His family was in trouble enough already, but he told them he would do what he could, because they had taken a stand on principle, and his father always told him that the principles made the man.

Then he left on the family’s swaybacked mare to meet Henry Knox.

TWO

BY FALL, THE GUN debate decibels were drowning out just about every other political discussion in America.

But life went on.

For Peter Fallon that meant a cross-country drive with his son, who was entering law school at Boalt Hall, Berkeley. Peter spent three days in San Francisco, exploring the bookstores and the restaurants. Then he flew home to proof his fall catalogue.

His theme for the season was American history. Some of his offerings: a 1930s pamphlet on the life of Washington, published by an insurance company, for ten bucks; a first edition of U. S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs for $895; a signed copy of Hawthorne’s Campaign Biography of Franklin Pierce for $8,500; and a beautiful three-volume 1815 edition of Lewis and Clark’s Travels to the Source of the Missouri, a steal at $22,500.

Soon private collectors, dealers, librarians, and museum curators would be poring over the pages, and his phone would be ringing. Peter never worried that one of his catalogues might inspire thefts, forgeries, or frivolous lawsuits. And he never imagined that something in the Fallon Antiquaria catalogue might lead to murder.

But on an afternoon in early October, a black Chrysler Sebring stopped in front of an old house in Millbridge, Massachusetts.

The driver watched the house for a time, then smoothed his hair, straightened his tie, and got out.

On the passenger seat was a copy of Antiquaria, open to page twenty-five. The item circled: “A letter from Henry Knox to Rufus King RE: William Pike of Pelham, Massachusetts.”

BUSTER MCGILLIS WAS on the telephone when his murderer came to the door.

He didn’t hear the bell. After a life of working in a noisy mill, he didn’t hear much of anything. After a life of breathing cigarette smoke whenever he wasn’t inhaling the cotton lint floating in the mill, he didn’t breathe too well either.

So he wore two hearing aids and took his oxygen through plastic tubes attached to a tank. He coughed all the time and talked too loud on the telephone.

“Yeah,” he shouted into the receiver, “a professor from Dartmouth. He came right here to the house….

Asked all kinds of questions … I told him the same as I told that bookseller. I don’t know anything.” Buster coughed and spat into the tin can beside his recliner; then he said, “Hey, the Sox are up…. See you later.”

Buster turned to the television: bottom of the sixth, fifth game of the American League Divisional Series, Red Sox 6, Angels 2. If the score held, there’d be another showdown with the Yankees in the play-offs. Just what every New Englander wanted, whether he lived in a seaside mansion in Maine, a dairy farm in Vermont, or here in tired old Millbridge, Massachusetts.

Buster decided to celebrate … with a cigarette.

People with emphysema weren’t supposed to smoke. Neither were people on oxygen. But there wasn’t enough life left in him to matter, and all his friends were gone, and the mill had been closed for twenty years, and he had lived long enough to see the Red Sox win a World Series already.

So … what the hell? He put the Lucky Strike on his lower lip, turned off the tank, scratched a match … and heard the pounding at the door.

Who was this, interrupting his ball game on an October afternoon?

He levered himself out of the recliner, grabbed the handle of the oxygen tank, and rolled it ahead of him. He avoided the pile of newspapers in the living room and the one in the foyer. Someday, he was going to have to recycle those….

As soon as he peered through the sidelight, the guy outside straightened his tie and started chirping, “Mr. McGillis? Mr. McGillis?” as though he was afraid Buster might not open the door.

But Buster did; then he rolled his oxygen tank into the way so that the guy couldn’t just step into the house. “Yeah?”

“My name is Walter Stanley.”

Buster looked him over—hair carefully parted, blue blazer and red tie, big smile, cheery manner—one of those guys in his late thirties who decides to become a real estate agent after he’s failed at everything else, then goes looking for old folks and talks them into selling homes they’ve lived in for decades. Guys like that were always knocking on Buster’s door, once they knew that he lived alone in the biggest house in town, a decrepit old place with floor-to-ceiling windows and grand Greek Revival pillars, built by Buster’s great-great-grandfather in the 1830s.

Then the man held out a business card. “I’m a book scout.”

“A what?”

“A book scout. I look for books.”

“To read?”

“To buy. Sometimes I buy whole libraries from estates. Sometimes I buy a few boxes from someone like you.”

“Then what?” asked Buster.

“Sometimes dealers buy them for a flat fee. Sometimes I get a percentage.”

Buster started to close the door.