Before I could offer any words of comfort he vanished into the shrubbery. I got back in my car, then, wondering if he might be lurking within earshot, got out again.

“I’m going to leave one of my business cards behind this post,” I said loudly. “If anyone finds it who wants to call me, my number’s on it.”

The grounds were so carefully groomed there were no pebbles or branches to weight the card. I finally tore a twig from the shrubbery and placed it behind the gate–release post with my card. As I released the gate I heard a motor revving behind me. The Mercedes Gelaendewagen appeared, going fast. It overtook me before I finished turning onto Gateway Terrace. Mrs. Trant was at the wheel. She and Mrs. Poilevy still had on their heavy glasses, which made them look like the menacing action toys at the pool’s edge.

The Skylark huffed after them but couldn’t keep pace. Before I reached the first intersection the Mercedes had disappeared.

In a few minutes I was back on the main roads, where strip malls and office towers made the Baladine home seem a remote Eden. Buildings of unrelated size and design are plunked haphazardly on the prairie out here, as if their haste to fill the vast space makes developers dig it up at random. It reminded me of a giant box of chocolates, where someone had eaten bits off dozens of pieces in a greedy desire to consume the whole thing at once.

In the distance the orderly Chicago skyline appeared. I swung onto the expressway–Arthur seeing Avalon through the mists and eagerly returning. Not that the pockmarked apartments and burned–out lots lining the inbound Eisenhower were any more delightful than the western suburbs.

A roar in the Skylark’s exhaust made it hard for me to think about the Baladines. I hadn’t gotten what I’d gone out there for: the name of anyone who might have hurt Nicola Aguinaldo. And what had I learned? That the very rich are different from you and me?

Certainly they’re different from me. The neighborhood where I grew up was a lot more like Uptown than Oak Brook. Every kid on my block knew what a pawnshop was: we were often the ones our parents sent with the radio or coat or whatever was going up the spout to pay the rent.

By the same token I didn’t know what life with a full–time nanny was like. Did they talk about their private lives to their young charges? You couldn’t live intimately with people for two years without sharing many intimacies, I suppose, if you found a language in common.