“Are you ever going back to Chicago?”

“I hope so. I want to leave as much as you want me to be gone. The sheriff has ordered me not to leave until Doris McKinnon’s murder is resolved. And of course until the people I’m looking for are accounted for. Maybe they contracted plague and died. It’s been happening a lot lately.”

She nodded, half to herself. “Word gets around.”

“The county health department is supposed to issue an advisory. I don’t know if they have yet, but the pathologist who was starting the autopsy on Magda Spirova had contracted pneumonic plague, which also killed Spirova.”

“Magda! I thought—” She gasped.

“Thought what, Ms. Perec?” I said sharply when she broke off in midsentence. “Thought Dr. Kiel’s friends got rid of her body before Dr. Roque could examine it? Or thought, like Shirley Kiel, that you were rid of her for good when she disappeared in 1983?”

“I don’t have to answer your questions, about Magda or anything else.”

“True.” I sat back in the wicker chair and steepled my fingers. “You might want to answer Cady’s.”

“How dare you! I’ve never seen such arrogance, coming into a town of strangers and thinking you can tell us how to live. Last time you were here, you insulted the memory of my daughter with stories about Matt Chastain. Now you have a new theory? Do you make them up at night when you’re lonely, just to poison the lives of people who have families?”

I flinched. Her rage had some kernels of truth in it.

“There’s some evidence Matt Chastain died in a fire at the silo protest back in 1983.”

“You’ve been listening to Sonia,” Perec said scornfully. “Although I thought she was in a coma and couldn’t speak.”

“Everyone talks to everyone in this town,” I complained, “but they don’t talk to me, and they get peeved when I find things out on my own.”

“What things have you found out?” Perec’s throat contracted, strangling the words.

“Sonia Kiel and Cady are sisters.”

“No! No, no, no!”

Her rising scream reached Peppy in the car, which made her start barking. I stood and signed at her to be calm, but it was several minutes before both she and Gertrude quieted enough for me to speak again.

“Doris McKinnon was digging up dirt samples on the land that the air force took from her and sold to Sea-2-Sea. She’d been told the land was too contaminated to farm, and then she saw that Sea-2-Sea was farming it anyway. She sent it to Dr. Roque to be tested—he was the black-mold specialist, so she figured he could sort out radioactive poisoning.”

Perec was clutching the arms of her chair so tightly I could see the pulses in her wrists, but she didn’t speak.