It had taken her precisely two further calls to track Martha down to her current habitat in Luna Street. The chain of addresses was remarkably short, causing Jean to wonder what, if any, effort her father had made to find her, and what could have caused their estrangement.

When at last she found herself speaking to Martha, whose confident, cultured voice was perhaps another factor in her decision to overdress for the occasion, she didn’t mention Gretchen but stuck to her story of interest in St. Cecilia’s. It was still true, but not the whole truth.

“Yes, St. Cecilia’s. I was there. I remember it well, particularly the ceiling.”

“What was special about the ceiling?”

“Absolutely nothing, unfortunately. I just spent an awful lot of time on my back staring at it.”

“Oh. I see. Sorry, I’m a bit slow today.”

“How did you find me, anyway?”

“Dogged, journalistic spadework. May I come and talk to you sometime? This is a party line so I can’t monopolize it.”

“All right. Any day except Wednesday or Friday. I teach on those days.”

“Thursday, then?”

“Afternoons are better for me. Three o’clock?”

“Three o’clock.”

The door to 16 Luna Street was opened by a tall, striking woman with scarlet lipstick, a paint-smeared smock and a wide floppy skirt. Her dark hair was tied up in a headscarf, not under her chin the way Jean and all normal people wore it but around her forehead with the knot at the front. She peered at Jean’s jacket with an appraising eye and asked, “Is that collar fur?”

“Yes,” Jean admitted, taken aback by this curious welcome. “Probably fox, but I don’t know—it’s secondhand.”

“Well, I’m afraid you’ll have to leave it out here—I’ve got a hideous allergy. Sorry to be a bore.”

She was wearing a pair of red backless leather slippers that made a slapping sound on the tiled floor as she led Jean down the shared hallway toward a row of coat pegs. The most noticeable thing about her, however, which Jean was doing her best not to notice as she struggled out of the offending jacket and hung it up, was that she walked with a stick. And her hands and wrists were bound with curious leather splints, leaving just her fingers and thumbs free.

“Would you like tea? It’ll have to be black. The milk’s spoiled,” Martha said, opening the door to her apartment, which occupied the ground floor at the back of the building, and showing Jean into a large, high-ceilinged room.

It was done out as an artist’s studio but with a divan against one wall and a couch and coffee table by the window. The space was dominated by an easel, on which was a prepared canvas marked with ghostly lines. A trestle table was covered with buckled tubes of paint, jam jars of brushes, stained rags and crusted palettes. Canvases were stacked in one corner like giant slices of toast. There was a mixture of competing smells, none of them pleasant—turpentine, laundry, a full ashtray and the remains of lunch.