“Please call me Katy, dear.”

“Katy,” Caitlin said thankfully. “Both Henry and I believe—we fervently hope—that you can shed some light on one particularly heinous crime.”

Mrs. Regan blinked like a young ingénue auditioning for a lead role. “What crime is that?”

“The murder of a boy named Justus Wilson. His friends called him ‘Pooky.’”

Katy Royal kept looking back at Caitlin as though she hadn’t spoken a word. Then, after an interminable silence, she blinked once, like a patient bird. “Who, dear?”

Caitlin leaned forward and gave Katy the full intensity of her gaze. She knew that her bright green eyes sometimes unnerved people, and she hoped they would have that effect now. “Pooky—Wilson,” she enunciated. “He was a young black man who worked for Albert Norris, the music store owner, back in 1964. He disappeared on July nineteenth, the day after his boss was murdered. He was never seen again.”

If anything, Katy’s eyes had grown glassier still.

Purely on instinct, Caitlin took the photo of Pooky and his band from her purse, then crossed to Katy’s chair and held the picture before her.

“That’s Pooky on the right,” she said, “playing the bass guitar. He was murdered in 1964, and I finally know why.”

“Why?” Katy asked, her eyes glued to the photograph, her voice as distant as the echo in a canyon.

“Because he loved a white girl. A beautiful eighteen-year-old girl.”

“No.”

“Yes,” Caitlin said softly. “A girl named Katy.”

“No.” Mrs. Regan shook her head. “He didn’t love her.”

This was the last thing Caitlin had expected to hear. “He didn’t?”

The stretched-taut face began to twist with emotion. “No, no, no. He just wanted to touch her. Use her. Do dirty things to her.”

Caitlin couldn’t quite read what lay behind the troubled face, but the voice sounded angry. “Who are you talking about, Katy?”

Mrs. Regan shook her head like someone trying to wake herself from a trance. Then she looked at Caitlin with unsettling directness. “You’re taping this, aren’t you?”

Caitlin swallowed. “No.”

“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” Katy chanted in a childlike voice. “I’m not blind, you know.”

Caitlin felt as though she’d awakened in a 1950s horror movie.

“If you want me to keep talking,” Katy said, “turn off your tape machine.”

Caitlin thought about it for a few seconds. Then she went back to her chair and replaced the photograph in her purse. Lifting the Sony so that Katy could see its red light, she switched off the recorder.

The woman smiled with childish satisfaction. “Now. Where were we?”

“Pooky Wilson.” Caitlin dropped the recorder back into her purse. “I was confused, because you were speaking in the third person. You said, ‘He didn’t love her. He just wanted to do dirty things to her.’ But I assume you were talking about yourself.”

“Yourself, myself, himself … no-self. What’s the difference?”