some of the older women in town - mabel werts , glynis mayberry , audrey hersey - remember that larry mcleod found some charred papers in the upstairs fireplace , but none of them know that the papers were the accumulation of twelve years ' correspondence between hubert marsten and an amusingly antique austrian nobleman named breichen , or that the correspondence of these two had commenced through the offices of a rather peculiar boston book merchant who died an extremely nasty death in 1933 , or that hubie had burned each and every letter before hanging himself , feeding them to the fire one at a time , watching the flames blacken and char the thick , cream ? -colored paper and obliterate the elegant , spider-thin cal ? ligraphy .