"But if you have her now, you're not missing anything," Angie said, feeling empty inside and alone.

"Not true. I'm still missing you. She's a stopgap measure, not a cure. She can't hold a candle to you, but, damn it," he said with a renewal of the anger that had spewed earlier, "I can't spend the rest of my life competing for your attention and coming in last." That said, he pushed away from the counter, went out the back door, and disappeared into the night, leaving Angie with the scattered shreds of her life.

Peter spent an hour searching through reams of negatives, looking for just the right one.

He put that one into a carrier, put the carrier into the enlarger, and adjusted the enlarger head for the print size he wanted. He made a test exposure, slipped the print into each of the developing solutions in turn, then turned on the light and examined the print. Back in the dark, he made a second, darker print, then a third one with higher contrast. With succeeding prints he focused on detail.

He made no less than a dozen prints before he was satisfied. Then he returned to the reams of negatives, selected a second one, and started the process all over again.

It was well past midnight before he emptied out the solutions and left the darkroom, and by then he was too tired to do much of anything but fall into He was up at seven the next morning, back in the darkroom, examining the prints he had left to dry but what had looked good to him the night before no longer seemed adequate. So he hastily gathered what he'd done, crammed the prints into the trash can, and vowed to do better that night.

His frustration followed him to the office, where the first of the morning's drop-ins were waiting. On the theory that the more he worked, the less he would think, he saw patients straight through until ten-thirty, when he stopped for a cup of coffee. That was when Paige cornered him.

Paige DREW THE PAISLEY SUSPENDERS FROM the pocket of her lab coat. She held them forth and watched Peter's face. Though his expression didn't change, he lost enough color to answer the question she hadn't asked.

ill found them in Mara's night table," she said. "It seemed an odd place for them to be."

"I'll say." He cracked his knuckles. "In Mara's night table?

Interesting."

"You didn't know they were there?"

"If I had, I'd have taken them back. They're my favorite ones. I thought I'd lost them at the health club. Thanks." He took the suspenders from her hand and stuffed them into his pocket. "Why were you looking in Mara's night table?"

It was a fair question. Theoretically, Mara's death could be explained away by Valium, fatigue, and a mistimed telephone call. But Paige wasn't satisfied. The more she learned, the more of a mystery Mara becameand the mystery nagged. Paige was driven to learn more. Mara, in death, had become her personal responsibility.

"I was sitting on her bed, trying to get a better understanding of what had happened," she said "Bureaus can be enlightening. Night tables, too. So i opened the drawer to see what was inside. Why do you suppose these were there?"

He took a gulp of coffee, grimaced, added another spoonful of creamer, and stirred. "she liked them, I "So did you. You used to wear them all the time How did she get them?"

"She was at my house a lot. She must have taken "Without your knowing?"

"She had free run of the place. I didn't follow her around keeping track of what she touched."

"But why would she take your suspenders and then hide them in her night table drawer?"

He drank his coffee "Peter?"

He looked at her. "Because, damn it, Mara had a thing for me. Come on, Paige. You knew that."

Paige hadn't known any such thing. She made a face that told him so.

"Well, she did," he insisted.

"You were friends. You did things together sometimes. What do you mean, she had a thing' for "She liked me. She was obsessed with me."

Paige shook her head. "Obsessed? Forget it.

Mara wasn't obsessed with you. I would have known."

"Like you knew about the Valium? Like you knew the little girl was en route from Bombay?

Face it Paige. Mara kept secrets. She was a little crazy that way."

He paused, then asked the question she had been grappling with most of the night, "Why did you think they were there?" ill thought," Paige began, but the truth was that despite all the grappling she hadn't known what to think. "I thought that maybe you had spent the night once and left them there."

"Why on earth would I have spent the night?

Mara was enough for me to handle in the daytime. Why would I buy into trouble at night?"

"Because you liked her."

"Sure, to pal around with sometimes, but being with Mara for any length of time was like having a pebble in your shoe. So why would I have spent the night at her house?"

"Because you liked her." "I did not."

"Sure you did. And she liked you. Okay, you hated each other sometimes, toothe two of you could drive us nuts with your bickeringbut through it all you were friends."

"Friends," he insisted. "Not lovers. What ever gave you the idea we were lovers? It's a preposterous thought."

Paige hadn't said they were lovers. Not once had she used that word.

She had imagined that Mara and Peter might have been out late doing something, or in late doing something, then fallen asleep. A pair of suspenders might easily have been discarded for comfort's sake, then left behind. Sure, the placement of them was odd, but it wasn't beyond the pale to imagine that Mara had found them lying around and stuffed them anywhere just to put them out of sight.

No, Paige hadn't said they were lovers. It was interesting that Peter had mentioned the word.

"Hi," Angie said, joining them with a fast look at each before turning to the coffee machine. "Am l interrupting something?"

Peter moved aside. "Nothing I can think of."

"Why do I sense you were talking about Mara?"

She poured herself a cup.

"Maybe," Paige answered, "because she's still front and center in our minds. Want to know what I learned yesterday afternoon?" She told them about the talk she'd had with the Air India supervisor Angie gasped. "Poor Mara! That might have done it. She wanted a baby so badly. If she believed that after everything she'd gone through, Sameera's plane had crashed, she might have been distraught."

But Peter was shaking his head. "She's lost patients without going over the edge, and she knew those children. She didn't know Sameera."

"But Sami was going to be her daughter," Angie pointed out, "and there's a difference.

If you had children of your own, Peter, you'd know. When it comes to parenthood the emotional involvement is far greater. Mara had her heart set on adopting that Paige wasn't a parent any more than Peter was yet she agreed. "She saw adopting Sami as her best shot at motherhood."

"That's what I don't understand," Peter argued. Why was it so important to her?"

"Time, perhaps. She was thirty-nine. She heard the old clock ticking away."

"You're the same age. Are you getting desperate?"