“That’s from Alfred Housman,” she said. When he shot her a look, she added, “I looked it up.”

“I only know John Houseman.”

“The original reads ‘Clay lies still.’ He added the ‘t-o-n.”

“So what’s this mean? That your bro—half brother is a ‘rover?’ He’s a wanderer? Has a wandering eye? What?”

“I couldn’t say.” It had baffled her too.

“Wait,” Jack said. “Here’s another: ‘Whither away, fair rover, and what thy quest?’“

“That’s from someone named Robert Bridges. I looked up the poems to see if anything else in them helped, but found nothing.”

“It’s crazy.”

“That’s exactly what Thomas’s lawyers are saying. They’re using all this weirdness as evidence that he wasn’t competent when he changed the will.”

“And when did he do that?”

“According to the date there, shortly before he died.”

“Well, whatever his state of mind, he was sure as hell determined to see you got that house.”

“I’m not so sure,” she said. “It seems to me he wanted to keep it away from Thomas more than anything else.”

“Can you think of anything important enough about that house that your half brother would kill for? What could your father have left behind that he wants so bad?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know Thomas. I can’t explain him. I don’t even want to try.”

“All right, then,” Jack said. “Your father. He seems to be at the root of all this. Who was Ronald Clayton? What did he do?”

Alicia closed her eyes and swallowed. He wanted her to talk about that man… who he was… what he did…

If you only knew…

Jack was beginning to wonder if something was wrong with Alicia—sitting so pale and silent on the other side of the desk—but then her eyes popped open and she began to talk.

“People called him brilliant,” she said in a flat tone as she stared past Jack’s shoulder, almost as if she were reading from a TelePrompter somewhere behind him. “His field was physics, and at various times in his life he was attached to the departments at Princeton, Columbia, and NYU, doing basic research. Somewhere in there he worked at Bell Labs and IBM. He followed the money. I suppose he did have a brilliant mind, but he was utterly ruthless: He wanted what he wanted when he wanted it and to hell with anybody else. His son is no different.”

Jack realized he’d never heard Alicia refer to Ronald Clayton as her father. “He” or “him” or “that man,” but never “my father.”

Had she been abused by him? Her brother? Both of them?

“Doesn’t sound like you had a great relationship with him.”

Her voice got colder and even flatter.