“She didn’t say much of anything. She was having a very hard time. She was very sick, very sick. Her temperature was high; she was sweating, shaking, and very unsteady. Almost incoherent. I couldn’t understand why the man hadn’t taken her to a hospital, and he told me that she didn’t want him to, that she wasn’t supposed to be having the baby, it was a real unpleasant family situation. He told me that the baby was the product of incest.” Dr. Bowden’s mouth folded up in a way that left no doubt as to how uncomfortable the word made him. “He said she was some kind of favorite of old Mr. Joyce, and she wanted to have the baby without him knowing, and then she would go back to her job and give the baby up for adoption. Her memories were too bad for her to want to keep it.”

And you believed this? I wanted to say, but knew I couldn’t break the flow of this confession. This was coming more easily than I ever would have believed, and I could only imagine that Tom Bowden had wanted to tell this story for years. I had a fleeting wonder about the kind of background this man must have, to have fallen for any of this. Of course, you had to add in the big dollop of greed that had influenced him.

“She didn’t have any family,” Manfred said, and after a second Dr. Bowden understood what Manfred was saying. He looked down at his desk fixedly. I could have hit Manfred for his interruption; at the same time, he’d only said what I was thinking.

“I didn’t know for sure,” Bowden muttered. “The man who’d brought me out to the ranch—I thought he was Drexell Joyce—the son. I figured the baby was probably his. Maybe he was ashamed to tell his grandfather that he’d been cheating on his wife; he was wearing a wedding ring, and Ms. Parish wasn’t.”

“Did she talk to you?” I said.

“What?”

“Mariah. Did she talk to you?” It seemed a simple enough question to me, but Tom Bowden was shifting uneasily in his black leather chair.

“No,” he said, and I sighed. Manfred raised a finger, just at the edge of my vision. He thought the doctor was lying again.

“So what happened?” I said, not seeing how we could get him to be honest unless we started beating on him.