Spencer cleared his throat.

'Don't bother, Detective O'Malley,' Katherine said quietly. 'I know you came to tell me she is dead. Didn't you?' she said without inflection.

Spencer nodded, and then, realizing she couldn't see him, said, 'Yes.'

They sat. A twitch passed through Katherine. It started in her eyelids and passed all the way down through her mouth and her neck and her arms and legs and ended in her feet. Then Katherine was still.

She stared at the space to the left of Spencer's head, and he stared at the blanket that lay limp on her lap. He couldn't bear to look at her.

Finally, Katherine asked Spencer to get her a glass of water.

When she had taken a sip, she whispered, 'My baby. My baby.' Spencer reached out to touch her, and she said, 'No, no, detective. Please. It'll be harder with your comfort. I'll be all right. Just give me a minute.'

He gave her two minutes, and then five.

'Did you know my daughter, Detective O'Malley?'

He nodded. He had to stop doing that. 'Yes, Mrs Sinclair. I did. Not well, unfortunately.'

'She was still quite beautiful, was she?'

'Very beautiful.'

Katherine smiled. 'Yes. She was really exquisite as a child. It used to break my heart to look at her. I just couldn't believe she could be so beautiful. Or do you think every parent thinks so about her children?'

Spencer's own mother thought the world never had more beautiful children than her own. 'Kristina was objectively lovely,' he said.

She nodded. 'Yes. You know, I'm happy now I can't see. I had seen her, and that was enough. Now I won't have to see her dead.' Her eyes filled with tears.

Spencer turned away.

'How did she die, detective? Was she in a car accident? Did she freeze? Was she murdered?'

Spencer wanted to say yes to all three; he was profoundly upset. 'She froze,' he said. 'How did you know?'

'The snow, she loved the snow,' Katherine said brokenly. 'She used to run outside in her pajamas the mornings after it snowed. And fall on her back into the snow. Get up, I used to shout. You'll freeze to death.'

Spencer shuddered.

It was a miracle Kristina had lived at all, Kristina's mother told Spencer. Katherine was a diabetic, and Kristina and her twin brother were born eight weeks premature.

The boy didn't make it; he had been born too weak.

Kristina, meanwhile, spent the first three months of her life fighting for it. Katherine buried her baby son and then day after day trod to the Greenwich Memorial Hospital to sit next to the incubator that warmed her only child. Kristina weighed one and a half pounds when she was born, but she held on for dear life. 'How she held on, Detective O'Malley,' said Katherine Sinclair with misted eyes, her fingers furiously tearing at the worn cotton blanket on her lap. 'Every breath she took, I thought it would be her last. I listened to her and I thought I would go insane hearing her gasp for breath, up, down, short, short, long, too long, another labored breath. But she came through in the end. We took her home on her four-month birthday. She weighed eight pounds then.' Katherine smiled. 'She grew up nice and tall, didn't she?' She stopped smiling suddenly. She stopped tearing at the blanket and turned in the direction of the window. 'She grew up so nice. So neat. And she wasn't a diabetic. She was healthy as anything after her first year. Didn't ever get chicken pox or any other childhood disease. Rarely caught cold, never had the flu. You'd never know she'd been on the edge of death.'

'No, you certainly wouldn't,' agreed Spencer. 'She looked a little like you,' he added, trying in vain to make the woman feel better.

After some time Katherine continued, 'For the first seven years of her life she grew up as our only child, spoiled like you can't imagine.'

'I can imagine, Mrs Sinclair,' said Spencer.

'She had two governesses. At four she began piano lessons on her own Steinway grand piano, at five ballet and gymnastics, at seven she wanted to play violin, so my husband and I bought her the best instrument available. She learned to ride horses, had her own horse in a stable we built in the back of our property. My husband ran a very successful business, and I came from money. My mother was very well off.'

'Yes, I know,' said Spencer.

'Everyone doted on Kristina. I hovered in the background constantly, wanting her, needing her, loving her. She would brush off my kisses as she concentrated on Mozart. I didn't mind. She was my only child can you imagine how I loved her?'

Spencer could only imagine not the wealth; the mothering. Ah, shit, he said to himself, shaking his head.

'When Kristina was seven, my husband and I realized we were ruining her. Completely. Our attention was harming her. She became self-involved, independent. She needed a brother or sister. But having children of our own was no longer possible, not if I wanted to live to raise them, and I did, you see.'

'Yes, Mrs Sinclair, I see.'

'We adopted a child from an orphanage in Texas. We went all the way to Fort Worth to find just the right boy.'

Spencer could only nod.

'He was a perfect little boy, dark, thin, well-behaved; he even looked a little like our Krissy. He was desperately in need of a home, and that suited us just fine, because we desperately needed to give him one. The sisters at the orphanage said he had been found three years earlier on the shoulder of a local highway in the middle of the night. At the orphanage at first he didn't speak. For the first year, not a word. Then two years before we adopted him, he started to speak. He didn't have a name, he didn't know his parents, he didn't know his date of birth. The sisters called him Billy. We renamed him Nathan. After our dead boy. We made his birthday a day before Kristina's, just like her older twin, who was born at ten minutes to midnight.'

Katherine must have sensed Spencer's reaction, because she said, 'Yes, I know. That old superstition. You shouldn't name a living child after a dead one, my friends told me. Well, why not, I said. Jews do. So I did. We were God-fearing people, not superstitious. We went to church every Sunday, and we said grace at our dinner table. We didn't believe in old wives' tales.'

'I don't either,' Spencer agreed.

'Ah, but we should have,' said Katherine. 'We adopted him, we gave him our name, we gave him everything we gave Kristina. Actually, we gave him more. He was a needy little boy.'

'I'm sure,' said Spencer.

'Kristina wasn't needy at all as I said, she was too independent. She really thought her daddy and I cramped her style, hovering over her constantly as we did. But Nathan was another matter. He lapped up our love and got very attached to us. He didn't like to go anywhere without us, or be in the house at night without us. He was an affectionate boy. A beautiful boy.

'The children took to each other instantly. Kristina was the aggressor, and I always had to intervene on Nathan's behalf. Kristina, don't tease your brother, Kristina, don't make fun, Kristina, leave him alone, Kristina, act your age. Kristina, Kristina, Kristina ...' Katherine caressed her daughter's name as she spoke.

'But secretly I was glad. They played, they fought, they watched TV, they played in the yard. Kristina taught Nathan how to swim. He didn't know how. He taught her how not to be afraid.'

'Afraid of what?'

'Of anything. If there was one quality that described him, it was dauntlessness. Nathan wasn't afraid of anything. Unlike Kristina, who had a number of childhood fears, of the dark, particularly. Nathan taught her to hold her breath underwater, long past the time the lifeguards would come. Nathan was the boy who climbed a tree and jumped from one tree to another, he was the one who broke his leg hopping the fence and didn't tell anybody for three days, he was the one who got straight As on everything without ever looking inside a textbook. He was our shining star. We couldn't believe God would bless us with such a boy.'

All Spencer could think of was that Nathan hadn't taught Kristina that well, because she had continued to be afraid of the dark.

'Kristina wasn't jealous?'

'Are you kidding? She must've been pretty lonely her first seven years. We were jealous of them. They were inseparable. They seemed to have a bond that we couldn't even understand, much less penetrate.

'They excelled in school. They were impeccably mannered, even Nathan, who learned well despite coming from nothing, from a garbage can somewhere on the plains of Texas. Three years passed, then five, then seven. I got back into my charity work, my husband worked hard on his imported textile business, we went out, we threw dinner parties, at which Kristina played the piano and Nathan sang. He had a beautiful voice.

'Even now, after everything, I look back on those years and think we had a perfect life. We had a life most people only dream of. Most of our friends were many times divorced, many times remarried, with children, stepchildren, half siblings coming together or coming apart, doing drugs at thirteen, rehab at fifteen, getting caught for stealing, stealing from their parents, rude, spoiled, indulged children, unhappy mothers, drifting, restless fathers. We knew women who were having affairs with nearly everyone who came to their front door, and their men worked all day and looked the other way at night. Except one man who shot and killed his wife.'

Spencer raised his eyebrows.

'John and I thought we had shielded our children from all that. We thought we'd given them a good life.'

'You had.'

'Well, we thought so then,' said Katherine. 'Even now, I don't know where we went wrong. Should I have paid more attention to them? Less? Given Kristina more attention? Given Nathan less? Adopted another child? What?'

Spencer didn't know what to say. Still, something was called for, so he reached over and patted Katherine's hand. She didn't move.

'It sounds like it was a good life, Mrs Sinclair,' he said, and in response she made a rasping sound, a strangled cry.

'Sure does, doesn't it?' she said. 'We loved that boy as our own. Do you understand?'

'Absolutely,' he said.

'My husband was priming Nathan to take over our family business when he was older. And in our will, we divided our assets equally between the kids. They both had trust funds that would become available to them when they turned twenty-one.'

Spencer nodded, once again belatedly realizing she couldn't see him.

'Nathan and Kristina ' Katherine swallowed hard, as if it physically hurt her to say the two names together. 'Little by little they started drifting away from us. Nathan stopped wanting to spend time with us. Kristina never did want to. Oh, well, we said. Just normal growing up what do they want with old fogies like us, anyway? By the time they were fourteen, they were more withdrawn from us than ever. We attributed it to their being teenagers. Sometimes teenagers are just like that. Their schoolwork hadn't suffered, they still got along, they had dinner with us. But something was different. I don't know. Maybe it was my little girl. I thought I knew her. She was always such an out-spoken, forward child, but lately then, back then,' she corrected herself quickly, 'she was getting inside herself and not coming out much. You know? I still heard Nathan's voice in the house, but Krissy stopped talking back. It used to make me smile to hear them argue, but now they were silent upstairs, silent in the family room, and pretty silent at the dinner table, too. Very polite, both of them. Too polite.

'Was this teenage rebellion? My husband and I wondered. If it was, it wasn't too bad, we decided. Many parents we knew had it much worse. You grow up indulged, the excesses just have to show themselves on teenagers. They show themselves in adults surely enough.'

'What excesses?' said Spencer, almost not wanting to know.

'That's right. I didn't see anything wrong either. Now, with perfect twenty-twenty vision isn't that ironic?' Katherine smiled in his direction. She must have been so beautiful once, thought Spencer. 'I say these things to you, but then I went along blithely, I did my charity work, I threw my small and large dinner parties twice a week, we went to New York for charity events, social functions, plays, parties.'

She was intent on telling him more and more about her past life. Spencer already had a good idea of what kind of life they had led in their estate mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. But she wasn't through. She needed to talk about it. She went on at some length about Kristina's piano and violin lessons, about her ballet dancing, about the money she spent on ballet shoes and tutus, about Nathan's making the varsity basketball team.

'I first thought something might be wrong when Kristina was fourteen and a half. And she came to me no, she didn't, our governess did, Mrs Pitt came to me and said that Kristina had quit her music and dance lessons. All of them. When I confronted her, Kristina said she'd become bored. It was very strange, you have to understand. She's been playing the piano since she was five. Now she wants to quit? I didn't buy it. My husband didn't buy it. But what could we do? She didn't tell us anything was wrong. We sent her to our family psychologist, who said she was closed-mouthed. He seemed concerned, and that concerned us. He said her behavior could be a response to something. He asked if anyone had recently died. No, we said. The kids are very happy. There isn't a problem.

'Every summer they went to Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, to my mother's house. She adored them both, was ecstatic to have them, but Kristina had always been her undisputed favorite. I was my mother's only child. I think she felt like she was raising another daughter. The kids loved going there, she loved having them. But when Kristina was fourteen and a half, she quietly told me she'd prefer not to go. It was inexplicable. Not go? But why? Grandma loves you. Oh, I know, she said, and then hesitated and didn't say any more. I couldn't get another word out of her on the subject. She went. The following year, she said again that maybe she could do something else this summer. I knew my mother would be devastated not to have her she'd had Kristina every summer since she was born. When Kristina didn't offer me any explanation for why she didn't want to go, I insisted. I said it was ridiculous.' Katherine paused. 'So she went.'

Spencer asked, 'She went, or '

'No, they both went. Of course. They both went. I thought nothing more about it, but when they came back, Kristina was more into herself than ever. Even my mother had mentioned Kristina's moodiness. We talked about it and decided it was just adolescence. You have sisters, detective?'

'Yes, three of them.'

'Didn't they go through adolescent angst?'

Actually, he didn't remember. They were always the same to him, and he was too young to notice how they acted with other people. When Spencer was young his world had been his family, and his sisters had been his surrogate mothers. When I was born, Kathleen, the oldest child, was twenty, Maureen, the fourth, was fourteen, and Sinead thirteen. By the time I was old enough to understand anything, they had long grown and flown and married. Kathleen, in fact, had my nephew Harry two years before I, the uncle, was even born. Some uncle I was to Harry. He is now thirty-two and calls me his little Uncle Spencer.

'I guess so,' said Spencer. 'I guess they seemed different during that age.'

'Yes, that's right,' Katherine exclaimed sharply. 'I'm sure your mother didn't think anything of it.'

'I am sure my mother didn't,' said Spencer.

'I didn't either. Kristina and Nathan returned from New Hampshire, started school, everything was okay. I kept busy. There are many charity fundraisers to organize before Thanksgiving and Christmas in Greenwich.'

Spencer understood. 'And then?'

'Then? Then nothing. Sometime in October of 1988, in my own house, in my own great room, on my new couch, my husband came to me on a Thursday night, after a long business dinner, and said, 'I have to talk to you. It's about Kristina.'

'Absentmindedly, I said, sure, what is it? I was stuffing envelopes or mailers, or whatever. John said people had been saying terrible things about Kristina, so awful that he'd punched his brother Jeff earlier that evening because he was so upset. Jeff apparently passed along some information.

'Now I looked at him. I put my mailers away, and looked up at John. If he said he hit his brother, it had to be serious. John had never hit anybody in his entire life. Then.

'John told me vicious rumors have been flying around North Street. People were saying it was just too horrible that Kristina was pregnant.

'I laughed. That was my first reaction. I just laughed. Don't be ridiculous, I said. You interrupted me to tell me this? Don't be so ridiculous. She doesn't even have a boyfriend. And he just stared at me so hard that I got very scared. I shook my head and laughed again. What's gotten into you, John? I said. Cut it out. What are you talking about? I might have screamed at this point. It can't be true, you know that.

'Call her, he told me. Call her down. It was late, but I did call her down. I heard her slowly walking down the stairs, and then she stood in front of us, in her white robe and slippers, looking tired and beautiful. "Krissy, Daddy is driving Mommy crazy," I said. "Look how late it is and we got you out of bed." She asked us what was the matter, and I felt better for a minute, until I said, "Daddy's been hearing things around town, some awful lies, I can't even believe I'm repeating them to you. Daddy your father and I we wanted to know " I couldn't continue. I was shaking badly by this point. It was just so absurd. I laughed again, and then John got up off the couch and asked our daughter, "Kristina, they're saying someone told me you might be pregnant. Is that true?"'

Katherine bowed her head, as if five years and blindness could not hide the bare humiliation she felt then.

'And she said yes.

'I looked at my daughter as I've never looked at her before, or since. I looked at her and saw her, saw her good and proper, maybe for the first time in her teenage life, I saw her as she was gaunt, pale, with circles under her eyes, with tired lips and sunken cheeks, and that loose white robe.

'Apparently it was the talk of the town. Greenwich is really a provincial town, when you get right down to it. A small-minded town. This was the whisper topic of the cocktail parties and the dinner parties and the indoor tennis games.'

Spencer patted her hand. Katherine did not move it away. Her body was motionless.

'That child, she was mine. She was mine, do you understand? How did we go from her being mine to being pregnant at fifteen?'

As if that was the worst of it, thought Spencer glumly, and Katherine must have read his mind, because she nodded and said, 'Yes. Pregnant at fifteen, by him.

'I had to face her. I can't forgive myself for what I did then. I came up to her and slapped her hard in the face. She fell to the ground. I was going to hit her again, but my husband held me back. I couldn't even look at John. And eventually much too soon I had to face Nathan. I could barely speak when I faced him.'

She could barely speak now, remembering it.

'Too awful, Detective O'Malley. Too awful. Nathan looked at me with remorseless eyes, he looked at me as if he just couldn't understand what all the fuss was about, and I knew then, I knew my husband would kill him if he saw that look in his eyes. He would kill him. And I knew how he felt. I understood. I wanted to kill Nathan too, seeing him stare shamelessly at me.'

Spencer shook his head. He was glad Katherine couldn't see him.

'I packed him up, very quickly two hours maybe? I packed him up and sent him on a bus to New Hampshire to be with my mother while we figured out what to do with Kristina. I was on serious medication by this time. I must have been taking Valium every two hours, I was a zombie, but it was the only way to get through it all. Medically induced lack of feeling. We thought Kristina would have an abortion, but would you believe it, she plainly refused. Refused. And do you know why? Because of the worst five words in the English language a mother can possibly hear. Kristina said, "But Mom, I love him.'"

Spencer sniffed loudly and shook his head. Katherine blindly sought his hand with hers. He gave it to her, and she took it and squeezed it. Tears were in her eyes. '"But Mom, I love him,"' Katherine whispered. 'Can you imagine anything worse?'

'No,' said Spencer frankly.

'We couldn't drag her against her will to a clinic. I even told Kristina I'd gladly perform the operation myself. But she didn't want it. She wanted can you believe it? to keep the baby.' Katherine laughed silently. 'I had been more proud of my daughter than of anything else in my life, she was my crowning achievement, but the Sinclairs have a proud tradition of finishing high school before they become pregnant by their brothers.'

Red Leaves House. Spencer wanted to tell this destroyed woman that her life's work had not been in vain. That Kristina had tried to do something with her life, tried to ease the pain she had caused. But he couldn't. Katherine's daughter was dead, murdered; her husband was dead, and her mother was dead. Only Nathan Sinclair remained.

'How did Kristina get to marry Howard Kim?'

'Well, tongues were wagging all over Greenwich. The whole town had become one big wagging dog. Wag, wag, wag. We had to do something. And soon. My soon-to-become ex-friends, they may have known that Kristina was pregnant, but they didn't know by whom. They guessed it was some high school boy. If they were to guess at the truth ' She swallowed hard. 'Have you met Howard Kim? He is a good-looking man.'