“Probably. Anyway, he was particularly bad that night, complaining about the food, when everyone else was complimenting it. Finally, I’d had enough. I put dessert on the table and told him I was quitting, and he could do the dishes, then I walked out. I went to my room and packed my suitcase and started walking toward the village, up the dark road. Then Thad pulled up in a car and offered me a lift. He asked where I was going, and I said I didn’t know. He offered me a job cooking for him, drove me back to his place, installed me in the guesthouse, and I’ve worked for him ever since. The job has grown to include lots of other duties, and I’ve enjoyed it.”

“What would you be doing if you weren’t working for Thad?” Stone asked.

“Probably working in a restaurant and hating it. I don’t like a big kitchen, and you have no social life at all. This job is perfect for me. You aren’t married, are you?”

“No.”

“Ever married?”

“No. Well, once for about fifteen minutes. It was sort of annulled.”

“And where is the ex-wife today?”

“Under full-time psychiatric care. I have that effect on women.”

She laughed. “I won’t pry. I just wanted to know if you were free before . . .”

“Before what?”

“Before I seduced you.”

“If I weren’t free, would it matter?”

“It certainly would,” she said. “I’ve learned not to get involved with married men.”

“I won’t ask how. Where are you from?”

“I was born in a small town in Georgia, called Delano, but I grew up mostly in Kent, Connecticut.”

“I have a little house in Washington, Connecticut.”

“Nice town.”

“Your folks still there?”

“Both dead. Daddy was a small-town lawyer and banker; my mother wrote short stories and poetry, sometimes for The New Yorker.”

“One of them was Jewish, you said?”

“Mother. She was a New York girl through and through. They met in the city at a party, and she married him and moved to Connecticut with him. She always missed living in New York. How about you?”

“Born and bred in the city. My father was a cabinet and furniture maker, my mother, a painter.”

“Were they good at it?”

“They were. Dad has work in some of the city’s better houses and apartments; Mother has two pictures in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum. Mother and Dad are both gone, now.”

“So we’re both orphans?”

“We are, I guess.”

They finished the risotto, and Callie served them a salad, then dessert—old-fashioned chocolate cake.

They took their coffee onto the afterdeck and settled into the banquette that ran around the stern railing.

“So, did you have a productive day?”

“I did.”

“How did your lunch with the dead lady go?”

“Very well. I believe I solved her problem.”