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"What kind of furniture is this?" I asked. I hadn't been in many houses other than my own, but I had never seen such elegant sofas, chairs, tables and lamps.

"It's all imported from France," he said. "That took almost a year, too, but it was what my mother wanted. Their bedroom is the same furniture style. Mine's a lot different, but the guest rooms are the same decor, as are the dining room and my father's office, which is really our den. As you can see, there's no television set in the living room. I've got my own set, and so do my parents, but our biggest screen is in the den. That's 'where Dad and I watch all the sports. It's also the only room in the house where my mother permits smoking. I don't smoke, do you?"

"No."

"I mean cigarettes," he said, smiling wryly.

"I don't smoke anything," I emphasized. I knew what he meant. He shrugged.

"Ever try it?" he asked.

"I don't care to."

"You don't know what you're missing if you don't try it."

"I don't care."

He laughed and then turned serious.

"You know my bedroom was supposedly your mother's, don't you?"

"No, how would I know that?"

"I thought you might. You want to see it?"

A part of me wanted to simply turn and run out of the house, but a stronger part of me was drawn to those stairs. I glanced at them.

"C'mon," he said, not waiting for my answer.

Under the rug were the steps upon which my mother had walked many times. It was down these steps that she'd fled. I could almost feel myself falling back through time, watching her rush out of the house and into the darkness that would surround me as well.

He paused on the stairway and leaned toward me.

"I know all about the murder," he said. "I know exactly where they found Harry Pearson's body and exactly how it looked when they found it."

He continued up.

My feet felt frozen to the step. 1 thought there was something terribly morbid about the casual way he talked about it all, but something fascinating as well.

"Hey," he said, stopping again to turn hack to me. "I just realized something. You know what's amazing, incredible about your coming here, in fact?"

I shook my head. Suddenly, because I was here and literally a few feet from my mother's room, I felt too weak to even speak.

"Today. The date. Don't you get it?"

"No."

"It's the date of the murder!"

5 The Scene of the Murder

. I suddenly completely understood the concept of selective amnesia.

Of course, I knew the date of Harry Pearson's death, but neither my grandmother nor my

grandfather, no one in the family, as a matter of fact, ever mentioned it or acknowledged it in any way. Maybe they had selective amnesia as well, or maybe they just thought it was wise never to mention it, even to themselves. I had heard that when I was very young, not more than three perhaps, one of the local newspapers did a column on the murder and that had revived interest, but nothing had been written about it ever since.

"I thought that was why you had come around today," Craig said.