When Helen Grimes opened her door, I could tell by her blank expression that I was about as foreign to her as my German car. Dressed in jeans and an untucked denim shirt, she planted her hands on her substantial hips and did not budge from the doorway. She seemed unbothered by the cold or who I said I was, and it wasn’t until I reminded her of my visit to the penitentiary that recognition flickered in her small, probing eyes.

“Who told you where I live?”

Her cheeks were flushed, and I wondered if she might hit me.

“Your address is in the court records for Goochland County.”

“You shouldn’t have looked for it. How would you like it if I dug up your home address?”

“If you needed my help as much as I need yours, I wouldn’t mind, Helen,” I said.

She just looked at me. I noticed that her hair was damp, an earlobe smudged with black dye.

“The man you worked for was murdered,” I said. “Someone who worked for me was murdered. And there are others. I’m sure you’ve been keeping up with some of what is going on. There is reason to suspect that the person who is doing this was an inmate at Spring Street - someone who was released, perhaps around the time that Ronnie Joe Waddell was executed.”

“I don’t know anything about anybody being released.”

Her eyes drifted to the empty street behind me.

“Would you know anything about an inmate who disappeared? Someone, perhaps, who wasn’t legitimately released? It seems that with the job you had you would have known who entered the penitentiary and who left.”

“Nobody disappeared that I heard of.”

“Why don’t you work there anymore?”

I asked.

“Health reasons.”

I heard what sounded like a cupboard door shut from somewhere inside the space she guarded.

I kept trying. “Do you remember when Ronnie Waddell’s mother came to the penitentiary to visit him on the afternoon of his execution?”

“I was there when she came in.”

“You would have searched her and anything she had with her. Am I correct?”

“Yes.”

“What I’m trying to determine is if Mrs. Waddell might have brought anything to give her son. I realize that visiting rules prohibit people from bringing in items for the inmates “

“You can get permission. She got it.”

“Mrs. Waddell got permission to give something to her son?”

“Helen, you’re letting all the heat out,” a voice sounded sweetly from behind her.

Intense blue eyes suddenly fixed on me like gun sights in the space between Helen Grimes’s meaty left shoulder and the door frame. I caught a flash of a pale cheek and aquiline nose before the space was empty again. The lock rattled and the door was quietly shut behind the erstwhile prison guard. She leaned up against it, staring at me. I repeated my question.