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someone, but that could be important? I mean . . . ” He’d struggled. “If someone had a piece of information that was . . . something else about a person, some important
thing
that you didn’t know before, and they could tell you—would you want to know?”
    “I’m not sure I know what you’re asking,” she’d said. “It would depend on what the information was. Do you want to tell me anything more?”
    She’d had the sense that her answer was very important to him and had felt somehow that she had let him down by not figuring out what he wanted. She had watched as he’d wrestled with something, staring at her with his strange, changing blue eyes. But in the end, he had just shaken his head.
    They had sat there on the floor of her office, staring at each other awkwardly, and she had felt an urge to embrace him.
    So she had gotten up, a little too quickly, and had said that theyshould get downstairs before someone towed the car. The next day, in class, she had been concerned about how he would act. Would he assume an intimacy that would make things awkward? But no, he had behaved perfectly, giving her a conspiratorial grin when he came into the lecture room, but treating her exactly as before.
     
    And now he was dead. It had seemed impossible, when Quinn had told her, to believe that he was no longer alive. It was just as Brad had said—she couldn’t accept that he wasn’t
somewhere
.
    Quinn had been embarrassed by her tears, handing her a tissue from a box on a side table. He hadn’t given her any more details about how Brad had died, and he’d reminded her not to talk about the jewelry to anyone and had said that they would be in touch tomorrow. “We may need your help in talking to the family about where the jewelry came from,” he’d said. As she’d gone, he’d said kindly, “I’m sorry you had to find out about it this way. If we had known you knew him, we wouldn’t have let it happen like this.”
    She took Mass. Ave. toward Somerville and Davis Square. It was almost six when she pulled onto Russell Street, the Victorians lining the street shadowy and spooky in the low light, the dusk descending in a cloud of spring-scented mist.
    Toby, wearing a raincoat, the hood pulled over his head, was waiting for her on the sidewalk. She had called him from her cell phone to tell him about Brad and he had promised company and dinner—Chinese she saw from the logo on the bag he carried.
    The gods smiled and she found parking right out front and in a few seconds she was enfolded in a hug and the scent of
kung pao
chicken and dumplings. “You okay?” Toby asked, watching her face. He had been her best friend since college, had been with her through three deaths—no, four, she realized—in a little more than a year. This was the fifth.
    Sweeney led him upstairs.
    “Jesus,” she said, collapsing onto the couch and leaning backagainst the cushions. The moist blur of the headlights on the way home had given her a headache and now her head was pounding. “I feel like someone mugged me.” The apartment, clean and freshly painted, the walls covered with photographs of gravestones and monuments, the black-and-cream color scheme pleasingly simple, usually made her feel better.
    “I did some asking around after you called,” Toby said. “Want to hear what I found out?”
    “Yeah, hold on a second.” She got up to pour them both a scotch—neat for her, on the rocks for him—took off her coat and lay back on the couch again. Toby’s hair had gotten mashed down by the hood of his jacket and he looked slightly mad, his black eyes wide behind his glasses, his curly dark hair pressed into an odd sort of cap. They had known each other for ten years now and the sight of him still filled her with pleasure.
    “Well, I called a couple of kids in Brad’s class who I knew from that play I directed last year.”
    Toby, who had been a thespian during his undergraduate years, had directed a student production