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wasn’t. The closest he came and the one time she caught a thought about Mary, it was a fleeting, She’s coming. I should clean the sink later. She’ll be going to bed in an hour . He stopped cleaning the sink, but the next morning, Linda saw it was clean.
                  Linda’s thoughts were interrupted by John saying, “I haven’t said enough now. I should be asking how you are doing and saying kind words about your father.”
                  “Why?” she said with genuine surprise. “You don’t remember him, do you?”
                  “No.”
                  “And you know how I’m doing.”
                  “What makes you say that?”
                  “You read people, me better than most,” Linda explained.
                  “But I should ask how you’re feeling to give you a chance to express it,” John said.
                  “I’m sort of on hold, not really believing, not disbelieving. I go back and forth between reaching for hope and trying to grieve. I believe he’s dead, because common sense says so. I believe he’s alive because I can’t believe he’s dead. He’s my father, damn it, and he may have been too busy to spend much time with me, but I love him and I can’t give him up because someone said a plane crashed.” She realized her voice was becoming almost hysterical, but she shouldn’t have to tell John this. He understood, he always understood. She was a bit ashamed of her outburst. “Is that what you wanted?”
                  “I understand,” he said.
                  “You understood before I said anything,” Linda said.
    ***
                  “You’re always acting.” John remembered Linda’s words that evening and tried to make sense of them. It confirmed Arthur’s message and what he was discovering about himself. In a way, it also confirmed his thoughts earlier when he wondered if he were an actor or a salesman. Apparently he was both, selling the image he acted, to everyone but Arthur. He also sold himself as a source of knowledge about psychiatry without actually giving direct information. Why not just tell people and why couldn’t he be himself with others? Who was “ himself ?” 
                  Linda obviously wasn’t completely sold on his image, but he didn’t know if anyone else guessed, well, whatever he didn’t know about himself. He felt he had a real connection with Linda: parental, not sexual. On the other hand, her brother Tom, who recently drove from medical school, quickly forgot that John lost his memory and dropped into the familiar relationship. There was no uncertainty on Tom’s part. Why was Linda different?
                  Whatever the answer was, he felt more comfortable asking her about her mother. Natalie Saunders was a stay-at-home mother who inexplicably disappeared. The only clue was a broken lamp and an un locked front door. Arthur was on a plane to a physics conference and the children were at school. Arthur was suspected, of course, because the husband was always suspected and he could have hired someone , making his alibi meaningless . He opened up his finances to the authorities, and if anyone was hired, it was hard to figure out where the money came from. Natalie took care of the family’s money and kept meticulous records. She was an accountant when Arthur met her. Arthur spent very little money and could hardly have squirreled away very much from the pocket money he carried. He didn’t even buy lunch because Natalie packed lunches for him.
                  Of course, other scenarios were considered, but no one who knew Arthur Saunders considered him dangerous. He enjoyed exercising, but it was obviously to stay in shape, not to become a fighter, in spite of an occasional self-defense class. He was small and wiry and, by all accounts, a very gentle