Amy answered, sounding relaxed: she and Harriet were enjoying a comfortable day alone together, she explained, without having to worry about Harriet’s folks. As she called her friend to the phone, I felt like a vulture, intruding on their light mood.

“Dr. Vishnikov sent me your brother’s autopsy report,” I told Harriet. “Would you like me to come to Amy’s so we can discuss it in person?” “Are you trying to prepare me for something awful?” she demanded. “Something I don’t want to know? Tell me now. This has been the hardest week of my life-I don’t want even a half hour of agony imagining things while I wait to see you.”

“Marc had a lot of phenobarbital in his system, but only one largish bourbon. Did he suffer from epilepsy, or have any history of seizures where he would have been taking this drug?”

“No,” she said blankly. “No, he’s always been-always was-really healthy. What does this mean?”

“I’m afraid it means what we’ve been saying all along: he really was murdered. Someone gave him a drug that knocked him out, and then put him in that pond to die.”

Saying it out loud brought me a sense of relief. The wheel stopped turning, the buzzing in my head ended. Murder. Not suicide. Not accident. I didn’t have to make a plaster cast of the wheel marks in the culvert: Mark’s killer had driven him to the pond in a golf cart.

Harriet became so quiet I thought perhaps she’d gone away, but at last she said in a dull, dead voice that sounded like her mother’s, “We’ve known this, anyway, all week. Not about the drug, but that someone killed him. It’s just hard to hear it finally said out loud. Marc wasn’t really healthy after all, was he? It didn’t matter that he attended the University of Michigan or was a prizewinning writer, or kept a healthy diet, did it? He still died from the black man’s disease.”

“I’m sorry?” I was confused-all I could think of was sickle-cell anemia. “Murder,” she hiccupped. “It doesn’t matter if you’re educated and live a decent life, it’s still going to get you.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated, helplessly. “I’ll come to Amy’s right now if you want.”

“No, thank you. I know you’ve been working hard on my behalf-on

my family’s behalf. I know you’re only doing what I asked you to do. But I need to be alone with a sister for now.”

When she hung up, I felt embarrassed: the news that elated me had brought her distress. I got up and walked around the room. We’d found Mark’s bottle of Maker’s Mark when we searched his house last week. Bourbon and branch: his drink, Amy had told me. If there were fingerprints on his bottle-if the whisky had been doctored-I wanted to collect that Maker’s Mark and get it tested, even if I had to pay for the job myself.

After Amy and I had finished inspecting Mark’s house on Friday, what had I done with his keys? I dumped the contents of my briefcase onto my desk. The set I’d borrowed from Mark’s housekeeper tumbled out in the jumble of papers, tampons and my PalmPilot. So did the key Luke Edwards’s locksmith had created for me to get into the Saturn.