She draws back her head, her opinion clear. “Absolutely not. The only man I even remember being close to Brody was Leo Marston, and Leo hated Tom. You know that.”

I remember Henry saying something about Brody and Judge Marston being partners. Leo was one of the cruelest sons of bitches I knew among the parents of kids I grew up with, and if he and Royal were friends, then I can’t imagine my father spending any time at all with Brody—which squares with what Dad told me.

Pithy’s face tightens with sudden urgency. “Why aren’t the two of you working together on this? Where is Tom? Is he hurt? Has someone kidnapped him?”

“No, no,” I reassure her. “He’s fine.”

But Pithy isn’t fooled. With oracular vision, she sees right through me, all the way down to my deepest fears. “Poor darling. Every son and daughter learns a heartbreaking truth someday. I only hope that in this case it’s something you can live with.”

“Since you were Dad’s first patient, you must have known Viola Turner.”

The old woman takes a deeper breath than she has up to now, then lets it out very slowly. “Of course I did. But don’t ask me anything you don’t want the answer to.”

Her warning chills me, but this is half the reason I’ve come. “Did Viola and Dad have an affair, Pithy?”

“I can’t speak to that. But your father loved that girl—that I do know.”

“How do you know?”

“Men are simple creatures, but they’re not all the same. Many from your father’s generation, doctors especially, went a little crazy in the 1960s. They’d grown up in the corseted thirties and forties, studied day and night, married as virgins. Then suddenly the world changed. They were making money, they were respected, and women threw themselves at their feet. A lot of them rogered everything wearing a skirt. They never considered leaving their wives, of course. They just wanted sex.”

“And Dad?”

“Your father wasn’t one of those. Tom was a fine and faithful fellow. But that kind of man is susceptible to a different kind of temptation. You see, the women of that period—women like your mother—grew up with the biggest dose of Calvinist guilt and shame any American women ever got. And it gave them problems in the boudoir. Even faithful husbands couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to be with a woman who didn’t carry that crippling burden.”

“A woman like Viola?”