Jane could tell Desmond was disappointed that Chloe and an unpaid assistant were doing the taping. Maybe he suspected something. She wasn’t going to press the issue; reassuring him would only make him more doubtful and might raise too many questions. This was just a preliminary taping and Chloe would do a good job with this as she did with everything else. Jane had seen her senior thesis film, a thirty-minute documentary about her mother and her mother’s family, all gorgeous camera angles of her gorgeous mother sitting in pools of gorgeous fading sunlight. Of course, given the fact that it had been made by Chloe, it was a story about one woman’s triumph over adversity, even though, as far as Jane could tell, the most adversity mom had to overcome these days was traffic on the Long Island Expressway as the family shuttled back and forth between their Park Avenue duplex and the house in East Hampton. Despite herself, Jane had watched the end of the film fighting back tears, mostly because it was such a bald, blunt love letter from a child to her adored mother. Jane never had felt that way about her own Scotch-soaked mother, and if Gerald ever made a film about Jane, it would probably fall into the horror movie genre.

They’d left behind the morbid downtown and had entered a sprawl of houses pressed too close together with a few browning hedges between them and an occasional lonely tree, like something preserved for its historical significance. Desmond pulled up in front of a low mint green house with faded green and white metal awnings over the windows. “This was Margo and her husband’s house,” he said. “That window above the garage was Pauline’s room. There were only a few houses around when they lived here, but they’ve developed every available inch of open land.”

Not exactly Graceland, but there was something interesting in the way the paint was peeling around the trim and in the rust stains dripping from the awnings. “Who lives there now?” Jane asked.

“I’m not sure. It was sold years ago. After Pauline died, Margo got sick and she and her husband moved to Florida.”

“What’s the architectural style?” Chloe asked.

“I think it’s called a raised ranch,” Desmond said. “Although it could be a split-level. I can’t remember exactly what I call it in the book. We should have brought along an architectural consultant.”

This was an obvious reference to Brian, a reference Jane was not going to pursue. Two days ago, Rosemary had called and mentioned that she’d bumped into Brian and Desmond in Boston. There was nothing wrong with that, but the fact that Desmond hadn’t said anything about it had given her pause. “I guess they were headed for Desmond’s apartment,” Rosemary had said. Having been at Desmond’s apartment, that didn’t seem likely. And yet . . .