“A private detective? Did that little Guinea hire you? What do you mean you knew my son during the war?”

“We were in the One sixty-one together over Germany. In Mustangs.”

The eye relaxed. “And? What do you want?”

“There’s good reason to believe that Colin was murdered. Another of Colin’s friends asked me to look into it.”

“Just a minute.” The door closed and he heard the chain fall slack. The door opened.

She was in her fifties, neat, beginning to put on weight. Her hair was blued and combed up. It was eleven o’clock in the morning and she was fully dressed, from expensive daytime dress to pearl earrings. She was elaborately made up, and her skin was very fair under the rouge. It was rouge, too: old-fashioned, carefully applied.

“Come in, come in,” she said. “I don’t want to be seen talking on the doorstep.”

He followed her into the sunken living room. The furniture was all new, contemporary; for all the use it showed, he could have stepped into one of the larger displays at an exposition in Grand Rapids.

Mrs. MacIver had an upright, shoulders-back walk that belied her age. She seemed to be in good health. Her legs were knotting up, but there were no marks—varicose veins, blemishes—on the skin. She turned to him now, shifting her weight as if she had been to charm school. It was interesting. “Excuse me. Are you the Leland who shot down all those planes?”

“That’s right.”

“Colin mentioned you in his letters. Let me have your coat, please. Do sit down. Would you like some coffee?”

“No. No, thanks.”

He sat down and waited until she returned from the hall closet. Little Guinea: that explained one thing—perhaps. The pictures on the walls were pastoral views of never-never land. As a child Leland had had a storybook filled with line drawings in the same style. These pictures were thirty or forty years old, the only old things he had seen so far. It did not promise much.

He remembered to rise when she returned. “The letters you mentioned. Did you happen to save them?”

“No, I’m sorry. Sit down. When I moved out of the big house I took only what I thought I would want. I didn’t think that Colin would die. Do you know anything about Colin and me?”

“I’ve been told that you weren’t in touch.”

“That’s right.” She sat like charm school, too, her legs under her and her hands clasped on one knee. The schools taught women never to face a man head-on, lest her hips give him the impression of a battleship about to run him down. After the war Karen had bought a book by one of the authorities; when she had seen that, she had put the book away.

Leland said, “Mrs. MacIver, I was hoping that you heard from him before he died.”

“No.”