“I know someone is responsible for all the deaths,” he said. “I know that. And I realize it’s someone I know. But I can’t imagine why. Sally was a good woman, a nice woman, and I loved her.” Hollis was apparently having as hard a time keeping his thoughts on track as I was.

“She knew something,” I said intently. “She knew a secret, a big secret. She died first.”

We thought about that for a second.

“Can you remember anything about her, in the days before she died? Was she excited, upset, worried?”

Hollis looked profoundly depressed. I wanted to touch his hair, stroke it, but I kept my hands locked together in my lap. “She seemed like someone who had a secret,” he said heavily. “She would talk to me about almost anything, but some things about her family and the mess her mother had gotten into—I guess it’s not too surprising that she didn’t want to talk about their drinking and fighting and their divorce, or her mom’s and dad’s . . . well . . . infidelities.”

I worked my way through that sentence. “So, she’d be open and honest with you about almost anything except her family,” I said.

He hesitated. “Yes,” he said finally, firmly. “Anything but her family.”

“Do you think she had a secret because she had just figured something out—like, ‘Oho! Eureka!’—or because her mom or Teenie had confided in her?”

Hollis tried hard to remember, while I tried hard not to be impatient. I was sorry he had to go through even more pain, but I thought it was necessary. Actually, part of me was asking, “Why didn’t he do all this before?” Of course, he’d thought his wife had died accidentally. Now that he knew she’d been murdered, though, surely he’d been turning that time over in his head?

“I think she’d figured out something,” he said. “It’s almost impossible to say what was going through someone’s mind, you know? And I’ve been thinking maybe I didn’t know Sally as well as I thought I did. If we’d been married longer, trusted each other more, she would have told me what she was worried about, thinking of. We could have worked on it together. We just hadn’t been married that long. We hadn’t been tested.”

This wasn’t getting us anywhere. “Did anything happen right before she died?” I asked, realizing I might sound callous. “Anything that might have triggered her death?”

“Only Dick Teague dying,” Hollis said.

“When did he die?” I asked. I’d seen the newspaper stories, but I hadn’t noted the date.