Barrier saw me staring at her and quickly turned, walking out of the church. I realized that Albritten had been speaking to me, and I knelt to ask her to repeat herself.

“You found Doris McKinnon, I see,” Albritten said.

When I squatted next to her to hear her over the hubbub, her grandson put an arm around her waist.

“Yes, ma’am. It was a second shock to find her a second time.”

“And they don’t know who that woman was, laying on Doris’s kitchen floor, hnn? Who you going to find next? I hope it’s not me.”

“Mother!” Jordan had appeared behind her with a plate of food and a glass of iced tea. “Please don’t. And you, you’re the detective, right? Don’t come bothering my mother. You almost cost her her life last week. She doesn’t need your kind of excitement.”

There was a murmur of agreement from the St. Silesians behind him, but Albritten laid a hand on my knee. She had so little flesh around the bone that her tendons stood out, ropes between fingers and elbow.

“Ms. Chicago Detective is doing her best for Emerald, Jordan. Don’t fault her for that.”

Jordan folded his lips in disapproval; they’d probably had this argument a few hundred times over the last two days. I pushed myself up to standing and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

“Don’t lose heart, Ms. Detective,” Albritten said. “That isn’t your own daughter paying you a visit, is it?”

“No, ma’am. She works with August in Chicago. She’s the person who came with August’s cousin and asked me to look for him.”

That caused a new murmur, this time of interest, but none of them said anything, no volunteers of information about where August and Emerald were hiding.

Cady Perec had been hovering. When I moved away from Albritten, she demanded to know when we were going to break into Sea-2-Sea’s experimental farm. I’d forgotten that part of my agenda, hunting for the places where McKinnon had been digging. I urged Cady not to bellow her felonious urges to the world, but she only laughed.

“If we tried to whisper, everyone would lean in to eavesdrop. Me shouting is just one more clanging gong among all these wagging tongues.”

Bernie had moved up closer to us, unfortunately. “You are going to break into a farm?” Her eyes sparkled. “Why? Can I come?”

“No!” I cried. “And I’m not sure it’s a useful idea.”

“But we need to know what Doris thought was going on with Sea-2-Sea, and I can help you find the place where she might have been digging,” Cady argued.