When the kettle whistled she filled up a cup and put a tea bag in it, found a plastic bottle of lemon juice and added two drops, then a thick stream of honey. Doctor said she wasn’t supposed to have honey, but on nights like this, she decided doctors weren’t always right, and anyway she didn’t have it very often.

The tea tasted just right, tart and sweet. She sat back in the rickety wood chair and looked out the window at the bright glare of downtown; they were playing with the blinking lights on that silly old ball at Reunion Tower again, she could never figure out what it was supposed to be. It looked like the world now, then it didn’t look like anything at all. She watched it for a few more minutes until her eyes started hurting, then she blinked and sipped her tea and thought about Verna Henderson, dead these eight years.

It started like indigestion, a bright burn in her stomach that got hotter and hotter and made her pant through the pain. The pain didn’t last long. She fell forward, pushing the teacup away, and was dead in less than a minute.

Her body smoldered for an hour, turning gray and black and then falling into ash. Her hands stayed untouched on the table, burnt off at mid-wrist. Her feet, still in the faded houseshoes, fell over to the right and left.

There was nothing left of the rest of her but ashes and a yellowish film of fat over the ceiling of the room.

There was a scorch mark on the table where her head had lain, and one in the seat of the wooden chair, but nothing else burned.

Nothing but Minnie.

Chapter Thirty-four

Martin

Mrs. Womack had stopped looking grandmotherly some time ago. As she looked at him from the other side of Agent Carling’s bed, she seemed like some evil old witch dug up from a fairy story, blue eyes gone cold, smile gone mean.

“This is your fault,” she said. Martin looked down at Carling’s too pale face, at the tubes going into her arm and mouth and nose. “Don’t bother to deny it, Mr. Grady. You wanted to play secret agent, and here we are.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. He felt the lash of her scorn without looking up.

“How nice. I’m sure she’ll feel much better once she knows that. As far as I’m concerned, young man, the only reason I haven’t taken you out and put a bullet in your back is because that nice young doctor says she’s going to live through the night.”

When he finally had the courage to look up, he saw her dabbing her eyes with a tissue, hands trembling.

“She’s like my own. I don’t suppose you can understand that.”