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“What kind of a deal?” the Lieutenant asked.

“Real estate. A development of some kind …” She started to say something else and then hesitated. The lieutenant cocked his head, waiting.

“When he was doing the Neck … this place … he got a couple of really nasty calls from some eco-nuts.”

“The Green Terror Brigade?” I put in.

She nodded. “That’s what everyone thought at the time.”

“Did your husband own a gun?” The detective picked up his coffee and took a sip.

“Several. He has a high-powered rifle with a scope for elk hunting.”

“No pistols or revolvers?”

“No. Not that I know of.”

We concluded not long afterward. Lieutenant Tracy asked her if it would be all right to bring in some technicians to go over the house. When she hesitated, he said it would be a matter of routine for him to get a warrant, but that, well, it would look better all around if she simply consented. At that she nodded numbly and again her face was touched with a kind of dread I found puzzling. But, of course, I’ve never had anyone close to me murdered.

“Do you want me to call Diantha and have her come over?” I asked.

She shook her head. “My brother Paul …”

We took our leave and drove back to the city proper. I mentioned my impression of Merissa’s initial reaction.

The lieutenant nodded noncommittally and stared out at the beautiful day. He said, “She knows a lot more than she’s telling us.”

On the drive down to Merissa’s, I had used Lieutenant Tracy’s phone to call Diantha and leave a message to the effect that I would be late in returning from walking the dog as something had come up. Even so, she said, “You were gone a long time,” as I came in the door with Decker. “I made soup for lunch, if you want some.”

I nodded, gave her a kiss, and asked her if she wanted a drink. I told her I had something horrific to report. Just then Elsie, who is two and a half, tottered in, but showed more interest in the dog than in me, which is no doubt natural.

Di’s evident excitement at the prospect of hearing bad news I took to be a measure of how dreary her life had become.

Anyway, I, with a gin and tonic English-style — no ice — and she, with a glass of chilled Chardonnay, went into the solarium that, because of the old hemlocks outside, seldom gets much sun, but has pleasant wicker furniture.

“Mommy has to talk to Daddy right now,” Di signed to Elsie, trailing in after us. Elsie, who suffers from an inexplicable mutism, is named for Elsbeth, Diantha’s mother and my late wife, who died more than three years ago.

“Decker wants cookie,” Elsie said, her little hands amazingly articulate.

“Okay, darling.”

Di, looking quite trim and fetching in jogging shorts and a leotard top (she has been following a rigorous regime of late), got up and brought in some dog biscuits, giving one to Elsie to hand gingerly, dropping it and laughing, to Decker.

In the midst of this tender scene, I said, “Heinie has been murdered.”

It was as though I were speaking to her from a distance because the words seemed to register a measurable time after I had uttered them.

“No … No!” She put both hands to her throat, as though to protect herself, and her lips went thin as her face knotted with pain. “Poor Heinie. Oh, my God. Merissa …”

I got up and sat beside her on the small sofa. I put my arms around her. Di’s grief, I knew, was something more than vicarious. Because, you see, what I was reluctant to tell Lieutenant Tracy is that, about a year after Elsie was born, Diantha had had an affair with Heinrich von Grümh.

It wasn’t a protracted, passionate thing. Or so Di tells me. Indeed, she refuses to call it an affair. It came and went during a weekend when she went down to Bayside for an overnight cruise on the Albatross. She went with Elsie and Bella, Elsie’s nanny. I didn’t go because, frankly, I found Heinie to be, over long stretches, something of a bore if not a boor. I went out to the cottage instead and did some gardening. It happened that Heinie and