Morning came with a heavy ground fog and a dampness that seeped through to the very bones. Outside everything was still grey, even things normally coloured lost intensity and appeared drab. The un-abating wind from the previous night had weakened but had failed to dispel its cover. Ray tossed the sheets back and shivered as he stepped onto the cold floor.

The water was lukewarm but he managed to scrape a decent level of beard off without too much discomfort before hurrying into his clothes. Coffee and toast was all he wanted for breakfast, served by a disappointed, stiff-faced Ada, and then set out to walk the short distance to the office of the Bay Herald.

Thompson Bay's commercial area was not that large, consisting of the one main street and a couple of side streets housing some additional businesses. Mostly single story structures with the kind of signage adopted by boutique oriented owners, obviously catering to the tastes of the tourist crowd. A nice feature and one that was well maintained was the presence of small trees every twenty feet or so along the edge of the sidewalk with hanging baskets to hold seasonal flowers. At the moment they were planted with some green foliage or other that Ray couldn't identify; a bridge to the next flower season he suspected.

The newspaper office was on one of the side streets running north from the main drag and Ray plodded through the damp air to its front door. The front of the business was a plain brick, storefront addition to an old two-storey house; it replaced what was once a grass lawn. Behind the house he could make out a huge willow tree, the branches slashing about in the light wind.

He went into a waiting room with several chrome and vinyl chairs flanking a large wooden cubed table covered in old magazines and back issues of the Herald's entertainment section. A half wall with a glass partition top gave onto a larger area with two desks, filing cabinets, copiers, faxes, telephones and a large coffee maker with a carafe half full. At one desk, with his feet up and a paper open in front of him, sat the man Ray assumed to be Duffy Wiltshire, the editor.

The sound of the door apparently hadn't alerted him so Ray rapped on the glass, getting one corner of the paper to drop, and was treated to a pair of tinted glasses looking at him without moving.

"Mr. Wiltshire?"

The feet came down and paper was folded and tossed on the desk. "And you are?"

"My name's Ray Simmons. I'd like to talk to you about Adelaide Balfour."

The man stood and hooked his thumbs in a pair of bright blue suspenders and canted his head, studying his visitor with more interest.

"Adelaide Balfour. Haven't thought about that name for some time now. What's your interest?"

"Can I come in or do we talk like jailhouse visitors through this glass?"

Duffy reached down and pressed a button and the door by the wall clicked open. "Like a coffee, it's pretty fresh?"

"Sure, thanks." Ray entered the office and sat in the only other chair at the desk.

"Ray Simmons, you said?"

"Yes. I'm Adelaide's uncle."

Duffy carried the two mugs across the room and handed one to Ray. "I don't recall an uncle involved at the time." He sipped thoughtfully.

"I wasn't. I was away."

"And now you're here exactly why?"

Ray crossed an ankle over his knee and tasted the coffee. "I'm looking for the person that killed my niece, pushed her mother into an early grave and sent her father into the bottle with no hope of getting out."

Duffy blinked at the determined response. "You have some information that gives you a starting point?"

"Just you."

"Me!" Duffy retreated around behind his desk and sat, cradling his mug in both hands. "Everything I knew was in my paper. Stopped writin' about that after they let the boy go. "

"You defended him in your articles."

"I did. I felt he was- I recall I had the feeling that there was something wrong with the kid you know. He just didn't fit what they were sayin' about him somehow."

"In what way?" Ray asked with interest.

"He seemed..." The mug found a resting place amid the papers on the desk. Duffy sat up. "I always felt there was maybe a mental thing going on with him."

"You never wrote that."

"No proof and I was already taking flack for what I did write. I didn't need another opening for criticism."

"What did you hear happened to him?"

"Left home and just disappeared. I tried once to track his name on the Internet but got nowhere. I think the boy probably changed his name after he moved out. I think I would have."

"Must be a record somewhere," Ray said.

"I doubt it. You can change your name with a few simple steps these days. Even get a new social insurance number and birth certificate. It's the age of cyber-re-creation. Pictures aren't worth a thousand words anymore. History can be tweaked on line. Nothing is the truth anymore."

"Kind of cynical."

"With cause, Mr. Simmons, with cause. I'm part of the same deception, writing opinions instead of facts. Digging up dirt without regard to buried roots or present blooms; whatever sells these," he said, tapping the paper he'd been reading.

"He never even got an apology you know. The city police told me they just released him after the arraignment and chucked the file into a cold case pile."

"You sound like his defender."

Ray didn't respond to the statement. "I heard about your calls to Hannah, my sister."

"As I just said, Mr. Simmons, without regard

"Was there anything at all that the local police found that might have contradicted their theory? Something that never made your paper?"

"Not to my knowledge. Folks around here were more than ready to accept the kid as the killer; they just couldn't pin it down."

"Did you ever contact Russell's mother?"

"Why do I feel you already know the answers to these questions?"

"It's a means of confirmation. You should appreciate that." The editor smiled. "So, Russell's mother, you contacted her."

"Once again, without regard, but in her case, without results. She took the standard line that her son couldn't have done it."

Ray sipped his coffee and pulled a face. "Maybe because he didn't do it?"

"You know something to support that, something that exonerates him?" Interest nudging up.

"No, not entirely, but more than likely. You weren't too far off the mark with the mental comment."

"How so?"

"The police made a weak effort at speaking to his family because they thought they had their man and they weren't interested in what they deemed parental excuses. I had a long talk with his mother—his father's dead now—she swears that her son could never have done such a thing because—"

"As I said, the script for all mothers," Duffy interrupted showing his disappointment at Ray's apparent excuse.

"In this case, appropriate, because Russell Church suffered from a form of hysteria that would have made an act like Adelaide suffered virtually impossible."

"Hysteria? What are you talking about?"

Ray explained as well as he could from what he'd learned after his own investigation about the various physical symptoms associated with conversion and dissociative reactions of hysteria, suggesting with good cause, why Russell couldn't have killed Adelaide Balfour.

"You're saying that the very idea of killing someone could temporarily paralyze a body? Make them go blind?" Duffy sounded incredulous.

"And deaf. Also, when the police had him his emotions shifted to the dissociative state and he acted bizarrely; in that condition he could even forget his own identity." Ray took another sip of coffee but it was cold and tasted awful. He set the mug down. "His mother said she tried to tell them when they questioned her but nobody paid attention. It sounded too crazy."

"You got that right." Duffy glanced at his own coffee and decided against it as well.

"Look it up. The word hysteria comes from the ancient Greeks; that's how old it is. Highly emotional people can be affected in this way and according to Russell's mother, as a kid he was diagnosed with extreme emotional sensitivity. The cops ignored her... as did almost everyone else." The emphasis made Duffy shift on his chair. "It was only because his lawyer convinced the judge of the condition, backed up by a mass of medical records from Russell's doctors, that he was released. Otherwise he was the perfect culprit."

"They said it was lack of evidence."

"Would you try selling hysteria to the public?"

Duffy acknowledged the fact. "If all this is true then and he really was suffering some kind of- of emotional crisis, then any hope of finding the real killer is long gone." He tapped his fingers on the desk. "Maybe this emotional breakdown was caused by him killing her, ever consider that?"

"Not according to a number of doctors and psychiatrists I spoke with. The very thought of the action would have triggered the conversion reaction." Ray put his leg down and sat forward. "The records show that the cops had nothing physical to connect him. It was all based on hearsay and innuendo and Russell's own behaviour... plus an eagerness to convict. Their case was a hollow effort from the start, that's why they lost."

Duffy puffed out his cheeks and stared into his mug. "Sounds like our investigation fell more than a little short of thorough."

"Are the officers that made the arrest still active? "Hersch and Williams?"

"Williams is. Hersch is somewhere at the bottom of the bay with his snowmobile. Happened a year after the investigation."

"They never found him?"

"Some kids saw a machine head out across the ice one night and when it was quite a distance out it just sank. They found the tracks behind his house leading down onto the ice and further investigatin' pretty much said it was Theo Hersch. By the time any report was made and the kids were found and questioned, they had no idea where he went down. Some locals made dives the following spring but didn't find anything. That's a big area. And it's deep."

They sat in silence for a few minutes, each digesting the other's news. Ray finally stood and placed his mug on Duffy's desk. "Nothing else you can think of that might help then, no other people, locals or strangers, I might look at?"

"There's folks that come up for the summer season and rent all along the bay. You'd have a job findin' them. As for locals, I've known just about everyone here all my life. Thompson Bay isn't New York as I'm sure you've noticed."

"I did." He laughed softly. "Well if you do get any ideas I'm at the hotel for a little bit anyway. Thanks for your time."

"What's your next move?"

"Check out the owners of the rental places. They'll have a record of whom they let their places to. Maybe the killer was one of those."

Duffy mentally smacked his head; why hadn't he thought of that? He walked Ray to the door and promised to do some serious re-thinking.