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inspecting. One nuzzled my foot. In the space of seconds, they all changed places in a macabre, swift game of musical chairs. Then they all ran from the kitchen as if they had sensed the ghost of Harry Starobin in the eggs. It was very sad. The cats seemed lost.
    “God, I’m tired,” Jo said, and then she broke into tears, choked them back, and stood up. “It’s doing all those stupid things around the barn. I find it very, very hard. I hadn’t mucked out a stall in ten years.”
    “What about Ginger?”
    “Oh,” she said with an airy flip of her whisk, which she had not relinquished after scrambling the eggs, “she left two days ago.”
    “Left? Where did she go?”
    “I don’t know. How should I know? She quit.”
    This was totally unexpected. I had thought the girl would stay on, if only to assuage some of her guilt for being Harry’s lover.
    “Did she say why?”
    Jo started to butter a pan, making a lot of clanking noises at the enormous black range. I could see that she had put much too much butter into the pan.
    “She didn’t say why,” Jo replied, gazing thoughtfully into the melting butter, “but I know why. She was sad. Harry was like a father to her. And she was sad about the calico barn cat, about Veronica. That’s stupid, though. Barn cats always vanish—sometimes for months. Especially when they have kittens. Veronica is probably living with some neighbor down the road now, quite happy, and one day she’ll just meander back. I told her what Harry used to say—that cats can predict earthquakes and other natural disasters long before they happen. And they vanish. I told Ginger that maybe Veronica knew that Harry was going to be murdered so she ran away with her kittens. But Ginger wouldn’t stay.”
    Jo poured the eggs into the sizzling butter and leaned over the pan, her tiny frame dwarfed by the gigantic apron.
    I would have to tell her that Ginger was Harry’s lover, I realized. Of course, I had no proof of it, only very circumstantial evidence—desperate weeping in seclusion. But Jo and I could go nowhere unless at the outset we were totally honest, unless even informed intuition was honored. What was the point of any other approach?
    She finished the eggs triumphantly and shoveled them onto the plates. Then she stepped back and shook her head. She had been so engaged with the eggs that she had forgotten everything else—bread, coffee, juice. Clumsily she covered the eggs on the plates and proceeded to make the remains of the meal. I should have helped, but I didn’t. My mind was on how to approach the matter of Ginger and Harry Starobin.
    Finally we ate, amidst the clutter, the eggs cold, the coffee weak, the bread stale.
    When we were finished, Jo heaved a great sigh, as if she could not handle such an assignment again for a long while.
    “Jo,” I said, moving my chair closer to her, “I want to tell you something, but I don’t really know how to go about it. I don’t want to . . .” I stopped, at a loss for words.
    “Then just tell me. I’m too old for nonsense, Alice. Don’t you know that?”
    I started to pile the plates, moving the condiments, gathering the dregs. “I think Ginger was having an affair with Harry.”
    “You think?”
    “Yes. I think so.”
    “What do you want me to say?”
    “What you know.”
    “I knew nothing of that,” she said quickly, and began to clear the table.
    “Jo, please, tell me what you know.”
    “Listen, Alice,” she said, leaning against the sink, undoing the leather apron, “Harry was a very strange and wonderful man. He had many enthusiasms. Sudden enthusiasms. He would suddenly take a fancy to a person or an animal or a house—anything—and he would give that person or thing his total attention. He would do anything for people. A lot of people loved him. He loved a lot of people. But that Harry and the girl were sleeping together . . . well, no, I don’t think so.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because,” she said,