“I think you’re going to hear a lot more. I—well, you will. You’re married. You know that I’ve been talking around things.”

The door was ajar, but he still felt that he had to be careful. He said, “I’m going to take it that you and Murray have waited until now because you wanted your situation to stabilize.”

She toyed with her matches. “I wanted to get the poison out of my system, yes.”

The waiter came to the table. “Is there something wrong?”

“No, but clear it away, please.” There were a few more people in the room. “We’ll have coffee and tea.”

“Some dessert?”

Leland saw her turn her head once. “Do you have some small, fresh cookies?”

“Yes, sir.”

When he had gone away, Betty Kaminsky said, “Just right. I’ll eat more of them than you.”

“You have nervous hands. I wanted to give you something to do.”

She stared at him while she evaluated this.

“Do you want to talk about the divorce now?”

“Yes, I—let’s wait until we won’t be interrupted.”

He took the opportunity to light a cigarette. He did not want to disturb her unnecessarily. The waiter came. When he had finished, she said, “I don’t think I can say it right out.”

“Let’s go on to something else,” he said. “A little while ago when we were talking about his mother’s two-thousand-dollar loan, you said that you didn’t know if she was hoping for a reconciliation. You were, though, weren’t you?”

She regarded him. “You don’t miss anything, do you?”

“I’m here to learn.” He did not wait. “You moved to Manitou in the hope of bringing about a reconciliation.”

“If I had stayed in Port Smith, even though he would know my address, I would have disappeared. This way, I was staying within reach—or so I thought. I couldn’t have been more wrong. While we were married we saw her often. After the divorce he never came up, never called her, never had any contact with me, except for the checks. I did exactly the wrong thing if I had wanted to be close by. But then, he fooled me. Tricked me.”

“Did you try to contact him?”

“Of course. While he was out west I wrote to him, and when he returned to Port Smith, I called—twice—and wrote twice more. The first letter was similar to the ones I had sent to Nevada. The last I wrote after I had met Murray. If I had it to do over, I wouldn’t. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Yes. This was the period, according to MacIver, in which you would marry again, quickly, with the first man who came along.”

“That’s right.”

“And in fact your emotional condition was such that you wanted a reconciliation, wrote to him, telephoned him, and in other ways made your presence felt so that he couldn’t possibly misinterpret your desires.”

“Yes.”