Dinner was better than the conversation. I ate in silence while Cade asked Kris Ann about her tennis and her cousin’s baby. Watching her was painful. Her gestures were sharp and nervous and her smile came late and left nothing behind. When Cade purred, “The next few weeks Adam’s to be quite busy on our Stafford case,” she lapsed into silence, as if at some unspoken punishment for her choice of a husband.

Finally I cleared the dishes, something I did when the maid wasn’t there. Kris Ann liked cooking, but hated to clean. When we’d first been married she would throw things in the dishwasher still dirty, so that they’d come out with traces of last night’s dinner baked on, like the evidence of some geologic period. When I’d joke that the progress of her cooking would be preserved in layers, for posterity, she’d grinned back and said dirty dishes weren’t her metier. So I’d taken them on again, while she drank coffee and offered me solemn advice. It had all been very droll, once.

I was alone in the kitchen when the phone rang.

“Adam,” the familiar voice said. “Can you come by?”

Fifteen

FIFTEEN

I left right after Cade, locking the doors behind me. Kris Ann watched me go in silence.

The Cantwell place was almost black. When I knocked, Etta Parsons answered and led me to the library with an air of cool unrecognition. “Mr. Cantwell will be down momentarily,” she said, and left.

For a while I paced the sitting room. It was the same, yet eerily different. Someone had replaced Lydia’s picture with one that was older and smaller. The effect was uncannily that of a fading presence. Two sliding oak doors sealed the dining room.

I went back to the library.

The evening paper was folded by Henry’s chair. I began riffling the sports section for box scores, as my father had taught me.

“Hello, Adam.”

Henry Cantwell had appeared with two snifters of cognac. I put down the box scores to take one.

“How are you?” I asked.

“Better.”

I wondered. Henry had lost the pallor of the day before, but the hesitance of his movements, a slight dreaminess in the eyes, were like those of a man after his first stroke. There was a rim of loose skin beneath his eyes and the start of slackness in his jawline I hadn’t noticed before. The haircut for Lydia’s funeral made his ears too large. “I’ve been wondering how to help,” I told him. “Sometimes I think people hover when what they’re really doing is relieving their own grief, not a kindness at all.”

Henry gave a thin smile, and his expression turned curious and kind. “Your father was murdered, too, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. He was.”