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son, back when you had so many girlfriends it was all you could do to keep track?
    If Victor had carved notches in his bedposts he’d have ended up sleeping on toothpicks. But I refrained; he’d come when I called, tonight, and done what was needed. And nowadays that was enough.
    Mostly. “Finding the dead bodies was a distraction, Victor.” Never mind that I’d forgotten his class
before
we found them, or that Victor’s analysis was perilously close to being on target.
    “Sorry if I missed a pearl of wisdom,” I went on. I keep the peace as much as I can, but there’s no statute of limitations on postmarital vengefulness. “We’ll be there next week.”
    “Tomorrow,” he corrected briskly. “What with the storm, so many couldn’t come that I rescheduled it. I’ve called everyone.”
    So the class would be held on a Sunday morning, and never mind whether the change suited anyone else. If I had as much self-assuredness in my whole body as he does in his little finger, I would be Genghis Khan by now.
    On the other hand, there’s not much worse than an insecure brain surgeon. “Fine,” I replied.
    We were standing in Ellie’s kitchen with its green enameled woodstove, bright woven rugs, and big oak table with a pitcher of red rose hips at the center of it. Ranged on the windowsills were a dozen quilted-glass jars of grape jelly, glowing royal purple.
    “Nice,” Victor remarked, glancing around. He looked just like Sam: same hazel eyes, lantern jaw, and confidential you’re-the-only-one-in-my-world smile. Sometimes that smile was the only thing that kept me from killing Victor, because Sam had it too.
    A basket of kindling stood by the stove, a pine rocker and low footstool pulled up in front of it. Tucked into one corner was the white enameled daybed with a quilt spread on it. “I ought to try something like this,” Victor said.
    Victor’s kitchen, in the big white Greek Revival house just down the street from mine, was about as cozy as the inside of a refrigerator. He paid ready lip service to style and comfort but rattled around his own old place like a marble in a box, trying and failing to solve the mystery of ordinary human-beingness.
    Which was the other reason I didn’t kill him: that he tried. From the table he picked up the papers the police had questioned Ellie about before they left.
    “This,” he said, “is strange.”
    I’d put the place back together from the mess the searchers had made of it. The baby’s room, newly painted in pale yellow and white, smelled of garlic and tobacco; I had opened a window.
    “Right,” I said. “It’s what’s upset her most, I think.”
    Me too. I kept trying to understand those papers: that because of them everything was suddenly so much worse than I’d thought. Ellie’s voice went on from the parlor: quietly, but the edge of hysteria in it was audible.
    “Does it mean what it looks like?” Victor asked.
    “I suppose so.”
    “Then how could they not . . . ?”
    “I have absolutely no idea.”
    Together the pages comprised a copy of the last will and testament, prepared by a Bangor law firm, of Paula Valentine, George’s recently deceased aunt. Jan Jesperson was listed as executor. The envelope they’d come in was postmarked a few days earlier.
    The warrant officers said they had found two copies of the document in George’s shed, and they’d taken one with them, Ellie insisting she’d never seen either copy before. Now I searched through the pages again, hoping I’d been wrong the first time I read them.
    As I did so Will Bonnet came into the kitchen, poured a cup of mint tea from the pot on a trivet atop the stove, and returned to the parlor to offer it to Ellie.
    “Come on, hon,” I heard him telling her solicitously. “Drink a little of this.”
    Will was a kind man, I thought distractedly; his own elderly relative was lucky to have him. “It means,” I told Victor, “that Gosling and Jan Jesperson didn’t quite get the last