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angry, yes I am. She had no right to do this to me.”
    At least one thing was clear to Tim Underhill as he watched his brother chewing an ice cube from the bottom of his empty glass: Philip was going to be of no use at all.
    “What’s our schedule?” he asked.
    “For tonight?”
    “For everything.”
    “We go to the Trott Brothers Funeral Home from six to seven for the viewing, or the visitation, or whatever it’s called. The funeral is at one tomorrow afternoon, out at Sunnyside.” Sunnyside, a large cemetery on the Far West Side of the city, was still segregated into separate areas for Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. There were no African-Americans in Sunnyside. When you drove past it on the expressway, it went on for mile after mile of flat green earth and headstones in long rows.
    “Philip,” Tim said, “I don’t even know how Nancy died. If it isn’t too painful for you, could you tell me about it?”
    “Oh, boy. I guess you
wouldn’t
know, would you? It’s not exactly public information, thanks be to God. Well, well. Yes. I can tell you how she did it. You’ve earned it, haven’t you? Coming out here all the way from New York City. All right, you want to know what someone does when she’s going to kill herself and really wants to make sure there are no ifs, ands, or buts about it? If she wants to hit that nail right square on the head? What she does is, she basically kills herself three different ways, all at the same time.”
    He tried to grin. The attempt was a hideous failure. “I had this bottle of sleeping pills left over from a couple of years ago. Not long after I left for work that morning, Nancy swallowed most of the pills—twenty of them, more or less. Then she ran a nice hot tub. She put a plastic bag over her head and fastened it around her neck. After that, she got in the tub and picked up a knife and cut open both of her forearms. Lengthwise, not those pussy sideways cuts people make when they’re faking it. She was serious, I’ll say that for her.”
    The bass notes booming through the ceiling wavered in the air like butterflies.
    Through the windows came the sound of cicadas, but Superior Street had never seen a cicada. Something else, Tim thought—what?
    Overhead, a door slammed. Two pairs of footsteps moved toward the top of the staircase.
    “Enter the son and heir, accompanied by el sidekick-o faithful-o.”
    Tim looked toward the staircase and saw descending the steps a pair of legs in baggy blue jeans, closely followed by its twin. A hand slid lightly down the railing; another hand shadowed it. Loose yellow sleeves, then loose navy sleeves. Then Mark Underhill’s face moved into view, all eyebrows, cheekbones, and decisive mouth; just above it floated Jimbo Monaghan’s round face, struggling for neutrality.
    Mark kept his gaze downward until he reached the bottom of the staircase and had walked two steps forward. Then he raised his eyes to meet Tim’s. In those eyes Tim saw a complex mixture of curiousity, anger, and secrecy. The boy was hiding something from his father, and he would continue to hide it; Tim wondered what would happen if he managed to get Mark into a private conversation.
    No guile on Jimbo’s part—he stared at Tim from the moment his face became visible.
    “Looky here, it’s Uncle Tim,” Philip said. “Tim—you know Mark, and his best buddy-roo, Jimbo Monaghan.”
    Reverting to an earlier stage of adolescence, the boys shuffled forward and muttered their greetings. Tim sent his brother a silent curse; now both boys felt insulted or mocked, and it would take Mark that much longer to open up.
    He knows more than Philip about his mother’s suicide,
Tim thought. The boy glanced at him again, and Tim saw some locked-up knowledge surface in his eyes, then retreat.
    “This guy look familiar to you, Tim?” Philip asked him.
    “Yes, he does,” Tim said. “Mark, I saw you from my window at the Pforzheimer early this afternoon. You and your friend