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think I hear people whispering—”
    “Whispering words of the dead,” I said. “And I wonder what they’re saying to each other.”
    “How about what they’re saying about us, ” Wade amended. He crossed his legs at the ankles and looked at me appraisingly. “Okay, so what did Anthony want from you two?”
    I shook my head. “Not supposed to tell anybody.”
    “You don’t think Paul’s going to blab as soon as I get home?”
    “So let him break the confidence.”
    “You’re being ridiculous. I’m going to know by nightfall so you might as well just spill it now.”
    He was right. And so I explained that Anthony had just become an unofficial psychiatric consult for the serial murders.
    “So that must mean Doc McCarthy is officially gaga.”
    “Apparently so.” And then, knowing that he’d soon hear it from Paul, I relayed the gist of the breakfast conversation: that, according to Anthony, the potter, Marjorie Poole, was drunk and high when she was assaulted, and a religious pamphlet was stuffed into her pocket as well as in the pocket of Angela Parker.
    Wade bunched up his lips so that one side of his flimsy mustache touched the tip of his nose. “But how was that kept out of the newspaper?”
    I told him what a journalist knows: that investigators filter what goes public; presumably, the killer will be out there reading whatever is written and published. That there are details they don’t want him to know they know.
    “So now they think this guy is some religious freak?” Wade was incredulous. “Anybody buying that?”
    “Not yet.”
    “How about you?”
    “Me? What do I know to think?”
    Through the closed doors we could make out John Dutton’s mellifluous droning of the names of people who, by all accounts, had finer handwriting and more hours of the day to devote to the inscription of ledgers with painstaking, calligraphic flourishes, when families tended to settle in one home and stay put for the rest of their lives and even when death itself didn’t seem like such an anomaly.
    Wade remarked, “In this day and age you’d figure they could get some of his DNA off of Marjorie or Angela or any of the others.”
    “He wears gloves, Wade.”
    “Still … something … hair or fibers.” He paused for a moment. “Catherine, it amazes me we had no idea somebody drove up our road and dumped a body.”
    Even though he appeared concerned, he sounded oddly flat and dispassionate, and I took dutiful note of this. “We’re hardly clairvoyants,” I told him.
    “No, we’re certainly not. And that’s why I called you. Because there is something else going on that I think you should know.”
    “Shoot,” I said.
    “I was fixing a leak in the greenhouse over the weekend. I saw Emily Waite driving down the road like a bat out of hell. Bouncing over potholes.”
    “She’s usually such a careful driver,” I noted.
    “Well, obviously in a state. When she glanced at me, she looked, pardon the expression, dead,” Wade said, pausing for effect. “Then five minutes later I saw Fiona, Fiona Pierce, driving up the hill in her Volkswagen Beetle.”
    “And?”
    “That’s the third time I’ve seen Emily leaving and Fiona arriving,” Wade said with no inflection in his voice.
    Fiona was one of my fellow volunteers at the prison. “Maybe she knows one of the weekend people,” I made myself say, even though I sensed where he was heading.
    “I also saw them early in the winter, Anthony and Fiona walking in the snow at the tree line way behind Paul’s house—Emily and the girls weren’t home.”
    “How come you never told me then ?”
    “Because then I didn’t know for sure what was going on.” Wade leaned back in his swivel chair. “And because I knew it would bug you.”
    “So you just wait until I find somebody murdered and then tell me?”
    “Hey, I can’t help … the timing of certain things.”
    “Okay, let’s go slow. So they were walking out in the open?”
    “Yes,