Kiel scowled. “Gertrude called me this morning. Apparently this detective spoke to Cady yesterday, got her worked up all over again, and Gertrude was afraid she’d come here to harass me. As she has!”

“Gertrude Perec,” I said. “Is she a family friend, a sister scientist—”

“She was Nate’s secretary,” Shirley spit at me. “She was that mirror that you hear about, the one who reflects men back at twice their normal size. Another one of Nate’s female groupies who thought he walked on water. Men tend to see through him. If Gertrude had had to live with him—”

“No one could keep sane in the same house as you. No wonder your daughter—”

I’ve never learned to do that two-finger whistle, but when I have to, I can hit the A above high C. I stood and let it fly. Kiel and Shirley both stopped shouting and stared at me.

“You’ve answered one of my questions with this repulsive display. I don’t know if you’re entertaining each other or yourselves, but you’re definitely making me sick to my stomach.”

Kiel started to speak, but I shut him up. “My turn, then it’s your turn. It’s called conversation. I am a detective, from Chicago, looking for a missing woman who grew up in Lawrence in the 1950s and went to the University of Kansas. She came back here with a young man who is a videographer, to film her origin story. In trying to find where Ms. Ferring lived as a child and a young adult, I met Cady Perec at the historical society. She took me to meet her grandmother. I also put up flyers asking if anyone had seen Ms. Ferring and her videographer.

“Sonia called me at two this morning, saying she had seen them taking photographs on her dead lover’s grave. By the time I got to Eighth and Rhode Island, where she’d phoned from, your daughter was in a coma, close to death. I called 911.

“All I want from you are answers to two questions. No, three. Who was Ms. Kiel’s truelove? Where is he buried? And have you been to the hospital to see your daughter?”

Shirley had started to snarl something about Sonia’s truelove, but my last question muted her.

“You’re a stranger in a strange land,” Kiel said. “You don’t know me, or my wife, or our daughter, so don’t sit in judgment on us.”

A vein over his right eye was throbbing. I hoped he didn’t have a stroke while I was talking to him.

“If you will tell me where your daughter’s dead lover is buried, I will leave—I will get out of your hair, I promise.” I’d started to say leave you in peace but realized in midsentence that wasn’t a country either of them was like to inhabit.