The officer in charge, a raw-faced man named Blodel, ordered a couple of deputies to hold on to me and my gun. When she realized what they were doing, Geraldine put on her grandest dame manner. She commanded Blodel to listen to her before he did anything he might afterwards feel “had been regrettable.” Despite her pain and her loss of blood, she gave a short, fluent account of Renee’s role in the evening’s wreckage. She stayed in the wicker chair, but her air of command was such that Blodel stopped what he was doing to attend to her.

“She shot the boy, she tried to kill Victoria. Victoria, where is Renee’s gun?” I told Blodel he would find the gun in the snow outside the kitchen door. “It will have Ms. Bayard’s fingerprints on it. And you’ll find its bullets will match the one that killed the youth in the dining room.”

Blodel sent a woman out to look for Renee’s gun, but his other officer kept a grip on me. Renee saw this as her opportunity to seize control of the situation. She left Catherine’s side, wearing an air of command like a second jacket, to tell Blodel that Benjamin Sadawi was a terrorist, wanted by the FBI, and that she had shot him to protect her granddaughter. She would appreciate Blodel’s help in getting her granddaughter to an airplane; the child was in shock, was recovering from an injury, and needed to be flown back to Chicago for medical care.

Geraldine and I listened to this with mounting indignation, but we couldn’t edge in a word to contradict her: Blodel kept silencing us when we tried to speak.

Geraldine’s wrath finally pushed her to her feet. “Oh, these lies, Renee, these lies; they fit you like the glove to hand. And you should know, Renee, that Marcus Whitby saw the agreement Calvin and Olin signed together. Whatever was in that agreement, Julius Arnoff has a copy of it.”

Before she could go further, her bad foot gave way and she collapsed, scrabbling at Blodel’s arms on her way down. My deputy let go of me to help get Geraldine back into a chair, and to make sure she hadn’t suffered further hurt. While their attention was on Geraldine-and on Renee, who was saying, “Oh, Geraldine, must you always play the victim to garner attention?”-I retreated to a corner of the living room with my cell phone.

My first call was to Freeman Carter. My lawyer wasn’t happy to hear from me at four in the morning, but he took in a summary of what had happened. He said he knew a lawyer in Rhinelander, the nearest big town, and put me on hold while he looked up the number. When he’d given it to me, he told me to wait half an hour before phoning so he could put the local guy in the picture.

I called Bobby Mallory next. Years of midnight emergencies brought him to the phone grouchy but coherent.