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you don’t speak up. That’s a lurker.
    “Anyway, we’ve had these sort of self-surveys online, but they don’t really mean anything because the lurkers so far outnumber the posters. On the TOWN, I think it’s about eight to one.”
    “Well, of the posters—or at least those who respond to the surveys—what are most people like?’
    “For openers, they’re all ages. Lots and lots of them are in computer-related jobs, of course. But we’ve got a fair number of writers and actors—we’re near L.A., so I guess you’d expect it.”
    “No dearth of doctors, I noticed.”
    “I think one of them is even a forensic pathologist. Yeah, we’ve got just about everything you can name. I’ll tell you one thing—we have a reputation for being one of the least nerdy bulletin boards.”
    “Did you say something about private conferences?”
    “Yes, anyone can start one. The most popular ones are the Men’s, Women’s, Gays, and Recovery, but we have lots that have just two or three people in them.”
    “Can I find out if Geoff was in any of them?”
    “I’ll talk to the…”
    “… legal eagles. You do that thingie.”
    Another dead end. Disgusted, she packed up and went home.
    There were other things she could have done; she felt a little odd about giving up so easily the first day of a big case, but the truth was, she was feeling overwhelmed by this one. She needed a good night’s sleep to get her mind in cyberspace.
    She had painted her new apartment melon, like the one she had left, in the Big House. As its former tenant, Jimmy Dee, had had it a deep, masculine aubergine, that hadn’t been easy, but it had been worth it. Melon walls, white trim, gauzy curtains, and French doors made a cool, light, airy, happy place, though she could have done without the cool and the air at the moment. She had a beautiful blue-and-white Chinese lamp that stood on an antique table, a shiny, dark wood coffee table, her almost-new gray-and-white-striped sofa, and very little else, except for her cherished Marcia Mandeville painting and a new bed, since she now had a bedroom. In the smaller apartment, she’d just used the fold-out sofa. Next she was going to need a set of fireplace tools, that was obvious. Even with the wide open spaces caused by an unconcealable dearth of furniture, she would have been perfectly happy here if she hadn’t had to wear three sweaters.
    Of course, she could always go over to the Big House.
    She’d been doing that a lot lately, and it had only just turned cold. Jimmy Dee had said he needed her, that’s why he’d given her the garconniere so cheap, and why she’d accepted. That and the fact that it was an offer no one in her right mind would dream of refusing. It was one of the best apartments in the French Quarter.
    But now she was developing a strange uneasiness about intruding in the Scoggin-Ritter family. The kids had been without a father quite a while before their mother died; and they’d never really known their Uncle Jimmy Dee very well. They weren’t used to men; she didn’t know if they knew he was gay, but she was damned sure they weren’t used to gay men. So they clung to her. Which made Jimmy Dee look sad, even though he knew she was the bridge between himself and them; that he’d been right in more than one way when he said he needed her. And it made her feel slightly panicky—panicky because, much as they weren’t used to men, she wasn’t used to kids. She didn’t know how to replace their mother, which was apparently what they wanted her to do. And she knew it wouldn’t solve anything—Jimmy Dee had to be their main parent, no matter how painful it was for everybody.
    So instead of Jimmy Dee, she called Steve Steinman, her California beau: “Something weird’s happening.”
    “What? In the weird capital of the world? Stop boring me.”
    “No, really. This is one for the books. I got this murder case—I mean, a coroner’s case that looked like murder. I went out to