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I understood what she meant because I could barely stand being around myself. I felt like the road of my life had turned into a dead end after all. Worse, an ambush. I stood and took her by the hands. “Let’s not lose each other,” I said. “Go, but don’t go.”

She collapsed against me tearfully. “I’ll go and not go,” she repeated. “Just for a while. If you need me, I’ll be there. I’ll wait for you.” She turned away, wiping away tears, and I already missed her.

We began the sad task of splitting up, however temporarily, sorting through stuff for her and Elsie to take with them for an extended stay at the cottage. I helped Diantha load her big vehicle. It tore at my heart and almost made me relent, to watch her and Elsie drive away.

So I’m alone in this great shack of a house, licking my wounds like some trapped and dying beast. I did make a large and powerful martini to assist me in my self-pity. But I only took a sip before placing it in the freezing compartment of the refrigerator. Because …

Because I have found self-delusion is preferable to self-pity — if only because the former can lead to action whereas the latter leads to more of itself. Thus, for a few heady moments, I saw myself as the character who, falsely accused, must venture forth to prove his own innocence. I made a mental note to drop by the Coin Corner and have a chat with Max Shofar.

At least for now the reporters have gone. It appears there’s been a suicide that the police are investigating. According to the Bugle, the body of Martin Sterl, who recently sold his high-tech firm for a tidy bundle, was found slumped over the wheel of his Mercedes by his young wife of some six months. “Although an apparent suicide, police are treating it as a suspicious death.”

That may be a sop to the man’s children by his first wife. In a tearful appearance at a press conference I happened to watch on television, the man’s grown daughter vehemently denied that her father had committed suicide. “I talked to Dad the day before. I’d never seen him happier. Except for that … woman …”

As for that woman, the news clip showed a petite, pixie-haired gamine in black averting her eyes from the camera. How well I know that response. At the same time, I realized that I had seen her before. The name Stella Fox did not ring a bell. And I had met but did not know her late husband, who had been much older than she. But where had I seen her? The recollection tantalized. I racked my memory. I cut her picture out of the Bugle. I went online and copied the news footage of her in dense shades as she hurried away from the blaze of lights. I studied them. Of course it may be just that my detecting instincts had been triggered. Not, I told myself, that I didn’t have a far more pertinent mystery to solve.

8

Alphus has come to stay with me for the time being. Despite our best efforts, no suitable place has been found to lodge the animal, a word I use with inner quotation marks. I went over to Sign House with every intention of telling Millicent Mulally that Alphus would have to go back to the Pavilion with the other chimps. I was going to tell her that she and other members of Sign House could have visiting rights, could even come and take him out for afternoon forays. But I now understand exactly what she means: It would be like sending an innocent man back to jail.

It’s not simply that he and Millicent exchange signals at a rapid and decisive pace; he responds appropriately whenever I say anything vocally to him. I did some signing, but I couldn’t follow all of his deft answers, a problem I have when practicing my awkward French on native speakers.

In person, the first impression Alphus gives is of a hairy, good-natured individual. His clear, amber eyes are deep-set beneath thick supraorbital ridges. His brow slopes back to thick, coarse hair, which he parts in the middle and which might be reminiscent of an old-fashioned style except that he combs it over his ears to minimize their marked