“I’ll bet Thomas knows,” Jane said. She wiped the knife on a damp napkin and cut off another slice. “Thomas has an encyclopedic mind.” It wasn’t the first complimentary thing she’d said about her husband this evening—she’d complimented him quite often—but this, like all the others, sounded emotionally neutral, as if she were describing the reliability of a favorite automobile, not the attributes of a man she was married to.

Thomas mulled this over, his lips pursed, ready, it seemed, to blow out a candle. “I believe she was a singer,” he said. “And I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say she was known for falling off the stage, most notoriously at Carnegie Hall toward the end of her career.”

“Oh goody,” Rosemary said, “a tragic drunk.”

Over the years, Desmond had grown used to the fact that most people had either never heard of Pauline Anderton or mis-remembered her in an outrageously unflattering way. Falling off stages, driving a Cadillac through a plate glass window, even, in one case, murdering a backup singer. Whatever defensiveness he’d once felt on her behalf had faded long ago. He patiently explained that while she had collapsed on stage several times late in her career, Anderton had never sung at Carnegie Hall.

“Too bad,” Jane said. “There probably would have been great footage.”

As Desmond was describing her early triumphs in Florida, her discovery by Walter Winchell, he felt something or someone pressing against his leg. He cleared his throat and sat up a little, but there it was again, a steady, gentle pressure that was definitely not accidental. He looked to the far end of the deck; Helen was prostrate near the railing, gazing at the skyline mournfully. So much for that possibility. The dinner table was narrow, not really suitable for six people, and earlier in the evening, he’d felt his knees brush briefly against someone’s leg several times without thinking anything of it. He glanced over at Brian, but he was staring off into the middle distance as he had been doing for the bulk of the meal.

“I think my mother might have listened to her,” Thomas said. “She could even have some of her records stashed away somewhere, here or in Beth’s house or that friend’s cottage she goes to in June.”

“The elderly have become one of the few remaining nomadic tribes on the planet,” Rosemary said. “It’s an interesting phenomenon. Someone should do a book on it.”

Jane pointed a finger. “Give it a whack, Rose. You could call it The Living Dead.”