Rockland, Maine is a small city where Helen Esterhazy Pendergast and her brother Judson Esterhazy lived as children. Vincent D'Agosta went there, posing as a private investogator. to find out more about the family. He had little luck around town, but one patron of a tavern called the Salty Dog told him, over beers, that the family kept a crazy aunt locked in the attic, who killed and ate stray dogs. Another told him that the wife tried to poison the husband after he beat her with an electrical cord, and yet another that the father lost the family fortune in the stock market and they disappeared to avoid their debtors. Someone else remembered that the father frequently traveled to South America.