“Her name is Cady,” I said quietly. “She’s the person you raised, not the person Magda gave birth to. She’s lucky that she came to you. You think highly of Nathan Kiel, but you must know how he and Shirley treated the three children who grew up with them.”

She didn’t speak, but some of the rigid lines went out of her cheeks.

I watched the second hand make a couple of circuits around the birds in the clock before I spoke again. “What made Colonel Baggetto think Spirova had come back here? Had she been in touch with Dr. Kiel?”

At that she looked up at me, the fierceness back in her face. “He talks to me. Who else can he trust? He saw her. He went out to that research place near Eudora, and he recognized her at once, even thirty-five years later.”

“What was she doing there?” I demanded.

“I don’t know. But Bram Roswell is as crazy as Magda, so whatever she was doing, it wasn’t designed to bring peace and light to the world, you can count on that.”

The meeting I’d stumbled on in the hotel bar last week, where Kiel was sitting uncomfortably with the colonel, Roswell, and the young man from the army staff college, that must have been to discuss Magda. How had she died? How had she landed in Doris McKinnon’s kitchen?

And what part of it had August Veriden and Emerald Ferring witnessed? I didn’t want to risk their safety by trying to find them in the library. If they were hiding in the stacks, under F for Fugitive or W for Witness, it would be child’s play for Baggetto and Gisborne to follow me to them.

I stood, my knees stiff. Every joint stiff, actually. “You owe it to Cady to tell her the truth.”

“You don’t get to tell me what I owe to whom.”

“You’re right. I’m just the outside agitator turning Lawrence upside down. In some part of your mind, though, you’ve always known the truth—it’s why you’ve resisted Cady’s efforts to find out about her father. Do you know that she went through all the files in the departmental office, looking for Matt Chastain’s records? What happened when his family wrote, wanting to know where he was?”

“Dr. Kiel told them he was doing important work for the government but that we couldn’t disclose the location. Then he wrote that we hadn’t had word from him for over a year and that the CIA feared he had died.”

“A comfort to his mother, no doubt. Just as knowing how Jenny died was a comfort to you.”