I grabbed a handful of napkins from the bird-shaped holder and blotted the tea before it could slop onto me. “Okay, what’s the truth?”

“Neither of us knew she was back here, not until you found her body. It was a complete shock.”

“But everyone said that was Doris McKinnon,” I objected.

“The army sent Colonel Baggetto here—Magda had disappeared, and they thought she might have returned to Lawrence. When he heard about you finding the body, he had his suspicions.”

“Did they lead him to stab Dr. Roque?” My mouth felt as though it were filled with ashes.

“No one stabbed Dr. Roque. He died of the flu.”

“Just like Lucinda Ferring.” I was holding my temper by a thread.

Tea was pooling on her side of the table. She stared at it, as if it might turn into a magic well she could jump into.

“Cady,” I said. “Lucinda Ferring found her in the field. She and McKinnon brought her to the hospital; she was dehydrated. And then someone called you.”

“Nathan,” Perec said in a dull voice. “He told me Jenny’s baby had been rescued. They’d found Jenny earlier that day, drowned in the Wakarusa. The sheriff found her. Deputy Gisborne he was then. When Nathan told me Jenny’s baby had made it, I didn’t want to ask questions. I wanted something of my girl.”

I didn’t want to feel sorry for her, but I couldn’t help it. She’d been squeezed in an intolerable vise—loyalty to Kiel, jealous fury toward Spirova, neither meaning anything under the crushing loss of her only child. Of course she wanted to believe that Cady was Jenny’s baby. I couldn’t say I wouldn’t have done the same thing.

“Magda gave birth sometime that summer,” I said. “Where?”

Perec hunched a shoulder, still staring at the tea. “She went to Aspen, or said she went to Aspen. There’s a big conference there every summer, and she went off to present a paper. She left before she started really showing.

“I thought she’d had the baby in secret and placed it with a friend. She was still hoping Nathan would change his mind and leave Shirley. But I guess she was keeping her baby somewhere in Lawrence. Maybe when she realized Nathan wasn’t going to marry her, she brought the baby out to the protest camp, hoping it would die from the plague test. She was crazy enough to do something that cruel.

“What am I going to tell Cady? What can I tell her her name is, even? What will it do to her when she finds out Sonia is her sister?”

Tears started falling again, not the sobs that had racked her earlier but those quiet, unconscious tears we don’t even know we’re shedding.