Free City of Light by Lauren Belfer

the News explained, was that a Mr. Jacob Hoffman, the manager of the boathouse restaurant, had been standing at a second-story window of his domain enjoying a morning cup of cocoa when he saw the footprints, the hole in the ice, and the suspicious bulky darkness just beyond. He telephoned the police immediately.
    The News speculated about whether Speyer had drowned or died of exposure; doctors offered varied opinions, awaiting the autopsy. The paper also raised several obvious questions: Why was Speyer walking across the ice in the middle of the night? Was anyone with him or following him? Did he see the posted danger signs and choose to ignore them? Thus far, the News reported, the police had discovered no indication of foul play.
    The report concluded with this comment:
“His death is a tragedy for the development of hydroelectric power throughout the United States,” Thomas Sinclair, director of the Niagara Frontier Power Co., told the News this morning. “I was privileged to work closely with him for many years. We enjoyed a pleasurable reunion at the Buffalo Club last night. I hadn’t seen him in several months. He was like a brother to me, and I shall miss him,” said the shocked Mr. Sinclair.
    Quickly I folded the newspaper and put it away. For what possible reason had Tom neglected to mention Speyer’s visit to his home? Why had he lied? What possible reason could there be to lie, except some personal involvement? Had Tom used the telephone in the parlor after Speyer’s visit, as I’d assumed last night, and if so, whom had he called? To make what arrangements?
    Even as these questions riveted my thoughts, another came too, one more personally pressing: Surely Tom knew that I would read his lie in the newspapers. Now I, as well as he, carried the burden of this secret.

CHAPTER III

    I f Frederick Law Olmsted had been a painter, Buffalo would have been his canvas. Beginning in 1868, he created in the city a vast system of parks linked by forested roadways wider than the boulevards of Paris. Olmsted had come to Buffalo at the invitation of a group of civic-minded business leaders, many of whom had served on the Macaulay board of trustees. Each time I stepped out of the school, I entered Olmsted’s vision as if I were walking into his mind, surrendering to the eloquent unity of every avenue.
    Delaware Park, where Karl Speyer drowned, was about a half-mile from school, within easy walking distance. After reading the News , I completed a few items of work and by four-thirty I put on my cloak and set off. I followed Olmsted’s regiments of trees, rows of six across, up Bidwell Parkway, around Soldier’s Place, and onto Lincoln Parkway. The clouds were gray, the air damp and cold. I crossed streets slushed with a winter’s worth of snow. Water seeped into my boots. At Forest Avenue, in front of the Sinclair estate, the west wind—the ice wind, from Lake Erie and the Niagara River—whipped around me, burning my cheeks. Olmsted’s vision embraced me nonetheless. I felt exhilarated by the majesty of the trees.
    At the end of Lincoln Parkway, atop a slight hill, Delaware Park opened into a startling vista of three hundred fifty acres. From where I stood, I could see a wide expanse of open meadows, gentle valleys, and tree-covered hillsides, all shaped around an ornamental lake, its shoreline gently curving. Just north of the park (primarily outside the park boundaries, on land which had been a cow pasture), the Pan-American Exposition was nearing completion, its gaudy Spanish Renaissance turrets and domes rising above the park trees. Of the dozens of structures in the exposition only two were designed to be permanent, destined to remain standing within the park itself: the New York State Building, a white marble Parthenon which I could just glimpse to the northwest; and beside me, on a knoll to my left, the half-finished Albright Art Gallery, inspired by the Erechtheum. The Albright Art Gallery and the New York