“Then you don’t know how hard it is.” She put out her cigarette in a glass of water that was sitting on the bar before it had even burned halfway down. “You try to be the best mother you can be to your child. Was I good enough? I don’t know … but Frank just went on his way. He left us. At least I gave our daughter a place to live and a bed to sleep in.”

“Did you have a close relationship?”

“Me and Anna?”

“Yes.”

The woman stared right past Heloise, lost in her own thoughts. “No, not really.”

“Why not?”

She didn’t answer the question but instead said, “I don’t think I’ve seen her since she moved out.”

“When was that?”

“When she was sixteen.”

“And you haven’t seen her at all since then?” Heloise raised her eyebrows in surprise.

The woman shook her head.

“What about the case against her? Do you have any idea why she killed Christoffer Mossing?”

“Yes.”

Heloise looked up, attentive.

“The police say she’s crazy,” the woman said. “Not right in her head.”

“And do you also think that?” Heloise asked. “That she just snapped?”

“Maybe.” The woman shrugged.

“Do you know anything about corpse flowers? Does that mean anything to you?”

“About what?”

“Corpse flowers,” Heloise repeated. “In one of her letters, Anna wrote about a corpse flower.”

“You mean, like, the flower arrangements they have at a funeral? On top of the coffin?”

Heloise glanced inadvertently at the “decorations” in the vases on the tables.

“No, it doesn’t have anything to do with funerals. It’s a flower that grows in Sumatra.”

The woman’s face was blank.

“The flower lures beetles into its petals by emitting an odor of death,” Heloise continued. “Does that mean anything to you?”

The woman wrinkled her nose and shook her head.

Heloise scratched her chin and shifted gears. “How long have you had this pub?”

“I took over in 1994. It was my father’s, and when he died, I carried the torch, I guess you could say.” She held a bottle of beer up in the air symbolically.

“What did you do before?”

“Before the Lantern?”

“Yes.”

“I ran a cleaning company, Kiel Cleaning.”

“Did you sell that company when you took over this place?”

“Something like that.” The woman gave a half shrug with one shoulder.

“What about your ex-husband? What did he do?”

“Frank? All sorts of things. He was never around.”

“Didn’t he have a job?”

“Yeah, he had lots of different jobs: electrician, waiter, auto mechanic, dog walker. Like I said, he was rarely home.”

“Did you guys fight a lot?”

The woman attempted a smile. “Only when we were in the same room together.”

“Would you say there was violence in your relationship?”

She lit a new cigarette. “What does that have to do with anything?”