I made noncommittal noises. It can be hard, when everyone relies on you, to let them know that you’re feeling despair, but I didn’t think it would be helpful to suggest that.

“How did you find him?” Harriet asked. “I don’t know Chicago at all, but Amy says that mansion where he-he died-is forty or fifty miles away, in some kind of wealthy town most people never heard of.”

“Your brother never mentioned New Solway or Larchmont Hall to you or your parents?”

She shook her head. “But he worked on a lot of different stories. If he was doing research, or even if he had a friend out there-we talked once a week or so, but he wouldn’t go into those kinds of details, not unless it was something that was becoming, well, a regular part of his life. Did you think he was in danger? Is that why you went out there?”

I told them about Darraugh Graham and his mother, and the family connection to Larchmont. At Harriet’s prodding, I told them about finding her brother, hefting him out of the water, trying to revive him. But I didn’t mention Catherine Bayard.

I expected them to leave then, but they looked at each other with the kind of wordless communication that old friends or lovers develop. When Harriet nodded, Amy Bount said, “We want you to ask some questions about Marc’s death. Mr. and Mrs. Whitby are too shattered to take any action, but we think, well, at a minimum, we want a better answer to what happened to him than the DuPage County sheriff is giving us.”

Harriet Whitby nodded again. “It’s not that Marc didn’t drink, but he wasn’t a drinker, if you understand me, and he didn’t use alcohol to bolster his courage. What they said on TV was a cruder version of what they told us this afternoon when my parents and I met with them, that he’d been drinking and fallen in this pond and drowned. If he-oh, it’s too hard to explain, but nothing about his death makes sense to me. Even if he had wanted to die, which I don’t believe for one minute, he wouldn’t do it like that. But they’re saying that their examination showed he drowned and that he’d been drinking. Would they make that up?”

“No. But they don’t do a complete autopsy on every body that comes to them. It’s too expensive, and this-your brother-must have looked straightforward to them. They wouldn’t do a complete screen for drugs or poison if they’d found traces of alcohol.”

Harriet and Amy looked at each other again, and again it was Amy who spoke. “Do you think they could be making that up? The alcohol?”

I frowned, thinking it over. “It seems unlikely. You could get a lawyer to subpoena the medical examiner’s report, I suppose. Do you have some reason to think they might make it up?”

“Their general indifference,” Harriet said. “We didn’t meet the sheriff, just some spokesman. He was polite enough to Mother, but not very interested. They don’t seem at all curious about why Marcus was in that place to begin with. They want it to be that he got drunk and-stumbled onto a deserted mansion and drowned himself. Either by accident or on purpose, they don’t care which.”