseas conglomerate that kept the name. Until the nineteen-twenties, my grandfather owned mills all over western Maine—Lewiston, Lisbon Falls, Jay, Mechanic Falls. All shuttered now, or turned into shopping malls. He lost most of his fortune in the Crash of ’29 and the Depression. That was the year I was born. No life of Riley for my father or me, we had to work for our beer and skittles. But we managed to keep the house.”

On the second floor, Brad transfers Dan to another wheelchair and hooks him up to another bottle of oxygen. This floor seems to consist of one large room where the December sunlight has been forbidden to enter. The windows have been covered with blackout curtains. There are four computers on two work desks, several gaming consoles that look state-of-the-art to Holly, a ton of audio equipment, and a gigantic flatscreen TV. Several speakers have been mounted on the walls. Two more flank the TV on either side.