“When you decide to tell me about the Sadawi boy, call my office and set up an appointment. I’ll make sure my secretary knows to fit you in immediately.” She was right: she didn’t dance, she slam-dunked.

I walked the four miles from Banks Street to my office. I’d heard a great deal today, and I was hoping I could remember enough of the nuances to let me sort lies from truth. I wished I had someone to talk it all over with. My old assistant, Mary Louise, with her astringent approach to the business side of detection, would have given me good feedback.

Or Morrell, whose thoughtful response to my own passionate ideasMorrell-I was getting so I couldn’t express his name without feeling

something in my center disintegrate. I had a moment of despair so overwhelming that I collapsed onto a bench, head on my knees. I flung out a hand, as if I could touch him.

Something cold landed in my outstretched fingers: a passerby had given me a quarter. I looked around, but I was at a crowded intersection on North Avenue. Any of the people leaving Walgreens or heading into Starbucks could have felt sorry for a woman so decrepit she couldn’t hold up her head.

I sighed and stood up. Back to your loom, Penelope.

I continued west on North Avenue, doggedly thinking about the Bayards. Neither Renee nor Edwards would have said as much to me on their own as they had together. Edwards’s anger with his mother over Catherine, and his mother’s anger about his rightwing views, had let me learn that there was something fishy about Bayard Publishing’s finances-either today, or sometime in the past. Edwards had also implied that his father had slept around-he’d called Kylie Ballantine one of his “special projects.”

And Geraldine Graham? I had reached the bridge over the Chicago River, where I came to a halt, staring at a crane moving scrap metal in a plant at the river’s edge. Had she also been one of Calvin Bayard’s special projects? A lover, supplanted by the new young wife from Vassar? If that was the case, it was funny that MacKenzie Graham killed himself after Calvin arrived back in New Solway with Renee, instead of while Geraldine and Calvin were still lovers.

All those New Solway lives, they were like the twisted ribbons of steel dangling from the crane’s magnet. You could turn them and see them in different combinations. I could see a version in which Geraldine Graham threw a mask into the pool so she wouldn’t remember the lover who made her buy it. Or because she had found out that she shared the lover with the mask’s provider. I could see, less clearly, her formidable mother throwing the mask away: No primitive art allowed? No primitive passions allowed? Or Darraugh throwing it in because he resented anything to do with Calvin Bayard-if Calvin had been Geraldine’s lover.

Calvin had also forced Olin Taverner to buy a mask. And Edwards Bayard had grown up to give Olin any revenge against his neighbor and nemesis the old lawyer might crave. But why should Taverner want