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her dead, with my son at the hospital in the middle of the night . . . she was lying there with all the tubes and when I looked at her and I saw that it was broken, that bond with our son, I could not believe that this strongest thing in the world that you say was no longer in existence. There she was, all her beauty lying there, and that strongest thing wasn’t anymore. She was gone. So I kissed her good-bye, my son did and I did, and they took all the tubes out. And this piece of human sunlight was there, but dead.”
    “How old was she?”
    “Fifty-two. It’s the most cruel thing that could have happened.”
    “Of all the people in the world who would have died in their fifties like that,” said Sabbath, “I would never have imagined your wife on the list. The few times I ever saw her in town, as you say, she lit up everything. And your son works with you at the inn?”
    “Innkeeping is not on my mind at all. Whether that comes back ever, I don’t know. I do have a staff of good workers, but innkeeping is not on my mind. Our whole marriage was tied up with the inn. I am thinking of leasing the business. If some Japanese corporation wanted to come along and buy it . . . Every time I go into her office to try to deal with her things, it’s awful, it makes me sick. I don’t want to be there and I go.”
    Sabbath had not been mistaken, he thought, to have never written Drenka a single letter or to have insisted that it should be he, and not she, who filed away for safekeeping the Polaroids he’d taken of her at the Bo-Peep.
    “The letters,” Balich said, looking imploringly toward Sabbath, as though to make an appeal. “Two hundred and fifty-six letters.”
    “Of consolation?” asked Sabbath, who, of course, had not himself received a single one. When Nikki disappeared, however, he’d got mail about her care, of the theater. Though by now he’d forgotten how much—maybe fifty letters in all—at the time he’d been stupefied enough to keep a careful count, too.
    “Of sympathy, yes. Two hundred and fifty-six. I shouldn’t have been amazed at how she lit up everyone’s life. I’m getting letters still. And from people I can’t even remember. Some came to the inn when we first opened at the other end of the lake. Letters from all kinds of people about her and about how she affected their life. And I believe them. They are true. I got a long two-page letter, a handwritten letter, from the ex-mayor of Worcester.”
    “Really?”
    “He remembers our barbecues for the guests and how she made everyone happy. How she came into the dining room atbreakfast and talked to everybody. She just touched everybody. I am strict, I have a rule for everything. But she knew how to treat the guests. Everything was always possible for the guests. For her to be pleasant it was never an effort. One owner is strict, the other is flexible and pleasant. We were a perfect pair to make a successful inn. It’s amazing what she did. A thousand different things. She did it all gracefully and always with great pleasure. I can’t stop dwelling on it. There is nothing that can take away even a little of this misery. It’s impossible to believe. One minute here, the next minute not.”
    The ex-mayor of Worcester? Well, she had secrets from both of us, Matija.
    “And what is your son’s occupation?”
    “A state trooper.”
    “Married?”
    “His wife is pregnant. The baby will be Drenka if it is a girl.”
    “Drenka?”
    “My wife’s name,” said Balich. “Drenka, Drenka,” he muttered. “There will never be another Drenka.”
    “Do you see him much, your son?”
    “Yes,” he lied, unless since Drenka’s death there had been a rapprochement.
    Balich suddenly had no more to say. Sabbath used the break to smell the moribund market’s smell. Either Balich did not want to talk about his grief over Drenka with a stranger any longer or he did not want to talk about his grief over his state trooper son who thought innkeeping