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family, I judged, wasn’t all that rich, because she had supported herself with odd jobs in Hollywood. “Checker in a supermarket. Travel agent. I even drove a cab for a while,” she said. “I had my little trust fund, but I didn’t want to touch it until I had to. But now …”
    She paused, with a forkful of shrimp halfway to her mouth, looking out at the sea. She finished uncertainly, “Now I feel as if I have to. Do you think I’m a nut?”
    I reassured her. “You can’t be a nut, because Marlene doesn’t think you are.”
    So then I had to tell her all about Marlene, and my business, and why I was an accountant rather than a lead baritone at the Met, although I didn’t tell her all of that. I couldn’t tell her all of that. She was too pretty and too nice, and maybe a little bit too sad, and I didn’t want to discuss mumps with her. So I jumped ahead to Woody Calderon.
    And so we came to Henry Davidson-Jones.
    She told me her story. Tricia had come out to Hollywood, too, hoping to convert baton-twirling into at least an occasional walk-on in a bikini. Never got off the ground. Went back to Beaumont to start over; but meanwhile the two cousins had picked up again, and when Irene decided she wasn’t going to get discovered in Hollywood, being then thirty-one while the maximum discovery age was about twenty-two, she went back to Beaumont herself.
    Tricia was all excited. She’d had this wonderful offer. She called Irene one evening to tell her about Mr. Henry Davidson-Jones and his promises of half a million tax-free dollars spread over a period of four years, and Irene had wished her well and got down to the serious business of washing her hair.
    “And about five o’clock that morning,” Irene told me, “the phone rang again. It was the Port Arthur police. They said Tricia had been in a car accident. She was dead.”
    I felt a chill grazing the center of my spine. “And the car went into the water and they never recovered the body,” I guessed.
    “Oh, no, it wasn’t that way. They had her body in the morgue, and I identified it.”
    She looked like crying for a moment—I mean, not as though she were going to do it, but as though she’d done too much of it lately. “I was her closest living relative,” she said. “So I told them they could use her organs for anybody who needed them. I called up Henry Davidson-Jones’s office in New York to tell them about it. They didn’t send anybody to the funeral, but they did send the biggest damned wreath of flowers you ever saw—I think. There wasn’t any name on it, but the florist said it came from New York.”
    She finished eating her shrimp. Then she said, “I wonder whose body it was I had cremated.”

 
CHAPTER

6
     
     
    T he sun was shining bright off the Mediterranean, a tour bus was off-loading summery men and women with cameras, at the table next to us four young German boys were arguing over whether Mutti would be angry if they all had another sweet. It was not an ambience for this kind of discussion.
    I nearly choked on the last of my omelette. “But you said—you said you saw her in the morgue!”
    “I thought I did. I saw a young woman who looked as much like Tricia as Tricia would, with her head all mashed and her nose pushed up under her left eye, and all the exposed flesh I could see all bruises and gashes. I did make an official identification for the police. She was driving Tricia’s car and wearing Tricia’s clothes and carrying Tricia’s pocketbook. That was six months ago, Nolly. I really did think it was Tricia. Wouldn’t you?”
    I was almost as exasperated as upset. “Come on, don’t ask rhetorical questions. You changed your mind, right? Why?”
    She said, “I was putting away all her papers. And some papers I saved about her. I couldn’t even look at them for months. But I saved everything, and then I decided to bundle it all up and do something with it—maybe bum it; maybe send the whole batch off to some