“I can’t be here any longer. Got a sister across the border in New York State, a lead on a job there in Fenelon. Need to put some distance between me and this place. Something I can help you with?”

“Not . . . really. Bit of a follow-up.”

He asked Wendell basically the same questions he had asked Christina Pidgeon. Any service calls? Workmen in the house? Deliveries?

No, no, and no.

“Those trains that were set up in the basement? Someone do that for you?”

Another no.

“What are you getting at?” Wendell asked. “You think someone who’d been in the house came back and killed Nadine?”

“Not suggesting anything. Just asking.”

“Because they ruled it a suicide. That’s what the coroner said. You saying something different?” Wendell became agitated. “Because if you think something different happened, then I have a right to know!”

Harry shook his head definitively. “No, Mr. Comstock. I have no evidence to suggest that.”

“Then what the fuck are you doing here?”

Harry raised a palm. “I’ll let you get on with what you were doing.”

As he walked out of the kitchen, he stepped aside to make way for one of the movers coming up the steps from the basement, carrying a cardboard box with tide printed on the side. When they were outside, Harry heard one of the movers say to the other, “I think he said that wasn’t going, but . . . you know what, just throw it in the truck.”

Neither the Pidgeons nor the Comstocks had been visited by Nabler. This so-called commonality wasn’t proving to amount to much.

Harry had one last stop planned. He parked out front of the Dorfman house. There was, on the roof, a slightly darker patch on the shingles where Dorfman’s body was immolated.

His mother, June, looking like someone who’d not slept since Harry’s last time here, came to the door after he rang the bell.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said, and began to cry. “Thank you for trying to save my son.”

She invited him into the kitchen and asked if he would like a drink. Scotch, a beer, vodka?

“Glass of water would be nice,” he said.

June ran the tap until the water was cold, held a glass under it, and put it on the table in front of Harry, then poured two fingers of scotch into a tumbler. Harry had the sense it was not her first drink of the day.

“Carvers say there’s nothing they can do,” she said.

One of the two funeral homes in Lucknow. Carvers & Sons. Always had struck Harry as an unfortunate name for an undertaker.

“Closed casket,” she said. “There was nothing left of his face.”