Ms. Chigwell was in the garage painting her dinghy. She greeted me with her usual abrupt gruffness, but since she invited me in for tea I presumed she was glad to see me.

She had no idea why they had started doing the blood work down at the Xerxes plant. “I just remember that Curtis was in a flurry about it because they had to send all those specimens to some lab and then keep separate records of them, giving the employees numbers and so on. That’s why he kept his own notebooks, so he could follow them by name and not have to worry about the numbering scheme.”

I sat in the chintz armchair for over an hour, eating a large pile of cookies, while she discussed what she would do if she couldn’t find her brother.

“I always wanted to go to Florence,” she said. “But I’m too old now, I guess. I’ve never been able to get Curtis to agree to travel outside the country. He always suspects he’ll get some terrible disease from the food or the water, or that foreigners will cheat him.”

“I’ve always wanted to go to Florence, too—my mother came from a little town in southeastern Tuscany. My excuse is, I never have enough money together to pay for the airfare.” I leaned forward and added persuasively, “You gave your brother most of your life. You don’t have to spend the rest of it waiting at the window with a candle burning. If I was seventy-nine and in good health and had some money, I’d be at O’Hare with a suitcase and a passport in time for tonight’s flight.”

“You probably would,” she agreed. “You’re a brave girl.”

I left soon after and headed back to Chicago, my shoulders aching again. Talking to Ms. Chigwell had been a long shot. I could’ve done it by phone if I didn’t enjoy seeing her, but the fruitless errand at the end of a long week left me worn out. Maybe it was time to give the police what I had. I tried imagining how I’d tell Bobby my story:

“You see, they’d been doing all these blood tests on their employees and now they’re afraid someone will find out and sue them for suppressing evidence of how toxic Xerxine really was.”

And Bobby smiling indulgently and saying, “I know you took a liking to the old lady, but it’s obvious she had a grudge against her brother all these years. I wouldn’t take her reports at face value. How do you even know those notebooks were his? She has some medical training—she might have faked them just to get him in hot water. Then he disappears and she wants to unload them. Hell”—no, Bobby wouldn’t use bad language in front of me—“Heck, Vicki, maybe they had one fight too many and she popped him on the head and then panicked and buried his body in Salt Creek. Then she calls you to say he’s disappeared. You’re high on the lady; you’ll believe the story the way she wants to tell it.”