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on top of a small mountain on the eastern edge of the city. A local duke had it built a hundred years before, in memory of his wife, a niece of the czar, after she died giving birth to her first child. I had seen the chapel only from a distance, but I needed no taxi driver to tell me where it was. I'd had it pointed out on practically every visit to Wiesbaden. None of my hosts ever seemed to know if the child, whether boy or girl, had lived or died.
    The surprise in actually visiting the chapel was to find that it stood with its back to the view. In the valley I had been admiring it from behind. A small Orthodox church, the entrance faced a gravel circle that was ringed, in turn, by an oval grove of birch trees, the tops of which fell short of the troika domes. The life-size veiled head of a woman, carved in stone, stared blankly out from the meter-wide medallion above the portal. More than inert, she seemed vividly dead.
    I pulled the heavy door open and stepped inside. While my sense of sight failed at once, my sense of smell came alive. The pungent odors of stale incense, candle wax, dust, and perhaps the leavings of small animals all combined to evoke the airless musk of religion. What I took to be a sanctuary lamp burned above me, but then I realized the red glow was from the glass of a rose window strategically placed to illuminate the otherwise dark reaches of a very high ceiling.
    As my eyes adjusted, I saw what a cramped space it was: an altar, a grilled screen before it, a half-dozen pews, and on the wall to the right, below the rose window, a gilt-framed icon whose face I could not make out.
    A rack of squat, mostly burned-out candle stubs stood before the icon. Altogether, the shrine might not have been entered in the century since its princess died, and suddenly it seemed more mausoleum than church. I backed out, feeling like a profaning interloper.
    Aware of the crunch of my shoes on gravel, I circled around the building to the small fenced plaza behind. I took in the vista of the city spread below, the needle spires of Wiesbaden's Lutheran churches, the brick tower of the
Rathaus,
the town hall. A line of haze hung over the Rhine, an otherwise invisible river perhaps five miles distant. From that direction—ultimately, from the North Atlantic—storm clouds marched steadily overhead, having overrun the sun again. I took the driving wind squarely in my face, the way a deck officer does.
    I studied the view as a way to avoid looking at my watch. The taxi had dropped me at the bottom of a curving gravel road that marked the limit of the secluded site. Odd that the chapel should be so visible across the province yet so isolated. A Saturday morning, but there were no other visitors. Then it hit me that Mrs. Healy would have known that.
    Not for the first time, I wondered what Gerhard would be making of my having vanished. A decade or two later, expatriate American executives holding positions like mine would be at risk for kidnapping, even in Europe, but not then, when we Yanks were still unvanquished. I knew that before calling the police at my disappearance, Gerhard would call Butterfield, my assistant, back in Frankfurt. So from Hainerberg, I had called Butterfield first, and told him to have Gerhard wait for me at the station.
    And I, precisely what was I making of the melodrama into which I had been conscripted? I had never been a man for mystery novels or spy thrillers, and if you had told me that I would take seriously a warning of being followed, whispered by a woman with an accent, I would have laughed at you. But that was before mystery had come to define my life, the mystery of what Michael was becoming, the mystery of what Edie's absence had done to both of us.
    Soon I was no longer seeing Wiesbaden; my mind's eye drifted back to that other grove of birch trees, in the far corner of the Holy Trinity churchyard in Oyster Bay. Those trees marked the Elgin burial plot, where Edie's family members had