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belongs to a bicycle touring club. They take long rides every Sunday. It’s a family joke, every Sunday Tim runs away from Dad. No phones. It’s how he stays sane.”
    “Do you think that your father’s head trader might know? Carl Savage? Ricky Sullivan said he’d call him and get him to the meeting.”
    “I guess so. This is all so strange,” he burst out suddenly. “I keep expecting to hear his voice calling me from somewhere else in the house. It’s terrifically unreal. When my sister Krissy heard the news she collapsed. They had to sedate her. And yet Mother is upstairs calmly making lists of people to ask back to the house after the funeral. I haven’t even been able to reach my wife, Jane. She took the children up to Wisconsin to visit her parents for the weekend. When I called she’d already left to come back home. I had to leave her a note on the kitchen table, but I didn’t know what to write. She’s eight months’ pregnant. I don’t want her to be alone when she finds out. I don’t want her to hear it on the car radio while she’s driving the kids....” His voice trailed off miserably.
    Suddenly, the door banged open and a young woman burst into the room in a flurry of dark hair and jangling bracelets.
    “Oh God, Barton,” she exclaimed, throwing herself onto him.
    “Margot,” replied her brother. It was more a statement than a greeting.
    Margot Hexter was just a year younger than her brother, but she had an air of immaturity about her that made her seem much younger. She was pretty, in an unusual way, with torrents of curly dark hair and her father’s big brown eyes. She was dressed like the graduate student that she was, in a wrinkled T-shirt with the slogan: ‘Take Back the Night,’ tattered jeans, and a pair of Birkenstock sandals with heavy socks.
    “I can’t believe it!” exclaimed Margot, apparently oblivious to my presence. “When Krissy called to tell me, it was just amazing. Somebody shot him. Isn’t it too much? It’s so incredible. Daddy’s dead. The relief, the freedom. All the clichés are true. A weight has been lifted; I feel ten feet tall. It’s making me dizzy.”
    “Margot!” exclaimed her brother, horrified. “I wish you’d stop saying the first thing that just pops into your head. Especially in front of other people.”
    Margot turned around and peered at me like a child seeing a particularly interesting animal at the zoo.
    “Who are you?” she demanded.
    “Kate Millholland. I was your father's attorney.”
    “So you’re the one who’s going to tell us how much?”
    “Pardon me?”
     “How much money. I thought that’s what lawyers do when somebody rich dies. You know, come to the house and read the will.”
    “I was your father’s corporate counsel,” I replied in what was intended to be a repressive voice. “I represent Hexter Commodities.”
    “Jesus Jones. A corporate lawyer. How dull.” She plopped down on the couch and addressed herself to her brother. “So who do you think murdered dear old Dad?”
    “No one knows what’s happened yet,” answered Barton, sounding genuinely pained. “The police are investigating.”
    “Don’t go all pompous on me,” said Margot. “What’s so terrible? The old monster’s dead, and we get all his money. You know, the only thing I find really shocking is that he was shot. I mean, frankly, I thought for sure they’d find him naked, in bed with sixteen-year-old twins, and with a pair of scissors in his back.”
     

CHAPTER 4
     
    Once Margot had been successfully prevailed upon to go upstairs to see her mother, I turned the currency I'd found in his father’s drawer over to Barton Jr. By anybody’s standards it was a lot of money, especially in cash, but for Barton Jr. it was clearly something more. The bullets that had killed his father had, by plan or accident, changed everything for him. Still reeling from the news, with grief so freshly upon him, he couldn’t see it yet. But events had