'Yes,' agreed Spencer. 'He is.'

'He practices tai chi chuan. He was in good shape, mentally, physically. Also, he took his responsibilities seriously. Which is why my husband trusted him and went to Hong Kong. Howard had wanted to come to America for a long time. Finally he had his chance. So you see?' she said, trying to smile. 'Everybody won.'

Spencer didn't say anything.

'How is he now?' she asked.

'He is very well. Successful.'

'Good, good,' she said without emotion. 'I'm glad for him. Did she die still married to him?'

Spencer shook his head. 'No,' he then said quickly, remembering she couldn't see him. 'They were divorced in November.'

'This November? Just past?'

'Yes.'

'When did she die?'

'November twenty-fourth,' said Spencer, and watched the mother shudder.

'Two days after her birthday,' she said, her voice breaking.

'Yes.'

'Did she ' Her voice broke. She whispered, 'Did she die a good death, detective?'

No, she died a violent death, he wanted to tell her, and she fought for every last breath, for every aching, icy breath, but in the end, her shoulder was too weak and her arm too sore, her ribs couldn't hold off the pressure, her throat was fragile, full of fragile life, and it gave out in the end, though not without a railing fight.

'Yes,' he said aloud, but couldn't add anything more.

Katherine stared into space. 'I always thought she would die young,' she whispered. 'I don't know why. She lived too much life when she was too young. She didn't save any for later.'

After a silence, Spencer asked, 'Did marrying Howard quiet the wags?'

'Oh, you know.' Katherine waved dismissively. 'It really didn't matter. The following month, the son of one of my friends went into drug rehab, another's was in the hospital for overdosing, a couple more kids were arrested for drunk driving on the interstate. Life went on. That is other people's lives.

'We just kind of stood still lost at that moment, suspended in our house, without Kristina, without Nathan, and really without each other. My husband blamed me. I blamed myself. A few months later I overdosed on Valium myself and spent a month in the hospital. I think John was hit harder than I was if that's possible. He thought of Nathan as his son, you see.'

When Spencer didn't say anything, lost in his thoughts, Katherine said, 'Marrying Howard was the right thing to do. Even if she had had the abortion, detective. Big deal. That's like killing the devil's child. There is still the small matter of the devil. And what? Should he have continued living in our house?'

'Of course not. Of course not.'

'And if we sent him away, how would we have explained that?'

'But Mrs Sinclair you did send him away. How did you explain that?

'His sister got married, and he wanted to be closer to her. We sent him to boarding school in New York.'

'Ahh.'

'It was really the best possible course.'

'Of course.'

Katherine didn't speak after that, just sat there and kneaded her old cotton blanket. Spencer finally said, 'Where is he now? Nathan? What happened to him?'

'I don't know. After my mother found out why Nathan was with her '

'How did she find out?' Spencer interrupted.

'Believe it or not, Nathan told her.' A little smile crossed Katherine's lips. 'He was just dauntless. He told her, she said, because he wanted her to be appalled at the way we had treated Kristina. The gall.' Katherine snorted, but her unseeing eyes betrayed some other emotion shame? Guilt?

'My mother kicked him out of her house, into the middle of winter. He was sixteen, and she took out a gun from her nightstand, my seventy-eight-year-old mother, who had me when she was forty-four, and told him to get out or die. He got out. No one has heard from him since.'

'Did Kristina hear from him?'

'No, I don't think so. He didn't care about any of us. Besides, my husband forbade her. Nathan's trust fund had been dismantled, and John had set up a separate one for Kristina to be administered by Howard, a trust fund for her living expenses, college, and whatever else. But John stipulated that if there was one sight of Nathan, Kristina wouldn't get a penny of that money.'

Spencer said that if Kristina had loved Nathan she would've figured out a way to see him.

Katherine scoffed. 'Love him! She didn't love him. Sixteen-year-old girls don't know the first thing about love. Money was too important to her. She wouldn't have risked it, not even for him.'

'You don't think so?'

'No, absolutely not.'

'How can you be so sure?' he asked.

Katherine was slowing down. Spencer could see she was becoming less interested in answering his questions, and generally less interested in sitting with him altogether.

'Because ...' She sighed wearily, ruffled her blanket, and went on, 'John knew some people. He hired a private investigator to find Nathan, but he had disappeared from the face of this earth. No one could find him. We assumed he'd left the country or changed his name. Or both.'

'Or died,' said Spencer wishfully.

'Died.' She sniffed. 'We wouldn't be so lucky, detective. Besides, the evil he brought lives on eternally. Nothing would've changed. My husband was consumed by what had happened. You know, he would regularly disappear for weeks at a time, coming back thinner and sicker than ever. John said he was out looking for him. I think that when my husband didn't kill Nathan right then and there, he just couldn't live with himself anymore.'

Spencer understood that.

'I've been in and out of hospitals ever since Kristina left us. I haven't been well, you know. My diabetes it's wrecked my eyes, my arms, look ' Katherine showed Spencer her right forearm, black-and-blue, swollen and peppered with needle punctures. 'Does it look as bad as it feels? They give me morphine to deal with the pain. I don't think I'm leaving this place. Why? What for? Even without my mother's money, I can still afford to stay here.'

'Your mother's money?'

'Yes, my mother's. She was so furious with us for Kristina, she cut us out of her will. I must say I was shocked. My mother had sisters, aunts, cousins, nieces, and nephews. And me. No one got a penny. We were all upset, I tell you.'

'Do you know who got her money?'

'Of course I know who got her money, detective,' Katherine said. 'I did not just fall off the turnip truck. What I want to know is, who gets the money now? Do I get some of that money?'

Spencer shook his head. 'Kristina made a will before she died. She didn't speak of you.' Spencer peered into the blind woman's face. 'Mrs Sinclair, you and your husband ... you disowned Kristina, didn't you?'

'We were angry!' Katherine shouted. 'We were furious. Do you have any idea how betrayed we felt?'

Spencer said quietly, 'It works both ways, you know. If you disown her, you can't get any of her money, either.'

Katherine breathed out and then shrugged with a humph. 'Who'd have thought she'd have any money?' She sat quietly and then said, 'She was killed, wasn't she, detective?'

Spencer didn't have the heart to tell her.

Patting the blanket on her lap, he said, 'Mrs Sinclair, don't blame yourself. Please. You did the best you could. Don't blame yourself. Don't sit here feeling guilty. How could you know about Nathan?'

'I could have known. Should have. Why, everyone knows that orphaned children are emotionally screwed up. I read up on it. The attachments they form are few and shallow, the affection they feel is fleeting, their gratitude nil. Their moral code is missing and their social restraint is torn to pieces. That was Nathan, but we thought miraculously he was different. But he wasn't different. He was the stereotype.'

'But Mrs Sinclair, not all orphaned children grow up to be morally and socially deviant.'

'It's the norm, detective. No, not all. But they are the exceptions. We didn't get the exception. We got the normal kid. The kid we're all scared of having. It's the monkey. The monkey with a bottle but without the wire mommy. You know. Harlow's famous experiment with monkeys with and without surrogate moms. Nathan had the bottle, but didn't even get a wire mommy to cling to.'

Spencer patted the cotton blanket again, at a loss as to what to say or do. 'That's no excuse. You didn't know you were going to be this unlucky.'

Katherine's mouth stretched into a grimace. 'Actually, Detective O'Malley, I'll tell you something. When Nathan was first found, he had with him a small cat, which he was allowed to keep. He had that cat for two years. The cat slept with Nathan and ate from his hand, and followed him around the orphanage. They seemed very attached to each other. When Nathan was six, the silly animal was run over by a truck or a bus, or a small industrial vehicle. When Nathan was told of the cat's death, he immediately threw out all the cat-related paraphernalia, the cat bowl, the litter box, the toys, the catnip, asked for his sheets to be changed, and never spoke of the cat again.' Katherine stifled a sob. 'When I heard that story, my heart just filled with love and pity for poor Nathan. Now, there's a boy who needs to be loved, I thought. But in the end, the joke was on me, wasn't it? I was the only one who cared about the stupid cat. No one else did. Certainly not Nathan. He never got attached to anything in his life.'

Carefully, Spencer said, 'Maybe he got attached to Kristina.'

Katherine scoffed, 'Not so much that he wasn't willing to ruin everything he had going for him.'

'Maybe he was willing to risk everything because he loved her.'

'Yeah? Well, where is he now, if he loved her so much?'

'Thank God he's not around,' said Spencer, feeling strangely bothered. 'Just one more loose end.'

Katherine said, 'You think that because he might have loved her it was okay? As if that justifies everything? Anything?'

'Not at all. It justifies nothing. He is despicable,' said Spencer fiercely.

Katherine groaned with despair.

'Forget him, Mrs Sinclair,' said Spencer intensely. 'Nathan is unfathomable to us. But you're not. You loved your kids. Please don't blame yourself. There are many parents who treat their children much worse than you treated yours and yet nothing like this ever happens. It was just a freak thing.'

'I don't believe you, Spencer.' Katherine called him by his first name. 'We breed what we plant. We reap what we sow. It's not an accident, and you and I both know it. I just don't know what I could've done to prevent it from happening.'

'Nothing,' said Spencer. 'It was just an accident.'

'It's not an accident. If I were dead, it would be an accident. It's not an accident. It's my life.'

When it was time to go, Spencer got up and kissed Katherine on the cheek. 'Good-bye, Mrs Sinclair.'

She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him to her. 'Spencer,' she whispered to him, her thin hand reaching up and touching his face. She touched his cheeks, his eyes, his lips, his cropped hair; she circled his eyes again and again with her long dry fingers. 'Spencer,' she repeated. 'Promise me something. Promise me,' she said before he had a chance to reply, 'that you will find who killed her.'

Spencer recoiled, but Katherine pulled him back. 'I know somebody murdered her, I know you wouldn't be here unless my baby was murdered. Promise me you will not rest till you find him,' she whispered.

Spencer tried to extricate himself, but she held on to his arm. 'Please, Spencer, promise me.'

'I promise,' he said, sighing, pressing his forehead against her hair. 'I promise.'

While driving back to Hanover, Spencer stopped feeling sorry for himself, stopped lamenting his dead wife. He actually began to consider himself lucky. Compared to a blind woman who had lost everything she ever loved, he was lucky.

In the three-hour trip back to Hanover, Spencer thought, God, I'm just like Katherine, behind a window, in a small room, looking out with unseeing eyes, wondering where my life went wrong, wondering what I ever did to make my life go so wrong.

But I don't want to give up on my life just yet. I don't want to give up on it. There is still a bit of it left, and I'm not blind, and I'm not dead.

CHAPTER NINE.

Red Leaves

Spencer slept poorly in his Hanover Inn bed after a night of drinking. The goose-down quilt was too hot, the pillows were too many, the sheets were too crisp.

In the morning he felt thinner and older when he put on his only suit to go and bury a girl he had known mainly in death.

It was windless, sunny, and bitterly cold out. The snow was iced into the silver ground. The tips of the trees barely moved at Pine Knoll Cemetery on the outskirts of Hanover. Howard had bought a beautiful plot on a raised plateau amid the tallest pines, which stood majestically over Kristina's grave. Spencer thought it was appropriate for her to be buried in a place similar to the one where she had died. Appropriate, yet eerie. Spencer wouldn't want to be her, looking up at the pine trees that she had seen on the edge of death.

About three hundred people turned out for Kristina's memorial service at Rollins Chapel, the Dartmouth College church. There were too many people to fit inside, and many had to stand outside in the cold, just to watch her coffin being carried into the church and then back out. Albert, Jim, Frankie, and Howard were among the six pallbearers. The ornate coffin was black lacquered oak with brass handles. Howard had spent a lot of money to have Kristina buried in style.

A gaunt and restrained Jim Shaw eulogized Kristina. He looked somber but didn't cry. His voice did not break. After he was done, he sat far away from Albert and Frankie.

Then the vice captain of the Big Green women's basketball team stood up and lifting her hand high up in the air, said that Dartmouth basketball would never be the same without Kristina's hair in her opponents' faces. That Dartmouth basketball would never be the same without Kristina.

The women from Red Leaves tried to speak but were too emotionally overcome, except for a girl named Evelyn, who lumbered up to the altar with her twin infant sons, showed them to the coffin, and wailed, 'Krissy, they let me keep my babies. Thank you. They let me keep them.' Sobbing, she was led away by her father.

Albert wore a dark suit, with a dark shirt and tie. His hair was tied back with a shiny black ribbon. Black sunglasses adorned his face. He didn't get up to speak, and what must have seemed odd to everyone else felt right to Spencer.

He wanted to talk to Albert.

Spencer's mouth went dry. He didn't care about propriety anymore. There was a young girl held in custody, awaiting a trial for her life, and there was another girl dead because this man had consumed them both, this orphan who, with his orphaned heart, had ruined a whole family. What was Spencer to do? He didn't know. But he had promised Katherine Sinclair he would do something.

The burial service at Pine Knoll was slow and less well attended. About a hundred and fifty people, including Spencer, Will, and Chief Gallagher.