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“Well, there’s Feidhlimidh de Buitliér. But a long shot.”

“Okay.”

I checked my watch. I still had a long drive to the cottage. “Anyway, the others would include Merissa Bonne, Max Shofar, Col Saunders, and … well, myself.”

His eyebrows went up. “Really?”

“Lieutenant, I want to clear my name …”

“But you know you didn’t do it?”

“That’s what I’d like to think. But I think I could have. I certainly wanted to.”

We stood and got ready to leave. He said, “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that. And, by the way, if you need any help in those interrogations, let me know.”

• • •

I had a feeling the weekend with Diantha and Elsie would not go well. I blame myself. Seeing firsthand, indeed, ransacking their snug love nest on the boat reopened the old wound as though I suffered from a kind of emotional scurvy. I sat in traffic and told myself again it wasn’t that Diantha slept with someone else, but the person she chose. Which didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Might I have been less wrought had she bedded down with a distinguished professor, with someone of charm and wit, with someone, more tellingly, younger than I?

Not only had the search and talk with the lieutenant taken longer than I’d planned, but the traffic proved treacherous. It being a fine weekend, hordes from the south clogged the coastal interstate heading north. It truly became life in the breakdown lane when bridge work on one of the smaller roads kept me and the old car fuming for nearly half an hour as some piece of equipment, which looked like a giant orange toy, got maneuvered into position.

“What took you so long?” was the aggrieved greeting from my beloved, who appeared frazzled by the heat, by loneliness, and now, quite clearly, by me. She wore a skimpy halter top, light shorts, and the look of a besieged single mother.

“I went with Lieutenant Tracy to search the Albatross. We found the original coins.”

“Really? Where?”

“In the framed prints in the master stateroom.”

“Oh” was the best she could manage. Perhaps because she sensed that the visit had revived my old demons. Not that she didn’t have demons of her own, in particular a large, hairy fellow primate. There was no kiss, no offer of a drink. Instead, “Could you watch El for a while. I need some personal time.”

Isn’t time with me personal time? I wanted to ask. But I knew what she meant. Besides, right then, Elsie and Decker made the best of companions. She sat on one of my bony knees and made very convincing talk with her hands. “Mommy sad.” Then, her little fists striking her chest, “ape,” followed by her right-hand fingers together down into the open palm of her other hand, “at,” followed by the bunched fingers of her right hand from edge of her mouth up to her cheek, “home.”

“Yes,” I said aloud as, like Alphus, she comprehends spoken words.

Then a new and favorite project — teaching Decker to respond to sign language. I found some dog biscuits for bribes along with a rough martini for me on the side. To my amazement, the animal already knew “come” — both hands held in front, the index fingers extended, the right in a beckoning circular motion around the other toward the speaker in what amounts, as in a lot of sign language, to the gestural equivalent of onomatopoeia.

We moved on to “sit,” a command he understood perfectly when vocalized. Elsie, wearing a light summer frock, perched beside me on the wickerware couch. Decker, eyes and ears alert, sat on his haunches facing us, tongue out panting in the residual heat. The problem in teaching him to respond to “sit” was to get him to stand. Which he did eventually. Elsie signed the word, the middle and index fingers of the right hand in a downward motion onto the middle finger of the left. Then I would say “sit.”

Incredibly enough, after at least half a dozen repetitions, the dear beast got it. Elsie high-fived me after her fashion and then indicated it was her turn for a treat.

Diantha returned presently having had her personal time, and I asked her if she would like a drink. I could tell something was afoot from