I leaned forward, excited. "Please let me be the judge, Mrs. Gray. You never know what might help."

"I was doing my hair, and I heard a car in the alley out back"

Bingo.

"What kind of car was it?"

"Oh, I don't know. I was in the bathroom. I just remember thinking it was odd to hear a car, with Walter gone and the fire and all."

Then why, I thought, didn't you go look? Aren't little old ladies supposed to be inveterate busybodies? What I really needed was a nosy old bird who kept binoculars on her windowsill and spent all her time watching the neighborhood goings on. You just can't find a good stereotype when you need one.

"Did it sound like Walter's truck, or like a smaller car?"

"Um, more like a smaller car. I would have remembered if it had sounded like Walter's truck."

I took a sip of tea, thinking. "Did it keep going or stop in the alley?"

"I don't know. I'm sorry. I meant to look out the back window, but I got distracted."

"That's okay. Do you remember hearing any doors shutting? Like someone was getting out of the car?"

She frowned, squeezing the wrinkles in her forehead together. "I think I did."

"One? Two?" I knew I was leading the witness, so to speak, but couldn't help myself.

"Um, one. No, two. Well, one for sure."

Okay, now I had just forced this very nice lady who wanted to be helpful to remember something that probably hadn't happened at all. I dropped it.

But I'd drunk only half of my tea, and I wouldn't be allowed to leave until I finished it. Not that I wanted to. It was so pleasant and homey in her kitchen that the acc.u.mulation of the last few days sloughed away. And my feet hurt.

Settling my posterior more firmly in the old-fashioned, red vinyl kitchen chair, I asked, "How long did Walter rent that little house from you?"

"Oh gosh-I guess I rented to Walter for almost twenty years. But that little cottage? About six or seven years, I'd say. He moved in there shortly after the Blys bought that house where you live. He lived in a duplex I used to own over on Cedar, but he loved that little cottage, and when the other tenant moved out he asked if he could move in." She blinked back tears.

"That fire was just awful. I'm sorry you lost the cottage," I said.

She nodded.

"Were you insured?"

"Oh, yes. Though I don't know whether I'll rebuild it or not."

"And twenty years is a long time to have a tenant. You've had a terrible week, haven't you?"

She sighed. "Yes. Thank you for not offering plat.i.tudes. Because " this week has well and truly sucked."

Surprised, I laughed. She smiled, and those gray eyes brightened.

"You must have known Walter pretty well," I said.

I knew the whole family."

"Really? I didn't get that impression from the way you talked with Tootie the other day, when you were getting her permission to let us in Walter's house."

"Tootie. Yes, well. I don't think she remembers me. Actually, that's not true. I'm sure she remembers me, but she remembers Mavis Smart, not the Mrs. Gray you introduced on the phone."

"Mavis Smart? Your maiden name, I take it."

"Yes. Mr. Gray's been gone for many years now."

"Why didn't you tell her who you were?"

Mrs. Gray was quiet for a minute, looking out the window at the brilliant autumn red of the burning bush in her side yard. "Let's just say her memories of me aren't the best. I don't see any reason to remind her of that time."

What on earth? But it was clear from the look she gave me that Mrs. Gray would not divulge more than she already had. I stifled my raging curiosity, took another sip of tea, and asked what she could tell me about Walter's childhood.

"He grew up like any normal kid," she said. "He had two brothers, and the three of them were close enough in age to spend a lot of time together. They'd roam around the edges of town-it was considerably smaller then-fishing and playing and getting into the usual sort of trouble boys get into. Nothing too bad, just boys being boys. Walter had a tendency to collect creatures. Frogs, snakes, the occasional wounded bird. I don't think his parentshis mother, really-would allow him to keep a pet, but he always had some animal or another out in the shed where they kept the tools. He was a nice little boy. I liked him."

"Tootie mentioned something about him having a lot of grief in his life. It was a bad time, and I didn't want to ask her about it. Do you know what she was referring to?"

Mrs. Gray nodded. "That was later. It started when he was a senior in high school. He took up with a girl from around here. I don't remember her name. Sh.e.l.ly? Sherrie? No-Cherry. Because of that hair of hers. Anyway, they were inseparable that year and the summer after they graduated. He asked her to marry him, and she said yes. But they both knew it would be a long engagement, since he was going to college in Seattle-he wanted to be a biologist-and wouldn't be able to support a wife until he'd finished."

"Walter went to college?"

"For a while. He ended up dropping out."

"W ?" Y*

She gave me a look. I was interrupting her story.

"Sorry. Please, go on."

"Well, he went to cla.s.ses, and she stayed home, living with her parents. Took a job working the counter at Cece's Variety." The store was still there on First Street, a retro hodgepodge of drugstore dry goods, children's clothes, and gifts.

Mrs. Gray continued. "It wasn't like now, when people think nothing of commuting from here to Seattle every day. The freeway hadn't even been built this far north, and there were only what we think of now as the back roads to travel back and forth on. So Walter lived on campus at the University of Washington during the week and came home on the weekends to see his family and his girl.

"After a couple of years she got pregnant. Walter dropped out of school and moved back to town. They got married, and he took a job working at the lumber mill. The baby was born healthy and happy, and while things weren't exactly the way he'd planned them, they were getting by okay."

Walter had a wife? And a child? And Tootie had left them out of his obituary. I had a bad feeling about what was coming next.

"They died," I said.

She shook her head. "No, they didn't die."

TWENTY.

"THEN WHERE ARE THEY?".

"No one knows," she said. "Let me finish telling you what happened."

I nodded and shut my mouth.

"Like I said before, Cadyville was smaller then. Made it even harder to keep secrets. It came out that while Walter had been going to the university during the week, his girl was seen going around with someone else. He found out shortly after they were married. And naturally everyone wondered if the child was really his. I don't know what happened behind closed doors, but in public he never let on anything was wrong, and he was the best daddy to that little boy. He really loved Cherry. She swore to everyone she carried his child, that she hadn't cheated on him at all. And she explained who she'd been seen with. Of course, everyone else in town already knew."

Mrs. Gray paused and took a sip of tea.

"Who?" I prompted.

"w.i.l.l.y Hanover. Walter's older brother."

"But it was all innocent?"

"That's what Cherry told him. But when Walter asked his brother about it, w.i.l.l.y told him different. He said it had been far from innocent."

"Why would he do that? It just seems cruel"

"w.i.l.l.y meant it to be. He wanted Cherry, and she'd married Walter anyway."

"Because Walter was her true love."

"You're a romantic, my dear. No, because Walter had higher aspirations than his brother. w.i.l.l.y didn't go to college-started working at the mill right out of high school."

"But Walter worked at the mill."

"That was the irony. I don't know if Cherry loved either one of them. She wanted to have a better life than the one she grew up with. Her mama died when she was about ten, and her daddy started drinking, couldn't keep a job. He wasn't abusive, at least as far as anyone knew, but Cherry had to grow up in a big hurry. Maybe it was being so poor that made her harsh. Made her desperate. Maybe it was not having a mother. Anyway, she had big plans. Walter was going to be an important scientist, and they'd be able to move away, if only to Seattle. She wanted to leave Cadyville, and she wanted her husband to make money. And that meant w.i.l.l.y wasn't husband material."

"But Walter was. So who did the baby belong to?"

"No one knows for sure. Cherry said it was his, and Walter chose to believe her. He loved that little boy like life itself, and settled down to raise him here."

"I bet Cherry loved that."

"Indeed she didn't. As a teenager she'd had a bit of a sharp edge to her, but with a husband and baby to look after and no hopes for the kind of life she'd intended, she got to be downright mean. She made Walter's life miserable, berating him in public, scolding him about what she perceived as his failures, until he eventually came to believe her. After a while, she started throwing hints about her relationship with his brother in his face. He was a gentle man, and she completely emasculated him, stripped every shred of pride from him. Everyone in town knew she was a shrew, and they pitied Walter."

"Pity's a hard thing to take," I said.

"It was a humiliation piled on top of everything else."

"What about his son?"

"Whenever Walter wasn't working, he'd carry that little boy everywhere, in his arms, and then later on his shoulders. But Cherry ruined that, too. As the boy grew older and could understand, she tried to turn him against Walter with her venomous complaints."

"And it worked? Oh, poor Walter!"

"It would have worked, if things had continued like that. But Cherry reached the end of her rope. She just up and left one day. Took the boy with her. He was only four."

"She left? Did she go with w.i.l.l.y?"

"Not with w.i.l.l.y. I don't know if anyone knows where she went or with whom. But it would have been with someone, because she'd never done anything on her own. She knew how to use other people, though. She'd found some other sucker she thought could give her more."

"What about her father?"

"She never contacted him that I know of. He moved in with her younger sister in Yakima for a while. I heard he died about ten years ago.

"And Walter?"

"She left him a ruined soul. It was the loss of that little boy that really did it. Walter just kept working at the mill. Didn't talk to people much. Cut off most contact with his family, didn't have many friends. And he started drinking, just like her daddy had. After a while it got out of hand, and he lost his job."

I hadn't expected Walter's tale of woe to be so much about family. He'd always seemed so independent. Well, no wonder he'd become such a loner.

"He rented from you twenty years ago?" I asked.

She nodded. "Just before he lost his job. But he always managed to pay the rent. And I tried to keep it low. I was afraid Walter was the type that could have ended up down in Seattle, sleeping in a doorway in Pioneer Square. He'd just stopped caring. I think it was the work he did for folks around here that kept him going."

Mrs. Gray paused to drink some tea. "And then six, seven years ago he just up and quit drinking. Probably saved his life." An uncomfortable silence followed her last statement.

I broke it. "Did you know he was engaged?"

Mrs. Gray's eyes widened. "Really?"

"To a woman named Debby. You might have seen her around, along with a little wiry guy."

She wrinkled her forehead in thought. "I've seen a man and a woman at Walter's a couple of times. Is she, um, a little rough around the edges?"

I nodded, seeing how she'd strike Mrs. Gray that way.