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paying any attention at all to Hack Sr.'s noisy health crisis. They were wrapped up in their conversations about real estate, politics, and golf. It was as if they had signed a secret pact to ignore the old man.
    Hack Sr.'s hacking was getting so explosive I half-expected him to have some kind of seizure. Should I call 911? Get him some whiskey? Or just ease on out of the house and let someone else deal with it?
    Just then a little boy about Derek Jeter's age came into the room. He ran up to the old man and threw his arms around him. "Grandpa," he said.
    The old man's killer coughs gradually subsided, replaced by gasps. Finally even those receded into ordinary breaths. Hack Sr. tenderly ruffled his grandson's hair and held him close.
    Feeling guilty for having brought on this fierce attack, I slipped out of the room. I walked toward the kitchen, which beckoned me with welcoming food smells and the gentleness of women's voices.
    There must have been a good twenty-five women in that kitchen, and I swear to God, every single one of them was holding a casserole dish. Additional casseroles were overflowing the counters, heating up in the oven, and cooling off in the refrigerator. Why is it that when someone dies, all the women who knew him feel compelled to cook casseroles?
    Well, no doubt the widow would be grateful for all that chicken pot pie in the lonely weeks ahead. Speaking of which, where was the widow?
    Maybe right here in the kitchen. I searched the room for a female specimen who looked more stricken with grief, and less preoccupied with casseroles, than the rest.
    But these specimens all looked equally bland. No grief here. I moved on.
    I wandered down a hallway toward the bedrooms. At first I thought they were all deserted, but then I heard voices seeping from behind one of the closed doors. It sounded like they were arguing—quite heatedly, in fact. I put my ear to the door, but was confounded by all the competing noise from the kitchen and living room. On an impulse, I opened the door and walked in.
    All six people in the room immediately shut up and looked my way. There were three frowning middle-aged men sitting beside each other on the edge of the bed, reminding me somehow of the Three Stooges. Standing in front of them were a man and a woman, both in their thirties, and both of them red-faced and angry. Meanwhile a bald man with an ironic expression stood apart from everyone else, leaning against a wall. He tapped his foot impatiently, waiting for me to leave.
    The polite thing would have been to say, "Excuse me," and close the door quietly behind me. But instead I stared back at them, trying to remember where I'd seen them before. In particular, I was trying to place that angry thirty-something man with the square jaw and piercing blue eyes —Pierce, that was his name, Robert Pierce, the state assemblyman from Wilton.
    Pierce was only about five-foot-seven but he was definitely on the rise, a star in local GOP politics, their new fair-haired boy. Everyone had expected him to be chosen as the next congressman when Mo Wilson was laid low. But the party bosses fooled everyone by picking the Hack instead, and Pierce was said to have swallowed his pride and accepted their verdict.
    Now, though, with the Hack out of the way, it looked like Pierce would get his big chance after all. According to the newspapers I'd read that morning at Madeline's, the local Republican big cheeses —the county chairmen of the 22nd District—were about to endorse someone as their official, party-approved write-in candidate. All the pundits were predicting that they would select Pierce, who would of course go on to clobber his opponent, the Jewish liberal suspected murderer, in the election.
    The lone woman in the room broke into my thoughts. "Looking for someone?" she asked, trying to soften her irritation with a hint of a smile.
    She was too waif-like for my tastes, but attractive in an Ally McBealish sort of way. Though she looked