“Ah, sure, I don’t know what you’re on about.”

She leaned against the side of the sink and stared at him. “That is Eddie McKenna’s voice, right down to the timbre itself, it ’tis.”

Luther shrugged. “Not bad, uh?”

Nora’s face sobered. “Don’t ever let him hear you do that.”

“You think I’m out my mind?”

She placed the peeler on the counter. “You miss her. I can see it in your eyes.”

“I miss her.”

“What’s her name?”

Luther shook his head. “I’d just as soon hold on to that for the moment, Miss O’Shea.”

Nora wiped her hands on her apron. “What’re you running from, Luther?”

“What’re you?”

She smiled and her eyes sparkled again but this time from the wet in them. “Danny.”

He nodded. “I seen that. Something else, though, too. Something further back.”

She turned back to the sink, lifted out the pot filled with water and potatoes. She carried it to the sink. “Ah, we’re an interesting pair, Mr. Laurence. Are we not? All our intuition used for others, never ourselves.”

“Lotta good it does us, then,” Luther said.

She said that?” Danny said from the phone in his rooming house. “She was running from me?”

“She did.” Luther sat at the phone table in the Giddreauxs’ foyer.

“She say it like she was tired of running?”

“No,” Luther said. “She said it like she was right used to it.”

“Oh.”

“Sorry.”

“No. Thanks, really. Eddie come at you yet?”

“He let me know he’s on his way. Not how or what yet, though.”

“Okay. Well, when he does…”

“I’ll let you know.”

“What do you think of her?”

“Nora?”

“Yeah.”

“I think she’s too much woman for you.”

Danny’s laugh was a booming thing. Could make you feel like a bomb went off at your feet. “You do, uh?”

“Just an opinion.”

“’Night, Luther.”

“’Night, Danny.”

One of Nora’s secrets was that she smoked. Luther had caught her at it early in his time at the Coughlin house, and it had since become their habit to sneak out for one together while Mrs. Ellen Coughlin prepared herself for dinner in the bathroom but long before Mr. Connor or Captain Coughlin had returned from work.

One of those times, on a high-sun-deep-chill afternoon, Luther asked her about Danny again.

“What of him?”

“You said you were running from him.”

“I did?”

“Yeah.”

“I was sober?”

“In the kitchen that time.”

“Ah.” She shrugged and exhaled at the same time, her cigarette held up in front of her face. “Well, maybe he ran from me.”

“Oh?”

Her eyes flashed, that danger you sensed in her getting closer to the surface. “You want to know something about your friend Aiden? Something you’d never guess?”

Luther knew it was one of those times silence was your best friend.

Nora blew out another stream of smoke, this one coming out fast and bitter. “He seems very much the rebel, yeah? Very independent and free-thinking, he does, yeah?” She shook her head, took another hard drag off her cigarette. “He’s not. In the end, he’s not a’tall.” She looked at Luther, a smile forcing its way onto her face. “In the end, he couldn’t live with my past, that past you’re so curious about. He wanted to be, I believe the word was, ‘respectable.’ And I, sure, I couldn’t give him that.”