Kappelman came over to where I was sitting. He waved a note under my nose—he would be down with Mr. Contreras getting permission for my outing. I nodded abstractedly and asked Ms. Chigwell to continue.

She took a breath, audible across the lines. “Fridays are my day at the hospital, you know. I do volunteer work with elderly ladies who no longer—well, you don’t want to hear about that now. But when I got back I knew the house had been broken into.”

“And you called the police and stayed with a friend until they arrived?”

“No. No, I didn’t. Because I realized almost immediately it had to be Curtis. Or that he had let someone in who wouldn’t have known the house well enough not to create a disturbance.”

Confusion was making me impatient. I interrupted to ask if any valuables were gone.

“Nothing like that. But you see, Curtis’s medical notebooks are missing. I’d hidden them from him after he tried burning them, and that’s why—” She broke off. “I’m explaining this so badly. It’s why I hoped you would come, even though it’s a great distance and you are most tired yourself. I feel sure that whatever Curtis was involved with down at the Xerxes plant that he didn’t want to tell you is in those notebooks.”

“Which are missing,” I interjected shortly.

She gave the ghost of a laugh. “Only his copies. I kept the originals. I typed his notes up for him over the years. That’s all that’s missing. I never told him I kept all the original notebooks.

“You see—he had put the data in Father’s old leather diaries, the ones he had custom-bound for himself in London. It seemed—a kind of desecration to throw them out, but I knew Curtis would be horribly angry to think I was keeping them out of memory for Father. So I never told him.”

I felt a little prickling along the base of my neck, that primitive adrenaline jolt that lets you know you’re getting close to the saber-toothed tiger. I told her I’d be at her house within the hour.

28

The Golden Notebooks

Kappelman and Mr. Contreras had struck an uneasy truce over the grappa bottle. Ron got quickly to his feet when I came in, putting a stop to a long anecdote about how Mr. Contreras knew when he first saw him what a lightweight one of my old lovers had been. I explained glibly that I’d had an urgent SOS from an aunt of mine in the suburbs, one I couldn’t ignore.

“Your aunt, doll? I thought you and her—” Mr. Contreras caught the look of steel in my eyes. “Oh, your aunt. Is she in some kind of trouble?”

“More just panicking over me,” I said firmly. “But she’s my mother’s only surviving relative. She’s old and I can’t leave her hanging.” It seemed wrong somehow to confuse the redoubtable Ms. Chigwell with my mother’s mad Aunt Rosa, but you have to work with what’s at hand.