I felt an uneasy sympathy for Curtis Chigwell, living with this battalion of rectitude. It would drive me to stronger stimulants than tea.

“Anyway, I took them, and hid them behind my boating books. Obviously a foolish mistake, since boating has always been my great love. It is the first place Curtis would have thought to look. But I believe he felt so humiliated by my catching him in the act, or perhaps so frightened about not being able to get rid of his guilty secret, that the next afternoon he tried killing himself.”

I shook my head. So Max had been right in a way. By stirring up the Xerxes pot I’d put so much pressure on Chigwell that he’d felt he had no options left. It made me feel a little seasick. I followed Ms. Chigwell quietly down the hall, my feet sinking in the soft gray pile.

A room at the end held a profusion of flowering plants that absorbed the eye. This was Ms. Chigwell’s sitting room, with a rocking chair, her knitting basket, and a serviceable old Remington on a small table. The books continued in here, in shelves that were built only to waist level, serving as platforms for the red and yellow and purple flowers.

She knelt in front of the shelf next to the typewriter and started pulling leather-bound volumes from it. They were old-fashioned diaries, bound in rich green, with Horace Chigwell, M.D., tooled in gold on each cover.

“I hated Curtis using Father’s personal diaries, but there seemed no good reason for him not to. Of course the war-Hitler’s war—put a stop to things like personally bound diaries, and Curtis never had his own. He coveted these terribly.”

There were twelve altogether, covering a period of twenty-eight years. I flipped through them curiously. Dr. Chigwell had written in a prim, spidery hand. It looked neat on the page, all the letters carefully aligned, but it proved tough to read. The books seemed to be an inventory of the medical history of the Xerxes employees. At least I presumed the names spelled out in the difficult script were the employees’.

Sitting in a wicker straight-backed chair, I rummaged among the volumes until I found 1962—the year Louisa had started at Humboldt. I thumbed slowly through the names —they weren’t presented in alphabetical order—but didn’t see hers. In 1963, after she’d been there a year, she showed up near the end of the list as a white female, age seventeen, address on Houston. My mother’s name leapt out at me—Gabriella Warshawski was the person to be notified in case of an emergency. Nothing about the baby, nothing about its father. Of course that didn’t prove Chigwell hadn’t known about Caroline—just that he hadn’t put the information in his notebooks.

The rest of the entry seemed to be a series of notes in medical shorthand: “BP 110/72, Hgb 13, BUN 10, Bili 0.6, CR 0.7.” I assumed “BP” was blood pressure but couldn’t even begin to guess what the other letters meant. I asked Ms. Chigwell, but she shook her head.