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spaghetti before us, on the kitchen table.
    The teenage Fortimiglio sneezed, dug a handkerchief from his pocket, blew his nose, and then enthusiastically attacked his spaghetti. Aside from his sneezing, he seemed to be even quieter than his grandfather.
    Rosa touched Chris’s arm. “Tell Vejay about the canoe trip,” she said.
    Chris laughed again. This time no one looked surprised. “Frank decided, for old times’ sake, we would take a boat trip. We’d paddle a canoe from the inlet up to town. It was a good time of the year for that. The river was calm, the water was low. So I said, fine. I got a canoe from a friend of Pop’s by the inlet.…”
    “I didn’t know they had canoes there,” I said.
    “They’re not for rental. This guy just loaned it to us, right, Pop?”
    Carlo nodded as he twirled the spaghetti against his spoon.
    “So, Frank and I paddled up river. This time he was sick. I mean, we had to stop for him to throw up. But he insisted on paddling all the way to the far side of town. He said he promised himself he could do it, and he didn’t want to welsh on himself.”
    “But he didn’t take the canoe back, did he, Chris?” Rosa laughed.
    “No. He offered, sort of. But he was real glad when I said I could do it alone.”
    “Why did Frank decide to move here?” The spaghetti slipped off my fork. I considered cutting it, but decided against it. I started to wind again.
    Chris looked momentarily confused. “Oh, you did ask that, didn’t you? I hadn’t seen him for a couple months. He just called and said he was tired of the city and wanted to get away. So—you know Mama—she told me to invite him up. He stayed for a week and he loved it.”
    For Chris there was no need to explain Frank’s reaction. Loving the Russian River was natural.
    “I guess Frank had heard me talk about the river so much when we were on ship—I was pretty homesick then—that he felt like he knew it. I must have talked about the town and everybody here twenty hours a day. Later, even now, I talk about it a lot. I’d told Frank so much that when he first came here he recognized people right off. He never had to ask where anything was.”
    “How did he afford the Place?”
    “He sold all his figurines.”
    “They must have been worth quite a bit.”
    “That’s what the sheriff said. Frank told me he got taken once selling a netsuke, so when he sold the lot he knew what to ask.”
    “The sheriff was here?”
    Chris stuffed a forkful of spaghetti into his mouth, looking toward his mother as he chewed. It was apparent he was passing the conversation to her.
    Rosa put down her fork slowly. “The sheriff—Sheriff Wescott—came by this morning, asking about Frank. There wasn’t much we could tell him.”
    “What did he say?”
    Rosa hesitated. She looked embarrassed. I had never seen Rosa have a second thought about discussing a conversation, particularly one so obviously in the public domain.
    “Did he tell you something about Frank?” I asked.
    “No, no. Nothing we all don’t know. He asked about Frank, and then, Vejay, he asked about you. You and Frank. I told him there was no reason for him to suspect anything there, that he was wasting his time.”
    “Is that all he said? About me, I mean.”
    “Well, no.” Rosa took an unusually long sip of her wine. She put the glass down slowly. “He asked how well we knew you, and we told him. We told him you were a friend, a good friend, that he’d do better to believe you and not spend his time foolishly asking questions about you when he should be looking for Frank’s killer.” Rosa smiled. “He didn’t like being told that.”
    “Thanks,” I said.
    “No need for that,” she said. “I told him if you said you were sick, then you were sick.”
    “Thanks,” I repeated without much enthusiasm. I did appreciate Rosa’s faith in me. But the sheriff wouldn’t. He knew I hadn’t been sick. Now he would think Rosa had no discrimination when it came to