And that had been one of their happy nights, Devlin thought as he got up from his hands and knees after checking the underside of the night table in Jane Milburn’s room. He had to wipe his hands of the dust from the Milburn wall-to-wall. Knees, too, gently over yesterday’s scrapes. Would the knowledge that Jane Milburn had not been especially clean sharpen the anguish of the former Anita Walton Brokaw? Was there a Milburn diary? The skin on the back of Devlin’s neck crawled. Jack Brennan’s most intimate behavior had occurred here. In the fifteen years since they had seen each other, Jack Brennan, like Devlin, seemed to have turned one hundred and eighty degrees. Devlin moved around the bed to the closet with care, almost convincing himself he could hear the passion of corpses. A sheet covered a table in the corner. The closet was empty, except for a few wire hangers and a clutter of shoes. Nothing on the shelf. Devlin stepped in, turned around, and checked the doorframe. Nothing at all.

He pulled the sheet off the table. Not a table, he saw, but a sewing machine. Devlin remembered his mother’s, with a start-stop lever she operated with her knee. You opened the machine like a book, unfolding the top. What happened after that? You had to do something else to get the machine itself up and ready to sew. There was a trick to that part, he remembered; his mother had reached in and done—what? Forty years later, he still didn’t know.

More to the point, how had the search team coped? Most automobile-oriented males couldn’t operate dishwashers, washing machines, dryers—and sewing machines. Devlin wanted to try his luck. His skin was still crawling, and he didn’t think it took much imagination to understand why. He was in a murdered young woman’s bedroom remembering his mother, and wondering what had happened to his brother-in-law, and trying not to worry about his girlfriend. Was that just another day in the life?

With the top unfolded, Devlin put his fingers in the obvious handhold and lifted. Something heavy rose a quarter of an inch and stopped. This was what Devlin remembered of his mother’s machine. How was it different from remembering a red label from Chicago under a night table? Devlin couldn’t remember how he had learned this, so how had he retained what he had learned? Now something made him reach down in front and—No, the front was a door, that was what he was remembering. Of course, where would a woman put her knees? If the search team was as inept as Devlin, a sewing machine was a very secure place to hide something like an audiocassette. Why not? A latch. He pressed and lifted from the top. Up came the sewing machine, hefty, cumbersome, an old black metal casting with a bright steel wheel on the side.

Sew what?