The wicker chair I’d moved on Thursday was still where I’d placed it, but a set of books and crossword puzzles stood on it. I added those to a teetering stack on the side table and sat down.

“Then what sin did Matt commit that turned him into a ‘subhuman specimen’ in your husband’s eyes?”

“My darling daughter’s language. You’ve been talking to her? I thought she was in a coma.”

“She is. That’s something she said earlier.” I started to ask if Shirley had been to the hospital yet but bit the words off: I wanted information, not a fight. “Regardless of the language, what did Matt do?”

“I don’t know. He cultured the wrong specimen, or switched specimens in mid-experiment. Nate was beside himself. The army got involved because they’d funded the research. Nate had to go to Washington and explain himself. He must have done a good job—they renewed the grant, and Nate kept his job.”

“Sonia saw something at the missile site back in 1983, whether—”

“She thinks she saw something. If you’re believing the things she babbles—”

“Someone tried to murder your daughter yesterday. She’d begun recovering from her drug overdose and was coherent. Someone is afraid of what she’ll reveal about events at the McKinnon farm, either three weeks or three decades ago. It would be incredibly helpful if you stopped hiding behind Cheese— behind Chesnitz’s diagnosis and started listening to your daughter.”

“Mind your own goddamn business,” Shirley snapped. “We managed perfectly well in our own bucolic, hick-town way before you came muscling in from the big city to tell us what to do.”

I glared at her. “You call this managing well? Your husband and you fighting day and night? Your sons so out of touch you didn’t even let them know their sister was in the hospital? You’re an intelligent woman. Don’t you think you’d feel better—manage better—if you let the truth seep in around the edges?”

She struggled to her feet. “Don’t preach at me. You know nothing about my truth, or my family’s. You’re not the one whose daughter tried to immolate herself on a barge on the river, imagining she could commit suttee because her fictional lover had supposedly died in a fire.”

“You’re right, I don’t know those things,” I said more quietly, “but I don’t believe that Sonia made up Matt Chastain’s death. Maybe she jumbled a lot of details together—she was fourteen, she was lonely and, like you, sensitive and imaginative—but she saw something that terrified her.”

Shirley was appeased enough by the implied compliment to sit down again, but I couldn’t get her to budge on what Sonia had seen thirty years ago. I finally gave up on it.