“That’s not possible,” he says.

“I know,” says Rebecca, and the Brontës, sensing her unhappiness, begin to circle her chair.

Titus Downing notices how dark the woman’s eyes look. They are slightly swollen, and he can all at once observe the many nights Rebecca has stayed awake, weeping, but she is no longer weeping. She looks, if he can gauge it right, a little bit frightened.

“Titus,” Rebecca says, and finally shares with him the reason why she has called him to London:

After they buried him—just weeks ago, Lady Ostlet says—she saw her husband in his Wellington boots shuffling past their flat on Gloucester Walk.

“It’s happened four times now,” she says.

These women, Downing swears, my god, they have pudding for brains, and even having to think about women having pudding for brains makes Downing feel dumber, and he truly does hate talking to women, and there must be legions of widows who have gone crazy in bereavement, believing they see their dead husbands everywhere, and Lady Ostlet’s black dress and dark eyes and her three feathery dogs, her flat full of flowers, it all suddenly feels downright insane, but as he thinks this, he also must admit to himself that Rebecca Ostlet is not acting insane: her expression, though slightly fearful, is not panicked; in fact, she appears more curious than anything, and when she says “Titus,” in the intimate way that she does, placing her hand on the crook of his arm, and continues, “he’s out there,” and points at her street, it’s the way she says “out there” that sends a shudder through Titus Downing.

Rebecca Ostlet gives each of the Brontës a cookie. “But that’s not the worst part,” she says.

“What’s the worst part,” Downing says.

“When he walks by,” Rebecca says, “there are bandages over his eyes.”

“Bandages why,” says Downing, because what can one possibly say to such a thing?

With both palms, Rebecca Ostlet smooths the middle part in her hair. “Because his eyes are not in his head.”

One of the Brontës jumps up onto Downing’s lap and breathes on him. The dog’s breath is warm, and Downing smells the sour contents of its stomach as Rebecca Ostlet stands up and walks to her secretary.

It is a woman’s secretary, painted white with red roses, and it, to Downing, looks like a large toy as he watches Rebecca unlock and lower the lid. She produces a wooden specimen box, which Downing instantly recognizes as the same five-drawer specimen box which belonged to Richard. He watches as Rebecca pulls out one drawer of the box with two fingers, walks over to him until she is standing right in front of Downing and there, on the cork-lined bottom, is a small, fluid-filled, glass-lidded jar in which the isolated double oculi of Richard Ostlet are thickly floating.

* * *

Cops are easy. All you have to do is show him your ID, explain you’re a congressman. There will be some perfunctory chitchat, and you will make the officer feel important, for you know, like, providing the civil service that he provides, and he may or may not write you a light traffic ticket or something, which is no problem—there is no problem that your staffers can’t handle—and sure enough, when the officer approaches your Tahoe, asks for your license, registration, insurance, and you hand it over, all is going as it should go, and the officer is, like you, a young handsome white guy, and he even actually, like, looks a little bit like you, and you have no reason to imagine that anything will go wrong in the way that it’s about to go wrong until he puts both hands over the side of your door and asks you what the hell you were doing all this time on your phone.