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“What hand?”

“That hand, your hand, you just did it again, like you’ve got indigestion or a pain or something.”

I looked down at my hand on my chest and realized that I had been unconsciously, habitually checking to be sure that the Lucite heart remained under my shirt, at the end of its chain.

“I have this little patch of stuff,” I said.

“Patch of stuff? Patch of what?”

“A rash or something. It itches a little. I’m pressing on it instead of scratching it, ’cause I don’t want to spread it.”

I don’t know why I didn’t show her the pendant. Maybe I worried that she’d have lots of questions about it, and that once she got me talking, I might spill too much. What a smooth liar I had become.

“Let me see,” Amalia said.

“Are you kidding? No way. I’m not letting a girl look at my chest rash.”

“Now, don’t be silly. You’re still a child, and I’m not a girl, I’m me.”

“I’m not a sissy, you know. I’m not going to make a big deal about a little rash.”

She rolled her eyes. “Masculine pride. All right, let the skin fungus or whatever it is eat you alive.”

“It’s not a skin fungus. There isn’t such a thing.”

“Well, there is,” she said. “But I didn’t come over here to talk fungus. I’m thinking you and I and Malcolm ought to take the bus into Midtown on Monday, have another excursion. The poor dear deserves it after Aunt Judy, and the summer is melting away.”

The following day, Sunday, both my mother and grandfather would be home, and w

e would probably do something fun together. On Monday, however, they would be at work again, and I would be home alone if I didn’t go with Amalia and Malcolm. Mr. Yoshioka wasn’t likely to hear from Mr. Otani until late Monday afternoon. If I stayed home, I’d be going a little crazier hour by hour, checking and re-checking the window screens and the cutlery drawer.

“What would we do?” I asked.

“Something cheaper. No admission fee this time. Just the bus fare and a little money for lunch. You seemed to like the courthouse tour, so I thought we could make it a day of architecture, all those fabulous old public buildings in that neighborhood. Malcolm loves architecture.”

“Okay,” I said. “I guess that sounds cool.”

“Same time as before.”

“I’ll be ready.”

“Cortaid.”

“What?”

“For the rash,” she said.

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By eight o’clock Saturday evening, as he would later testify, Dr. Mace-Maskil had reached the conclusion that the wisest course would be to say nothing to Lucas Drackman about Mrs. Nozawa inquiring after him. Maybe she was telling the truth, and maybe Lucas had done some great kindness for her and her husband in an uncharacteristic moment of humanity, in which case he would not be high-tailing it to Illinois to kill her and perhaps the professor, too, and there would be no danger that the truth about the murder of Noreen by proxy would become known. Hell, maybe Lucas had killed someone for them. Why couldn’t it be, he asked himself, that the Nozawa bitch was lying about having inadequately thanked Lucas and was instead trying to contact him because she had someone else she wanted him to blow away? She was a businesswoman, after all, queen of clean, cars and clothes, and in the professor’s opinion, there were no more ruthless, bloody-minded people on the planet than business types.

Pleased by his elegant reasoning and by the calm with which he had thought his way through these dangerous shoals, Dr. Mace-Maskil mixed a pitcher of martinis.

Sunday morning, after expertly managing his hangover by taking a massive dose of vitamin B complex chased with milk of magnesia, he felt queasy, not because of the previous evening’s indulgence, but because intuition insisted that he had made the wrong decision. No matter what the reason that Setsuko Nozawa wanted to contact Lucas, if she mentioned Mace-Maskil, her version of their encounter would be the first that Lucas heard, and thereafter it would be more difficult to sell him a version more flattering to the professor.

After further managing his hangover with three raw eggs and a dash of Tabasco sauce blended in a glass of orange juice, Dr. MaceMaskil spent the morning and early afternoon crafting a story of his confrontation with Setsuko Nozawa that might have occurred in an alternate universe.

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