“Lydia?” I called, and then went back through the foyer to the staircase, glancing toward the dining room as I passed.

I stopped there.

Lydia Cantwell lay sprawled behind the dining room table. Her eyes bulged and her tongue protruded from a smear of lipstick. Her throat was circled with bruises.

It was a moment before I knew that I had crossed myself.

I went to her then, kneeling. Her wrist was stiff and cold to the touch. There was no pulse.

My limbs had gone numb and heavy. I stumbled back from her. Her terrycloth robe was pulled to mid-thigh and her legs seemed pitifully thin. Black hair straggled on the Persian rug, and I noticed, foolishly, that she had dyed the gray at her temples.

I felt a moment of awful tenderness, as if I should cover her legs. Instead I went to the kitchen and called the police. When I returned, my throat was parched and my mouth tasted bitter, like half-swallowed aspirin.

It was then I saw her picture.

It had been taken at a formal sitting and placed next to Henry’s in the other room. Now it sat on the dining room table. Someone had stabbed out the eyes. I rushed back to the kitchen and vomited.

I raised my head from the sink, breathed deeply, and went back to the dining room. The envelope lay where I’d dropped it, by Lydia’s hand. I picked it up and went outside. I didn’t look back at the woman, or her picture.

The porch was cool. Above the roses a hummingbird hovered in delicate suspension, a picture from a Chinese vase.

I walked to my car and slid the envelope under the seat.

Two

TWO

“Panic is the first enemy of the lawyer,” Cade had once told me. So when the first police came—two uniformed patrolmen in a squad car—I tried to blank out everything but the envelope.

The young man rushed past me through the front door, slamming it behind him. The other stopped in front of me. He was short and paunchy, with pale blue eyes and a creased clown’s face so sad it must have always seemed close to tears. “What happened?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Sure.” His voice was patient and unsatisfied. “Just how you found her.”

I swallowed. “I got here maybe fifteen minutes ago, on business. Mrs. Cantwell’s our client—” I paused, deleting the envelope. “No one answered, and the door was unlocked. That wasn’t like her; she was a careful woman. So I stepped inside to check.”

The door opened behind me. “Called in the body,” the young man said. “Rayfield’s coming himself. You’ll want to see this.”

His partner nodded and turned back to me. “You’d better come inside, Mr. Shaw.” I didn’t move. “Come on,” he said, almost gently.