Though he was still looking at the paper, I could tell by the lack of eye movement that he wasn’t reading any longer.

“Skyler Ellison’s father,” Hal went on, “had a dislike, even a hatred, for that profession. His father’s sister married an artist who abandoned her less than a year after he’d moved them to New York. She was too ashamed to go back home and died a few months later of a cancer that could have been treated—and likely cured—if caught earlier.”

It was a sad story, tragic on many levels. I wondered what it said about Skyler’s relationship with his parents, that he would embrace something that must have been abhorrent to his father.

“Art has a pretty broad scope of professions,” I said. “It doesn’t seem fair to assume everyone in it is a manipulative gold-digging schemer.”

Hal nodded. “True. But the former brother-in-law was a sculptor.”

Ah. Well, there you go. It seemed beyond the realm of possibility that Skyler’s obsession with Conti sculptures could be anything but a reaction to his childhood. And that brought up another question. “Are Skyler’s parents still alive?” I asked.

“His father died ten years ago,” Hal said. “His mother passed two years last Christmas. Congestive heart failure and a stroke, respectively. There were no other children.”

So Skyler was trying to prove himself worthy to parents who had been dead for years? What a messy tragedy for so many people, but mostly for Pug. And Sylvia.

Hal seemed to be waiting for another question, but it wasn’t going to come from me because I was preoccupied with wondering how it would feel to have both parents gone from the world. It was the natural order of things, I understood that. Still, knowing that someday my mom wouldn’t be asking if I ate my vegetables and that my dad wouldn’t always be around to remind me to check my car’s windshield wiper fluid made me want to call my brother. An odd reaction, but there it was.

So it was Ryan who asked the question. “If Ellison didn’t have any brothers or sisters, did he inherit his parents’ estate? Or because he went to art school, did they cut him out of the will like they threatened?”

Hal nodded. Apparently Ryan had asked the right question. “Skyler Ellison did, in fact, inherit the full estate, excepting a few donations to nonprofits.”

“Because his dad died before his mom did.” Rafe put his arm around me. “If it had been the other way around, I bet he wouldn’t have seen a dime.”