He’d taken out a pad of legal paper, carefully setting the Dunkin’ Donuts coffee to one side.

“Can you spell your name for me, please?”

I spelled it out. “I’m a lawyer, Mr. Manheim, but these days I work primarily as a private investigator. A case I’m involved in has brought me to two clients of yours. Former clients, I guess. Joey Pankowski and Steve Ferraro.”

He’d been looking at me courteously through his thick lenses, his hands clasped loosely around his pen. At the mention of Pankowski and Ferraro he let the pen drop and looked as troubled as a man with rosy cherub’s cheeks could.

“Pankowski and Ferraro? I’m not sure—”

“Employees at Humboldt Chemical’s Xerxes plant in South Chicago. Died two or three years ago.”

“Oh, yes. I remember now. They needed some legal advice, but I’m afraid I couldn’t do much for them.” He blinked unhappily behind his glasses.

“I know you don’t want to talk about your clients. I don’t like talking about mine, either. But if I explain what’s gotten me interested in Pankowski and Ferraro, will you answer a couple of questions about them for me?”

He looked down at the desktop and fiddled with his pen. “I—I really can’t—”

“What is going on with these two guys? Every time I mention their names grown men tremble in their shoes.”

He looked up at me. “Who are you working for?”

“Myself.” Myself, myself, it is enough, or so Medea said.

“You’re not working for a company?”

“You mean like Humboldt Chemical? No. I was hired originally by the young woman who used to live next door to me to find out who her father was. It seemed remotely possible that one of those two—most likely Pankowski—could have been the guy and I started poking around trying to find someone at Xerxes who knew him. This woman fired me on Wednesday, but I’ve gotten piqued by the way people are reacting to me. Lying to me, basically, about what went on between Pankowski and Ferraro and Xerxes. And then a guy I know at the Department of Labor told me you used to represent them. So here I am.”

He smiled unhappily. “I don’t suppose there’s any reason the company would send someone around after all this time. But it’s kind of hard for me to believe you’re on your own. Too many people got too excited over that case, and now you come in out of the blue? It’s too—too strange. Too pat.”

I rubbed my forehead, trying to coax some ideas into my brain. Finally I said, “I’m going to do something I’ve never done in my whole history as an investigator. I’m going to tell you exactly what happened. If after that you still feel you can’t trust me, so be it.”

I started at the very beginning, with Louisa showing up pregnant in the house next door a few months before my eleventh birthday. With Gabriella and her quixotic impulses. With Caroline’s exuberant philanthropy at other people’s expense and the nagging feeling I still had of being her older sister and somehow responsible for her. I didn’t tell him about Nancy ending up in Dead Stick Pond, but I described everything that had happened at Xerxes, my conversation with Dr. Chigwell, and finally Humboldt’s intervention. That was the only episode I muted. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him the owner of the company had had me in for brandy—I felt embarrassed because I’d let myself be gulled by the trappings of wealth. So I mumbled that I’d had a call from one of the company’s senior officers.