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nothing in his expression or manner to show that his experiences in Vietnam had driven him to the psychiatric wing of a VA hospital for three years. He seemed now to be simply an open, cheerful, amiable young man, in fact younger than the thirty I knew him to be.
    “The question is,” he said, leaning closer to me and talking softly, “how are you doing?”
    “We probably shouldn’t look furtive,” I suggested, “since we’re supposed to have just met.”
    “Oh.” He sat back, looking confused and guilty, which was no better.
    “Here comes your soup,” I said. “I was hoping to have a talk with you and Doctor Cameron after lunch anyway.”
    “Oh, good.” He sat back to let Walter Stoddard put down his soup. “Chicken noodle? Great.”
    “And swordfish,” Stoddard told him. He looked at me. “Are you ready for yours?”
    “I’ll wait for Mr. Gale,” I said.
    “Bob,” he said. “Call me Bob.”
    Stoddard went away, and I said to Gale, “I have the uncomfortable feeling you’re treating this like some sort of counterspy adventure.”
    He recoiled as though I’d slapped his face, which was approximately the reaction I’d been hoping for. “I didn’t mean to,” he said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Tobin, I didn’t—”
    “I know you didn’t,” I said, willing to take him off the hook now that he’d learned the lesson. “You just have to be more careful not to act quite so elaborately innocent and conspiratorial. Unless you’re already known as an outgoing and extroverted personality, sitting at this table was itself a mistake. Trying to talk to me about what I’m doing here was a second mistake in such a public place, and being so obviously furtive about it was a third. We’re just having a conversation, you and I, the sort of chat two people might have who have just met. There’s nothing to look secretive about.”
    “You’re right,” he said, but of course he couldn’t avoid looking crestfallen, another out of place expression. Happily, no one seemed to be paying much attention to us. “I am sorry,” he said.
    “And if I’m going to call you Bob,” I said, trying to relax him, “you’ll have to call me Mitch. All right?”
    A happy smile spread over his features. At last, a non-suspect expression. “Sure it’s all right,” he said. “Mitch.” And insisted on shaking hands, which I resigned myself to putting up with, extending my left hand across my body for him to grasp awkwardly and pump with his right.
    Stoddard brought us our swordfish a minute later, and it too was very good. The fork was even more confusing left-handed than the spoon had been, but I managed.
    While we ate, I asked Gale to fill me in on the quartet I didn’t know, the four women at the table across the way. I had to warn him against sneaking sly glances in that direction, but after that he settled down and gave me their names.
    And it turned out I was at last in the presence of two of the injurer’s victims. The woman facing me was Rose Ackerson, and the one on the left was Molly Schweitzler, they being the two women who’d been bruised and burned when a table in this room had collapsed on them during a meal, the first of the faked accidents.
    Though I already knew the histories of both women, and they were hardly among the suspects anyway, I allowed Bob Gale to tell me the blend of fact and fancy he knew about their backgrounds. Rose Ackerson, a woman in her late fifties, had been three years a widow when suddenly she’d kidnapped an infant from a baby carriage outside a drugstore. She had cared for it well, had made no attempt to get any ransom, and when caught she had tried to claim it as her own child. She’d spent the last four years in a state mental institution.
    Molly Schweitzler, a plump woman of forty-three who looked like a somewhat overly solemn earth mother, had never been married. She currently weighed less than at any time since the age of fourteen. Her family had had her under psychiatric