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think it was. The car’s still there. You can check.”
    Hastroll would be out the door right now.
    “Then I took a cab to the museum and found Alice inside.”
    “Did you talk to her?”
    “No. I just … followed her.”
    “Why?”
    “I didn’t want to bother her.”
    “And she never noticed you?”
    “No.”
    “What time was this?”
    “Maybe close to ten.”
    “How long did you follow her?”
    “The whole time she was there.”
    “And you never revealed yourself to her?”
    Pepin shook his head.
    “Why?”
    “I told you: I didn’t want to make a scene.” Then he propped his elbow on the table and pressed his hand to his forehead, rubbing it. He smiled sadly. “And it was kind of pleasant.”
    “How’s that?”
    “Haven’t you ever wondered about your wife during the day? What she does when you’re not around? What she looks like doing it?”
    Only married men, Sheppard thought, should be detectives. They’d been to places in their hearts that single men hadn’t. They could imagine following their wives without them knowing—and in fact could imagine even the most terrible things. “How long were you there for?”
    “Until lunch.”
    “Let me get this straight. You were dying to talk with your wife, you’d driven up to the school and back, yet the whole time you were at the museum you didn’t say a thing to her?”
    “If I’d tried, my only chance to talk later would’ve been lost.”
    Sheppard sat back again. “What about after lunch?”
    Pepin closed his eyes, exhaling sharply, then opened them. “We got separated. I lost her.”
    “How?”
    “I went to the bathroom, but when I came back to the dining hall she and the class were gone.”
    “Did you manage to find her again?”
    Pepin shook his head. “I looked for her, but then there was the accident.”
    “What accident?”
    Pepin held his hands up as if it were obvious. “The blue whale,” he said.
    Sheppard remembered now. He’d caught the headline on CNN, the frantic interviews and eyewitness accounts, the fears of a terrorist attack. Still, he didn’t make the connection. The blue whale model had broken away from the ceiling and fallen into the crowd. Amazingly no one was injured, but the museum was immediately evacuated as a precaution. “Were you there when it happened?”
    “I was just coming into the Hall of Ocean Life,” Pepin said, “when there was this huge crash and then white dust everywhere, fiberglass or plaster just billowing all over the place. People were panicked and running everywhere, so I ran out too and looked for Alice outside. But it was madness. The firemen and rescue crews were pushing people back. No one could give me any information, so after a while I decided to go home.”
    “Why would you leave?”
    “It was total chaos. Home seemed like the place to wait.”
    “What time was this?”
    “I don’t remember. I could’ve been there a couple hours. It was three, maybe four.”
    “And once you got to your apartment?” Watching carefully, Sheppard could see him remembering the scene.
    “She was … just sitting at the kitchen table with that plate.” Pepin’s eyes welled up. “She’d gotten there before me somehow and was just sitting there, and then she … ” He shook his head.
    “She didn’t say anything to you?”
    Pepin covered his mouth.
    Sheppard couldn’t help it; he was furious.
    “She just decided—out of the blue, with nothing between the two of you but a disagreement, in fact nothing but an invitation to run away together—to kill herself?”
    But now Pepin was crying. “I can’t talk about this anymore.”

 
    T his deep into the diet—ten weeks in and over thirty pounds lost—Alice’s behavior began to change. It was the same as the onset of her depression, those weeks when she’d decide, without consulting him, to go off her medications, David missing the signs every time. She could be just as erratic, as maddeningly touchy and forgetful, as given