She made a wry face. "Alcina probably went to the farmhouse and disposed of the gun as soon as the police drove off with Yannis."

"Maybe. I know you like Yannis for the murder, but I can't see that he has a motive."

"Did the police question anyone at the taverna to find out what Yannis and Fathi were arguing about?"

"No one claims to have understood."

"They were talking loud enough to be heard and there were other Greeks in the courtyard," said Dinah, looking around to see what was holding up the wine service. "And regardless of what you say, I think there's something fishy about Yannis."

Thor gave an exasperated shake of his head. "I think the good people of Kanaris don't rat out their fellow citizens. And I agree with you about Yannis. He's JDLR."

"What's that?" asked K.D.

"Just don't look right." He grinned. "I picked it up from an episode of NYPD Blue."

K.D. leaned her elbows on the table and cradled her chin in her hands. "It must be just thrilling to be a policeman."

Dinah was about to remark that policemen get a particular thrill protecting people's homes from burglars, but she bit her tongue.

Brakus bustled out of the kitchen with a tray and a bottle of wine. "Greetings, my friends." He set the wine on the table and offloaded a basket of bread, a bowl of olive oil, and two glasses. "And you have brought a guest. Kalispera." He drew a corkscrew out of his apron pocket.

"Could we have another glass, please?" K.D. was irrepressible. "I can show you my ID if you like."

"No need. You are with a policeman, no less."

Dinah sliced a glance at Brakus. "Do you know a monk named Constantine?"

"There are no monasteries near Kanaris. No monks."

"There's one," said K.D. "He talks kind of nutty and smells as if he hasn't had a bath since the Middle Ages."

"A homeless beggar," said Brakus. "Since the austerity cuts, there are many homeless people sleeping rough, many unemployed." He seemed preoccupied tonight. He didn't ask K.D. where she came from or what she was doing in Kanaris, or where and how Dinah and Thor had spent their day. He uncorked the wine and poured a taste for Thor, who pronounced it fine. He poured two glasses and turned to go. "It is permitted to serve the young lady?"

"Sure. Why not?" The way Dinah felt at the moment, she didn't care if Princess K got plastered so long as there was plenty for the grownups. She said, "We may want a second bottle in a little while, Mr. Brakus. And would you bring a large bottle of water?"

"Certainly."

He scurried off and Dinah imbibed a long, soothing drink of wine. "Your occupation has created quite a stir in Kanaris, Inspector Ramberg. It was a mistake that first night telling the chatty Mr. Brakus that you were a cop, even if you made a point of saying you were on holiday. He must have put out a bulletin. Everybody seems to know who we are and this Constantine character, who calls himself the 'mouthpiece of Hera' for crying out loud, implied that Zenia Stephanadis leased Marilita's house to a policeman in order to provoke her neighbors."

Thor shrugged. "It can't matter to anyone that a Norwegian cop with no authority comes here as a tourist. Now if somebody spread the rumor that I was a tax collector, I'd be worried."

"Well, I'm worried. I saw Brakus in Pythagorio this afternoon in highly suspicious circumstances."

"Suspicious in what way?"

"In an up-to-no-good way. Do I have to put it in TV cop-speak or do you need an English phrase book?" As soon as the words flew out of her mouth, she felt like a louse.

K.D. smiled. "We'll have to be extra considerate tonight, Thor. Poor Dinah must be exhausted from our walk in the heat and the dirt bath she took after she was tackled by that monk."

Thor frowned. "I thought you said it was an accident."

"It was." After my first glass of wine, thought Dinah. I will tell the twerp she has to go home after my first glass. I'll put her on a plane to Athens tomorrow morning and if she jumps ship in Athens and wings off to Timbuktu, so be it. It won't be my fault. She gave Thor a contrite smile. "I'm sorry I was short, Thor. It just looked fishy to me that Brakus would be so chummy with your friend, the Greek cop."

"Sergeant Papas?"

"If Papas is the cop you rode off with to arrest Yannis. I saw Brakus give him a large shopping bag and I'm betting it wasn't a batch of baklava. There was another man with them. He looks like Saddam Hussein. When K.D. and I walked past the winery at the foot of the hill, he was sitting in front glaring at us like, I don't know, like a..."

"A total gargoyle," said K.D. "He gave us the side eye like whoa, I am one thug-nasty dude and you better not even think of coming any closer."

Dinah had to hand it to the kid. She had a gift for language.

Thor looked impressed, too. Dinah hoped he didn't start mixing teen slang with TV cop slang.

He said, "I've heard that Zenia employs refugees to work in the vineyard and around her house. He's probably a day laborer. But it worries me why Brakus would meet with Papas."

"Are you here to advise the Greek police?" asked K.D.

"Nothing like that." His eyes skimmed past Dinah's and veered off into the grape arbor. "I'm just an observer."

"Oh, what an adorable kitty." K.D. scooped up a white-socked black cat and cuddled her, or him. The cat meowed weakly. "Are you hungry, little sweetie? Would you like me to order you some tuna fish?"

Brakus' harried looking wife delivered the wine glass for K.D., gave her and the cat a scathing look, and whisked back toward the kitchen.

"What's her problem?" huffed K.D.

"Perhaps she has too many adorable kitties underfoot," said Dinah.

"That's cold. This little cutie is starving and she's probably throwing out gobs of food."

Thor poured three or four ounces of wine into K.D.'s glass. She set the cat back on the floor, broke into a triumphant smile, and raised the glass like a trophy.

Dinah picked up her own glass and put it to her lips.

"Wait!" K.D set down the glass and clapped her hands together under her chin. "Aren't y'all supposed to offer a toast? What do the Greeks say, Thor?"

"I do have a Greek phrase book, to compensate for my deficient English." He reached into the inside breast pocket of his jacket. As he did, Dinah caught a glimpse of his shoulder holster. He pulled out a small book, read for a minute, and said, "Ya-mas. To our health."

"Ya-mas," echoed Dinah and they all touched glasses. She deserved that little dig about his English, which was impeccable, and he deserved her trust and support and good humor or what was the point? She lifted her face to the sea breeze, inhaled a lungful of sweet air, and rebooted. "Somebody else bumped into me. An admirer of Marilita." She handed him Galen Stavros' business card. "He wants to visit the house. I told him he should speak with you to set up a time."

Thor read the card. "What did he look like?"

"Old," said K.D.,"but not crashy."

"Crashy?" It was obviously a new one on Thor.

K.D. translated. "Crazy plus trashy. He's sort of shriveled, but he has sexy eyes, like he could have been handsome when he was young."

Dinah hadn't noticed the sexy eyes. She had been too rattled by the fact that he also knew where she lived. She said, "He's been in the taverna before. He's tanned like a cowhide and wears a black fisherman's cap."

Thor grinned and put the card in his pocket. "Maybe he has a take on what drove the mysterious Marilita to murder."

Dinah said, "Her sister attributes her blowup to a carnal nature and a disdain of proper institutions."

"You've met Zenia?"

"It was more of a skirmish than a social meeting. She showed up at the house this afternoon to get a look at her new tenant's live-in girlfriend. I don't think she much cares for your taste in women. But here's an intriguing tidbit. She let it drop that Alcina is Marilita's illegitimate daughter."

"That is a surprise. Why would Marilita leave her home to Zenia instead of her daughter?"

"But she did leave it to her daughter," said K.D.

It was Dinah's turn to be surprised. "How do you know that?"

K.D. clicked her zebra-print fingernails on the side of her wine glass. "Alcina told me. She came to my room this afternoon to make sure I had everything I needed. I said her house was just gorgeous and she went all glum and said that it had been hers, but it wasn't anymore. She signed it over to Zenia when she was sixteen so that Zenia would give her the affidavit she needed to marry Yannis."

"A minor can't enter into a contract anyplace I've ever heard of," said Dinah. "Especially not one that cheats her out of her inheritance. Zenia and Marilita may have owned the property jointly and when Marilita died, Zenia took over the management. Alcina doesn't get along with Zenia. She might be exaggerating about Zenia stealing the house out from under her."

Nobody remarked. K.D. went back to nuzzling the cat. Thor broke off a piece of bread and analyzed it minutely. He seemed to grow more abstracted by the minute. Dinah sipped her wine and rubbed her bruised hip. She read an old poster on the wall next to the dining room advertising the 2010 Athens Classic Marathon, commemorating the 2500 year anniversary of the first marathon. A messenger named Phidippides ran from the battlefield at Marathon to the capital to announce that the Greeks had defeated the Persians. As Dinah recalled from some book or other she'd read, as soon as he delivered the happy news, he dropped dead.

Her glass had gone dry. This was her cue to speak up and disabuse K.D. of any hope she entertained of staying on in Kanaris. Somehow, the moment didn't feel right. She decided to put off her decision by one more glass of wine. She watched K.D. playing with the cat. Her tale of family woes had dredged up memories of Dinah's own teenage angst. The summer when she turned sixteen, she had appropriated her mother's car and a few hundred dollars and driven across the country from Georgia to Seattle to seek refuge with her Aunt Shelly. That escapade had whetted her desire to travel and Shelly, a teacher of ancient literature, had inspired in her a love of mythology. When she went home to go back to school in the fall, she'd outgrown her desperation. She had a fresh perspective and new interests. She thought, maybe I owe K.D. a week or two of refuge. Maybe all she needs is a little time apart from her mother to get her head on straight.

Dinah's stomach gurgled and she picked up the menu and browsed. "I see they have the spit-roasted goat tonight. And homemade pasta."

K.D. said, "I've already decided. I want the chicken in cream sauce and I'm going to share it with the kitties."

Thor didn't seem to hear. He hadn't even opened his menu.

Dinah settled on the moussaka with a side of tzaziki and closed her menu. She poured herself another glass of wine and studied his face. He seemed to be gnawing on an impossible problem. "What's got you stumped, Norseman?"

"Do you really think there was a payoff of some kind in the bag Brakus gave Papas?"

"I did think so. But it's probably because I don't like Brakus. I don't appreciate him broadcasting our names and address to every Tom, Dick, and mouthpiece of Hera who walks in this place. But whatever the meeting was about, I don't see how it could have any bearing on Fathi's murder, do you?"

A waiter arrived and Thor seemed glad for the interruption. K.D. and Dinah placed their orders. Without looking at the menu, Thor ordered the same dish he'd ordered the night before. When the waiter repaired to the kitchen, he refilled all of their glasses and seemed to push his worries onto the back burner. "K.D., did you know that most Greeks are named for a saint and on that saint's day, everyone with the same name gathers for a festival? It's the same in Norway. The Catholic church replaced the pagan celebration of birthdays with name days."

"Is there a name day for Thor?" she asked.

"Every Thursday is my name day. But what do you think, Dinah? As the Christian faith evolved, did the saints substitute in people's minds for the old gods?"

Conversation took off and the wine began to have a yeasty effect on everyone, bringing happier thoughts to the surface. Thor told a funny story about the Norse gods and K.D. regaled them with a blow-by-blow of the movie-version Thor's exile to New Mexico. By the time they finished their meal, Thor's mood had improved and so had Dinah's. Everything seemed to have an innocent explanation. On an island twenty-seven miles long and eight miles wide, everyone would be acquainted with the local police, Brakus included. They had probably known one another since kindergarten. And it was only natural that gossip would attend the first-time rental of the house that had belonged to a notorious murderess. As for Brother Constantine, he was probably just a vagrant who ferreted out the local scuttlebutt and used it to scam people by telling their fortunes.

As they walked back to Marilita's house in the twilight, Thor extolled the attractions of Norway, with emphasis on the nice, cool summers near the North Pole.

Dinah laughed. "Your internal thermostat is set too high, Norseman."

"He wouldn't last a week in the summertime in Georgia," said K.D.

Dinah got a chicken-skin feeling as they walked past the spot where Fathi had died, but Thor wrapped his arm around her waist, dispelling her fear. Honeysuckle perfumed the air and in one of the white-washed houses, someone was playing the piano-"Claire de Lune." Somewhere out beyond the trees, the moon was ascending over the Aegean. In the afterglow of the wine, even K.D. seemed simpatico. Maybe she wouldn't be such a bother, after all. Maybe she could hang around for a week or two so long as she minded her p's and q's and kept a low profile.

They turned down the alley toward Marilita's house and all that good feeling came to a screeching halt. The veranda was a shambles. Broken flowerpots and clumps of dirt and uprooted plants lay strewn across the tiles. The chairs and table had been smashed to kindling. The door had been egged and a stinking mound of garbage had been dumped under the mulberry tree.

Alcina stood in the center of the chaos holding a lantern in one hand and the empty parakeet cage in the other. She said, "You brought this on, Thor Ramberg. All of our trouble is because of you."

Chapter Ten.

Dinah sat on the side of the bed in K.D.'s room, smoking one of K.D.'s Newports and explaining why it was too dangerous for her to stay in Kanaris. "Too much is going on. There's too much deviousness. Too much nastiness. Thor was right about there being a lot of crime on the island. It's not safe."

K.D. slouched against the wall and exhaled a long, white streamer. "Big dilly. It's only a little vandalism and people acting pissy. Like what goes on in high school? Like daily?"

"A man was murdered in the lane just yesterday, probably by...possibly by Alcina's husband. This house has bad karma."

"Karma is so pagan. You're overreacting."

Dinah narrowed her eyes. She hadn't smoked a cigarette since last New Year's Eve, one hundred and fifty-seven days ago, and here she'd let herself be corrupted by a willful adolescent with a subversive agenda. "You have a disturbing tendency to blow off crime as if it's hardly worth mentioning. Your burglary caper may have been just a misunderstanding and vandalism may be an everyday occurrence back in Atlanta, but murder can't be minimized and I don't think I'm overreacting. Friends or relatives of the murdered man have probably decided to take vengeance against Yannis and his association with this house makes it dangerous."

"Don't you trust Thor to protect us?"

"He can't watch over us every minute of the day and night." Dinah stubbed out her cigarette and got up to leave. "Don't unpack. I'll drive you back to the airport in the morning and we can phone your mother to expect you."

K.D. hurled herself onto the bed face-first and began to sob. Or pretended to sob.

So much for the doing of good deeds, thought Dinah, and stormed downstairs to see what progress Thor had made with the cleanup. She and K.D. had helped him broom up the dirt and debris and bag it, but left him alone to hose off the tiles and the door. On the first floor, she heard water splatting against the side of the house and the windows. Above the noise came the sound of gut-wrenching sobs from Alcina's room.

The loss of the parakeets seemed to have hit Alcina hard. If tears were any measure, she cared more about those flown birds than she did about the dead Iraqi. And where was Yannis? The police had released him. He ought to be on hand to comfort his wife.

An alarming possibility sprang to mind. What if it weren't the birds that Alcina was weeping for? Was Yannis here when the vandals struck? If they were friends of Fathi's, angry about Yannis' release and bent on revenge, they could have dragged Yannis off to do God only knows what to him.

She rushed down the hall and rapped on the door of Alcina's lair. "Alcina? Alcina, may I come in?"

She didn't answer.

Dinah pushed the door open a crack and peeped inside. The room was cloaked in shadow, lit only by candles and permeated with the tang of incense. Painted icons of Greek Orthodox saints stared down from the walls like an unfriendly jury. Alcina rocked back and forth on her knees, wringing her hands and howling. She didn't seem to be so much beseeching the saints as berating them for their ineptitude.

"Alcina, please tell me what it is you're crying about. Is it Yannis? Did the people who trashed the veranda hurt him?"

She began to ululate.

Jerusalem. She was Marilita's daughter, all right. Dinah felt a mixture of pity and aggravation. "Alcina, Thor's already phoned the police, but you need to tell us if there's something more than broken chairs and flower pots for them to investigate."

"Thor Ramberg. He caused all of this. The police turned Yannis loose with no protection. He'll have to leave Samos. They will kill him." She clasped her cross and her fetish and held them against her mouth.