As I went through the house, it didn’t strike me as the home of a woman with valuables, but maybe there’d been family silver or something of that nature. An addict with a craving to feed would take pretty much anything that could be turned into cash.

The ground floor included a powder room off the kitchen and a full bath built awkwardly into an alcove by the front door. A room beyond the powder room seemed to be Doris McKinnon’s bedroom—it held a small TV, a number of pill bottles for the conditions that beset aging bodies, and a stack of library books. She wasn’t a novel reader. These were tomes on the Second World War, especially the Eastern Front, and on contemporary weapons of mass destruction. She might have been ninety-something, but her brain had stayed active. Brain. That thought brought the insects crawling out of what was left of her eyes—if those were McKinnon’s eyes—unwelcome to my mind. I pulled on Peppy’s collar so hard that the dog whimpered.

Beyond the dining room were two parlors, which looked like shrines to Emerald Ferring. Photos of her covered the walls: as a tap-dancing little girl, in her high-school graduation robes, stills of her from Pride of Place and the rest of her Hollywood oeuvre. Ferring had won two Emmys for Lakeview, the Jeffersons look-alike series she’d starred in. She’d been photographed at one White House gala with President Clinton and another with Michelle Obama.

The most interesting photo was next to McKinnon’s bed. It showed Ferring at the Kanwaka missile protest back in 1983. It was a black-and-white shot of her at the gates, looking over her shoulder at the crowd behind her while a young man was using bolt cutters on the lock. Soldiers in riot gear were approaching the pair; whoever had taken the picture had chosen exactly the right moment, when everyone was poised on the brink of action. Ferring’s expression was intense, Joan of Arc trying to raise the Siege of Orléans, not an actress trying to boost her career. Or maybe she’d been a gifted actress channeling Joan of Arc.

The photo was signed to “Aunt Doris, I owe you much. This comes to you with love, not obligation. Emerald.”

A strange inscription. I frowned over it, until Peppy jerked against me again, reminding me to keep moving. I glanced at pictures of what I assumed had been Lucinda Ferring, some with Emerald, one of her on a tractor, mugging for the camera, another of her with McKinnon, the two women in floral-print dresses on the porch, martini glasses in hand. Nell Albritten said there’d been gossip, but you couldn’t tell from the photo if they’d been lovers or comfortable companions.