She remembered. Between fifteen and twenty-five years old? She seemed like nineteen to him, around the time they were beginning to play their game in earnest. “Good. I eat a lot of apple pie these days.”

“I’m going back to my office,” Ann Elizabeth said. “Have a nice visit.”

Maryellen was holding his hand, smiling, her blue eyes bright. “Let’s go inside. You look wonderful! For all I knew, you could have been a potbellied bald guy. You’re still a cop. I can see that you don’t drink anymore.”

He stepped into the middle of the room as she closed the door. Lovely: a love seat, a leather chair and some wooden bookcases, a fireplace in the corner, a true dining room beyond. Windows on all sides. “The two bedrooms are in back,” she said. “The whole place is going to be another set of offices when I’m out of here.” She approached him. “What did she tell you? Did she say I was crazy?”

He took her arms from around his neck. “She said you were doing well. You’re a guest. You have your own life.”

She pulled her fists to her bosom and gave him a little-girl look. “What did she say about that?”

“That’s it: you have your own life. So do I. It took me a long time, but I finally have something together that I want to preserve.” He wanted to add, and cherish. “Now your brother has been murdered, and more than you can see in the papers, I’m being fitted for the collar. I know enough of the who, what, when, and where. What I don’t know is why? An eighty-eight-year-old mafioso in New Jersey told me to ask you.”

She laughed out loud. “I thought I was crazy! Oh, come, let’s have some coffee and apple pie. It took all that to get you to come find me, huh?”

“Maryellen—”

She shook his arm. “It’s a joke.” She wanted him to sit facing the little kitchen, the place could be converted into a set of offices later. She was going to sit on his right, showing him her best side. She had done the same thing fifteen and twenty years ago. After she had served the pie and poured the coffee, she sat down and said, “You have another girl. What’s she like?”

“Irish. Wise. Joyous.”

“Where did she go to school?”

“Londonderry.”