He was from one of those nondescript suburbs somewhere west of Boston—a shopping mall with a few cul-de-saced neighborhoods arranged around it. His father had died young, leaving Dale the head of a household of adoring women—two sisters and a flirtatious mother. He’d worked his way through Harvard, smoothing out his Boston accent so he’d be presentable and respected among Boston’s Brahmin banking and business establishment. His real stroke of genius had been cultivating an aura of polite coarseness that made other men desperate for his approval, hoping, Jane supposed, that being liked by him would mean they were more like him. Jane had never understood why people didn’t immediately spot the calculation behind his manner; it was too natural and unaffected to be real.

“You look pretty spectacular yourself,” Jane said. “Just in case no one’s told you in the last three minutes.”

“I look like crap,” he said. “Do you realize I’ve started sprouting hair in my ears?”

“It’s the talk of the town. We’re thinking about doing a segment on it next week.”

Dale sat at the table sideways, one arm flung over the back of his chair, a friendly grin on his fat lips. He touched the rim of the water goblet and the fish swam to his side of the glass and gazed out at him adoringly.

“I saw the show when your friend Rosemary Boyle was on. I didn’t realize poor old Charlie had died that way.”

“It was horrible,” Jane said, because you had to say it was horrible, even if you weren’t so sure. “He was alone in Maine on a fishing trip, not that he fished. Rosemary was devastated.”

Dale pushed the tiny aquarium to one side of the table, rested his elbow in the middle, and leaned toward her. “Between you and me, don’t you think the whole thing is a little funny? I got a little spooked listening to her. To be honest, I started wondering if maybe she had something to do with it.”

Jane laughed, as if he couldn’t have meant the comment as anything other than a joke. “Talk about a vivid imagination,” she said. Those were the words Thomas had used when she ran the exact same theory past him as soon as she heard about Charlie’s conveniently lonely death.

Dale shrugged and sat back in his chair. “I’m not serious. But remember that weekend they came to visit us on Nantucket? She had him eating lobster every meal and was drowning his food in butter. She was running out to buy him cigarettes every five minutes.”