Seated at a table for two, by the front window, she overlooked a patio shaded by a striped awning, with the sidewalk and the busy suburban street beyond. This was a white-tablecloth establishment, but cozy and welcoming: a black-and-white-checkered tile floor, black wainscoting, white walls, a patterned tin ceiling, black chairs with bright-yellow cushions.

The customers were a varied bunch. La Convenable was such a perfect place for people watching that Estella never opened the book she had brought to read.

“I looked up from my salad and saw him coming forward through the restaurant, returning from the hall that led to the lavatories.”

When Estella seemed to be lost in the memory, David said, “Patrick Corley.”

“Yes. I had no doubt that it was him. He was identical to Pat in every detail.”

David played devil’s advocate. “This was—what?—six years after his death. Memory fades.”

“Not mine,” she said. “Not after all those years of wonderful friendship, doing business together. Anyway, though he hadn’t seen me when he went to the men’s room, and though I hadn’t noticed him earlier, he saw me as he returned, and he knew me.”

“He reacted at once to you,” David said, recalling Lew Ross’s report.

“He looked shocked at the sight of me. He halted in the middle of the restaurant, froze for a moment, staring, then turned and hurried back the way he’d come.”

“You went after him.”

“I surprised myself, how quickly I reacted. It wasn’t what you might think, not astonishment or curiosity. In retrospect, I realize it was anger that drove me up from my chair. Why would he have faked his death, caused such pain and grief for his friends? What selfish purpose would have motivated him to do such an outrageous thing?”

“But he didn’t fake his death. He really died. Your friend the supermarket manager attested to that. And the coroner.”

Her eyes, the gray-blue of hawk’s-eye quartz, seemed to focus on something at a great distance. Only when her stare returned to David did she reply. “Yes. They attested to it. However, when I saw him and when he reacted to me, I put aside everything I knew. It all became only what I thought I knew—it was no longer reliable. Instead of returning to the lavatory hallway, he pushed through a swinging door into the restaurant kitchen. By the time I followed, he was exiting a service door at the back. I barged right through the kitchen staff, went after him, and came out in an alleyway. He was nowhere in sight. The restaurant sits midblock. He could have gone around the south corner or the north, or through a back entrance to a business on the farther side of the alley.”

She noticed how fiercely her fingers clutched the arms of the chair, and she relaxed them.

“You returned to your table?” David prompted.