“You know I won’t tell her,” she said.

“You can tell her if you like,” I said.

“But I won’t.”

A moment of complicity, strange after all that had happened. We were smiling at each other, sharing in this small betrayal.

“Just so you know,” said Vee, “I’m an empiricist, not a fascist.”

I frowned. “What?”

“I base my beliefs on the facts in front of me.”

I smiled, but Vee was serious.

“Racial hierarchies are based on emotion. I thought about this a lot. They’re not rational.”

“Tell your mother. She’ll be delighted. Come on let’s eat.”

Elsa was standing by the table, reading from the court schedule. There was something too perfect, too staged in the arrangement of her limbs, and I wondered for a moment if she had heard us in the hall.

“I’m going to sit today out,” she said.

Vee stared. “Why, Mum?”

Elsa picked up the sheet of paper from the table. “‘Today the court will examine the beliefs of the accused, in connection with the psychiatric report compiled by Doctor Blah, blah blah blah professor emeritus of the University of Meh.’ I’m translating. You get the gist.”

“Meh,” said Franklin from his highchair. “Mmmmeh.”

Vee took the piece of paper from Elsa’s hand, scanned it, put it down. I simply stared at my wife.

“Don’t look at me with concern, Cal. What happens inside those men’s heads is irrelevant to me. It’s what they did that counts.”

“And it’s not that I disagree with you.”

“Then don’t.”

Only Franklin seemed truly happy this morning, though the day was just as bright and the birds sang just as loudly.

“Do you have to be crazy to plan the murder of children? This is the question that the Garden Island courtroom will consider today. Paul Andersen and his brother John admit that they set out to do exactly that last year on Midsummer’s Eve, when they murdered ninety-one people in cold blood, eighty-seven of them minors. In front of the court are two competing psychiatric reports, which draw two chillingly different conclusions.”

I paused. Through the window of my office I could see our upstairs neighbor, standing on the path, peering in. I looked at the telephone on the desk in front of me, at the headphone lead connecting me to the phone. I picked up the phone, stood up, walked toward the window.

Carly’s voice in my ears, comforting and professional. “Cal, talk us quickly through those conclusions.”