She sighed. “The fire department looked into it and the insurance company had an investigator come out, and whatever might have been wrong with it, they can’t guess what it was. And it was relatively new. Darryl bought it only three or four months ago and he was always very careful with the gas connections and everything. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Had there been someone here to service it?” he asked.

“No. Not since they brought it from the barbecue place.”

“Okay. Anyone else been in the house lately?”

“Like who?”

“Service people? Someone to fix a washer or dryer or the furnace or anything like that at all?”

Christina thought for a moment. “No.”

“Maybe that train set of Auden’s? Did someone come to the house to put it together?”

“Oh no. Auden and his father did that. It wasn’t very complicated.” Her eyes glistened, and she looked away momentarily. “What makes you ask?”

“It’s routine. Whenever there’s an accident and the cause is undetermined, we like to know if there’s any likelihood that it could have been tampered with, improperly maintained, anything like that.”

She shook her head.

“Those trains . . . I don’t see them on the dining room table this time,” Harry said.

“After what happened to his father, Auden didn’t want to play with them anymore. We boxed them up and put them in the garage.”

“Maybe you could return it.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “The man I bought it from, he was so nice. Auden might want to get it out again someday.”

“Well,” Harry said, putting his hands on his knees and pushing himself up. “I wanted to drop by and see how you were doing. I won’t take up any more of your time.”

She saw him to the door and closed it softly behind him as he went to his car.

So much for that theory, he thought, keying the ignition. Edwin Nabler hadn’t set foot in the Pidgeon house. But that didn’t mean he was ready to abandon his hunch quite yet.

When he got to Wendell Comstock’s house, there was a moving van backed into the driveway. Two men were walking a couch up the ramp and into the back of the truck when Harry wandered through the open door of the house. Save for a couple of chairs, the living room was empty. He found Wendell in the kitchen, using a tape gun to seal a large cardboard box, one of several on the counter. The table and chairs were gone, making the room seem larger than it normally would have.

“Mr. Comstock.”

The greeting startled the man. He turned, and when he saw the chief he put down the tape gun. “Oh, hello,” he said.

Harry waved a hand at the boxes. “I see you’ve made some big decisions.”