But no way was she flirting. She was one of those people to whom the world was a straightforward place. Obviously, she was happily married to Big Ed and, at the moment, grief-stricken. She couldn’t be bothered with whether or not eye contact could be misinterpreted. The hand on the arm, though, the wide serious brown eyes-it was disconcerting.

“How does my mind work?” Hardy repeated. “Very slowly, I’m afraid.”

“No, I don’t think so.” She poured coffee into two plain brown mugs and shifted the sugar-and-cream tray closer. “I don’t think so.”

“Rusty clock, guaranteed. Tick…” He paused, looked around, came back to her eyes. “Tick. Like that.”

It was the first time Hardy had seen anything like humor in her eyes. She took her mug in both hands and leaned back in her chair.

“Jim-Father Cavanaugh-came by last night. Evidently there’s a suspect?”

“You didn’t see the paper?”

She shook her head. “With Steven, now…” she began, then stopped.

“How is he?”

She lifted her shoulders, noncommittal. “Anyway, the suspect is the reason I called.”

“Well, I think we have two, actually.”

He explained a little about Cruz, then went back and covered Alphonse. She listened, but her eyes were out of focus somewhere over the middle of her backyard. When Hardy finished she didn’t react in any way.

“Mrs. Cochran?” he said.

She might have been talking to herself, trying to find reason in something absurd. “Two people,” she said. “Two people might have killed Eddie, wanted to kill Eddie. How could two different people want to kill my Eddie.” It wasn’t a question. Hardy looked down into his mug. “I mean, it doesn’t make sense.”

“No, I guess it doesn’t.”

“But you think it happened?”

He shrugged. “It seems to be the only other option. You were certain he didn’t kill himself.”

“I don’t know what’s worse.” She closed her eyes. “Now I don’t know why I called you,” she said, apologizing, trying and failing to smile. “I mean, I keep thinking something, like some…”-she paused-“some information is going to make a difference. I keep thinking we’ll find out something and I won’t feel this way anymore. It’s stupid, really.”

“No, it’s not stupid. It’s pretty natural.”

She fixed him with a dark glare. “It’s stupid! Nothing’s going to bring Eddie back.” Shocked at herself, she leaned forward in her chair, quickly, putting her hand on Hardy’s arm again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell at you.”

Hardy fought the urge to cover her hand with his own. She didn’t need any kind of comfort right now. Or maybe she needed it, but it wouldn’t take. Waste of time to try. Hardy was matter-of-fact. “It’s natural to be curious about the truth. Once you know what happened, you can put it somewhere. It’s not stupid.”

She took a couple of deep breaths. “Jim said more or less the same thing.”

“Jim’s right.”

She found a little nugget in that. “Of course,” she said, her face softening. “Jim’s always right.” She continued the deep breathing. “So what does it mean, the suspects?”

“It means you might have a better idea of what really happened. With luck, you’ll get some kind of a motive. Frannie stands to collect some insurance.”

“That’s good. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“It’s the reason I took this job in the first place. But, as you say, none of it is going to bring Eddie back. Nobody’s pretending it will. It’s just a place to move on from, that’s all.”

“Where to?” she said all but to herself.

The coffee had gotten cold. The shade had moved enough so that Hardy’s head was now in the sun. He shaded his eyes briefly with his left hand. “That’s everybody’s question.”

She lowered her head. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m still all inside myself.”

As they took in the coffee stuff, she started talking about Steven. Though he remained on the pain drugs and was sleeping a lot, he’d sat up for the first time the previous night, talking to Jim and Big Ed. He acted sulky to her, or toward her, she couldn’t tell which. “It’s like the more I try to do for him, the more he withdraws,” she said.

Dismas carried the mugs and rinsed them before putting them upside down on the drain.

She felt guilty, subjecting him and everybody else to this eating, horrible pain. It wasn’t his business. She was becoming a talking junkie, where as long as someone was there to talk to, it kept it at a bearable distance. It shamed her, feeling that way, talking intimately to near-strangers, but she couldn’t help herself.

She heard a faint “Mom” from the back of the house. “Would you like to see him?” she asked. “It’s pretty lonely for him in there.”

Steven had pushed himself up again, crookedly. She reached behind him to straighten the pillow.

“Come on, Mom.”

It was hopeless. He nearly cringed at her touch. She turned with a half-broken smile. “Do you remember Mr. Hardy?”

He nodded. “You find the guy that killed Eddie?”

“We think so.”

It was too dark in the room for such a beautiful day. Erin pulled up the shade. “Would you like the window open?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Then to Dismas: “Father Jim said you were sure.”

Dismas came up and sat at the foot of the bed. “We ought to be sure by tonight.” He reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet, then extracted a blue card and held it out to Steven. “Last one got pretty bent up,” he said. “You want it?”

To her surprise, he took it.

“Thank you,” he said. Just like that, formally. Not “Thanks” or “Sure,” but “Thank you.” Then: “What’s keeping you from being sure?”

Dismas kind of laughed and shrugged at the same time.

“Can you tell me? I mean, all about it?”

Dismas looked at her, and she nodded. It was good he was starting to come out of the pain, show some interest in living.

But she wasn’t sure whether she could handle hearing it all gone over again. “Are you hungry, Steven? Would you like some lunch?”

He paid no attention to her, all his concentration on Dismas.

“You’re not too tired?” he asked Steven, catching her eye with a question. She nodded that it would be okay.

“No. I do nothing ’cept sleep anyway.”

“Well, I’ll go make a sandwich,” she said. Dismas was already talking before she was out of the room.

Hardy sat at the Cliff House waiting for Pico to arrive for lunch. He was able to see clear to the Farallones. In front of him about a hundred sea lions cavorted on and around Seal Rock.

The place, jammed on weekends, was not too bad here on a Tuesday afternoon. He got a table by one of the floor-to-ceiling windows without any wait; his waitress was friendly but not too, and didn’t even blink when he’d ordered his two Anchor Steams at once. He was halfway through the first.

His instinct had been to go back to the Shamrock, maybe take on his regular shift again or at least crow a little to Moses. But driving toward the place from the Cochrans’, he decided not to jinx himself. One more day, or-more likely-a few hours, would be worth it to make sure the thing was nailed down.

He couldn’t tell Moses he’d almost cracked the case, that almost surely Eddie had been murdered, that it was likely Fran would get some insurance, and oh, by the way, there was a chance that Moses owed him a quarter of the bar.

So he’d called Pico and turned west on Lincoln toward the Cliff House instead of east to the Shamrock. He’d told Pico he wanted to celebrate, but perhaps he’d been premature even in that. Everything with Jane seemed to be going so well, the case had just about concluded. So what was wrong with him that he couldn’t be happy? Was he so much out of practice?

He sipped at his beer, watching the waves break against the rocks below him, and tried to figure it out. The feeling-the old gut “something is really wrong” feeling-started while he was talking to Steven. He’d started in with that just to loosen things up over there, because Steven so obviously needed to feel involved. He knew the kid couldn’t really help him at this stage. There was nothing left to do.