“No,” I said quickly. “His suit looked kind of old . . . ish.”

“In what way? Was it very worn?”

“No,” I said. “It looked new, but old. Just . . . I . . . I don’t know much about suits. Not super old. Not, like, historic. Kind of like . . . something on Frasier? Or Seinfeld or something? You know, the show? It was like a suit out of a nineties sitcom. The jacket was kind of long and big.”

She hesitated, then wrote this down.

“Right, then,” she said patiently. “How old would you say he was?”

I imagined Uncle Bick, without his beard, maybe forty pounds lighter, in a suit. That was about right. Uncle Bick was thirty-eight or thirty-nine.

“Thirties, maybe? Forty?”

“All right. Hair color?”

“No hair,” I said quickly. “Bald.”

We ran through every option—tall, short, fat, thin, glasses, facial hair. In the end, I painted a portrait of a man of average height and weight, with no facial hair or distinguishing characteristics, who was bald and wore a suit that seemed to me a little out of date. And since it was dark and “crazy” isn’t an accepted eye color, I couldn’t help much on that front either.

“Stay here for just a moment,” she said.

She went away. I shivered and looked around. A few of the officers who were working in the library glanced over at me as I sat alone at the table. No one else, it seemed, had come in to report anything. It was just me. When she returned, she was wearing a tan raincoat and she had Inspector Cole with her. Up on the dais, Inspector Cole looked much younger. Up close, I could see fine wrinkles around his eyes. He had a steady, unwavering stare.

“We’d like you to show us exactly where you saw this man,” she said.

Two minutes later, we were on the sidewalk outside Hawthorne, staring up at the bathroom window. The screws were still on the ground. It was only now that I realized that we’d left our entire building vulnerable. A sloshy, queasy feeling came over me.

“So,” DI Young said, “show us exactly where you were.”

I positioned myself right under the window.

“And where was the man?” she asked.

“Right about where you are,” I said.

“So, quite close. Within ten feet.”

“Yes.”

“And your roommate?”

This was the first time DCI Cole had spoken to me. He was staring at me unblinkingly, judging me, his hands deep in the pockets of his coat.

“Was right here,” I said, pointing up at the window.

“So she saw him as well.”

“No,” I said. The queasy feeling got worse.

“She didn’t see him? But she was right in the window, wasn’t she?”

“I guess she was just looking at me.”