Shirley darted a glance at her husband. He was frowning at her with more ferocity than ever.

“Sonia’s belief that she had a lover was the start of all our troubles. She became infatuated with one of my graduate students when she was fourteen. She imagined it was reciprocated, and of course it wasn’t. The whole episode was humiliating in the extreme.”

“Sonia stalked him,” Shirley said. “Of course he couldn’t complain to Nate—Nate runs his lab like a medieval fiefdom. He owns his students, and if they divide their loyalty with a spouse or a sport, woe betide them. Besides, Matt—the student, Matt Chastain—was terrified that if he complained about one of Nate’s children, Nate would take it out on him. Nate doesn’t like being crossed.” The last words came out in a childish, taunting tone.

Kiel made his swatting gesture again. “If I’d ever gotten a tenth of the respect in my own home that I got—”

“Sonia stalked Matt Chastain,” I interrupted. “Is this who Mrs. Kiel thought Dr. Cordley should know about?”

Shirley cawed raucously. “Everyone knows about Matt.”

“Did your daughter kill him?”

The silence in the room became so absolute that I could hear the drip from a faucet down the hallway.

“Who have you been talking to?” Kiel finally asked, his voice little better than a whisper.

“No one, at least not about her killing Matt Chastain. Did she?”

Another silence stretched out. Finally Kiel said, “No. She didn’t kill him. He . . . made a disastrous decision regarding an experiment I was conducting. Helping conduct. He couldn’t face the consequences, and he ran away. No one has heard from him since.”

“Sonia refused to believe he disappeared,” Shirley added. “She built a fantasy around him, that he was really in love with her but that Nate—or the government or maybe the Russians—murdered him to keep him from her.”

“And whose fault was that?” Kiel snarled. “Who filled her head with those garbagey romance novels you gorge on—”

“Save it for when I’ve left,” I snapped. “I can’t tell you how vile you sound or how unpleasant it is to listen to you. Given that your daughter thought Matt Chastain had been murdered, where did she think that had happened?”

“Wherever it was she was spying on him at the time. Poor Chastain. He was one of the weakest students I ever had, both scientifically and morally, but he didn’t deserve Sonia.”

15
And Besides, the Mensch Is Dead

Kiel vanished on his tagline. I could hear him stomping up a flight of stairs and then a door slamming. His man cave, perhaps, where he gnawed on raw alligator and brooded over how little recognition his wife and bipolar daughter gave him.