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didn’t recognize.
    His smile was gentle, his eyes suddenly sad. “We’ll talk later.”
    I didn’t know what to say. “I . . .”
    The governor turned toward the clay head. Didi began to close the door.
    “Didi, can’t we just tell the governor that—”
    She shook her head. “Please, later.” She closed the door, and I heard the snick of the lock.
    I hesitated, then walked to my former office, the one Gert had proudly decorated in pink and green and yellow—thecolors of spring, as if that could banish Massachusetts’s dour winters.
    She answered my knock with, “Come in.” I found her awash in a sea of paperwork.
    “Horrible, isn’t it?” I followed Penny to the sofa. “All that paperwork.”
    She blew a pink Bazooka bubble. “I kinda like it.”
    “What?”
    “Yeah. It’s contained, y’know. Ya finish a stack and you feel you’ve done something. Ya can see it.”
    I got it, but . . . “You’re such a people person, Gert.”
    She nodded. “Don’t tell, but I get sad.”
    I knew just what she meant. “Mind if I make a call?”
    She pointed to the phone. “You know the routine.”
    I did, and soon I had an outside line. I dialed Delphine’s gallery on the Vineyard. No one picked up, not even the machine. Disturbing. The woman was a sharp businessperson. Someone
always
answered her phone during business hours.
    “Back in a sec.” I crossed the hall to MGAP’s central office, waved at Donna, a longtime employee, and sat behind one of the workstations. As soon as I logged on, I found Delphine’s Vineyard gallery and the hours it was open.
    The elegant Web site told me I could call now and get knowledgeable help. Well, dammit, where was that help? Where was Zoe? The phone rang and rang and rang.
    I rubbed the pendant I’d purchased from Delphine the last time I’d visited her shop. The carved frog was set in silver on a long silver chain. The frog was nutria jasper with azurite by a Zuni master carver named Ricky Laahty. He’d mined the stone himself. It was smooth and warm beneath my fingers as I rubbed and rubbed.
    I didn’t care if it sounded crazy or made no sense, Delphine was dead. Her skull, here. I felt it in my bones.
    I felt compelled to wait until the cleansing ceremony was complete, so I called up to Addy to see if she was free for lunch. She wasn’t, and so I wandered down the hall and across the lobby to CSS to find Kranak. He’d been his usual ballsy self with the Geographic guys. Made me chuckle.
    I peeked around the corner. “Rob?”
    He hadn’t heard me because he and that new lab tech—what was her name?—were eating subs. Looked like the subs were from my favorite place in the North End. Bite for bite, the tech matched Kranak’s gusto. They were laughing at something. I wondered what.
    I backed away, right into the officer on duty at the desk.
    “Ma’am?” he said.
    I smiled, but felt a wistful sadness creep up from my belly. The officer didn’t know me, nor I him.
    There was a time when I had known
everyone
at The Grief Shop.
    “Ma’am?” he repeated.
    “Sorry,” I said. “The fellow I was looking for isn’t here.”
    I guessed I wouldn’t wait after all.
    That night I ate with my old pal Shaye at Antico Forno on Salem Street in the North End. It was far away from touristy Hanover Street on a narrow street reminiscent of Europe, which is why I liked the setting so much. The food was pretty fabulous, too.
    Shaye was a shepherd to homeless women, and I respected her greatly. But we argued, as usual.
    “The tribe should get their skull back,” she said.
    I zipped my trap as the waiter delivered my steaming plate of
frutti di mare
, then I stabbed a piece of calamari onto my fork. “You can’t say that.”
    “Sure I can.” She swished her bread around the herbed oil and chomped down. “It’s easy.”
    “We don’t even know if the skull is an American Indian ancestor.”
    Shaye smirked. “Right. It’s a fucking white guy from Spain or