She stood, and Clare hastily followed suit. Mrs. Rouse met them at the door as they retrieved their coats from the hall closet. “Leaving so soon?” she asked.

Mrs. Marshall laid her hand on the woman’s arm. “Renee, I’m sorry to have had to bring bad news. Please let me know that he’s doing okay.”

For a moment, Mrs. Rouse’s chirpy facade fell away, and she looked older, tired, scared. “He’s just so unpredictable lately,” she whispered. “Sometimes he’ll sit for hours in that old chair, not reading, not watching television. Just sitting. Then other times he’ll come home ranting and raving and ready to take on the world. I wish I knew how to help him.”

“Have you thought about taking him to a psychiatrist?” Clare said. “Maybe he’s depressed.”

“He can’t be!” Mrs. Rouse’s expression went flat. “He’s the most stable person I know.” She reattached the cheery look on her face. “He probably just needs a break. We’re going away this Friday to a medical conference in Phoenix. We’ve planned to take a few extra days afterward, to lie by the pool and order room service.”

“That sounds wonderful, dear. I’m sure it will cheer him up,” Mrs. Marshall said. “Do keep in touch, won’t you?”

The two women exchanged hugs and Clare shook Mrs. Rouse’s hand.

Outside, on the top of the steps, they paused to pull on gloves. “You ought to encourage her to get him to see a doctor,” Clare said. “Stable people suffer from depression, too. And he was acting very oddly in there, you have to admit. Like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to curl up and die or come out fighting.”

Mrs. Marshall clutched Clare’s arm against icy slips as they descended the steps. “Maybe,” she said.

“You sound doubtful.”

At the walk, Mrs. Marshall let go of Clare and snapped open her clutch to retrieve her keys. “We’re from another generation, dear. We don’t go popping off to get mood-altering pills whenever life hands us a setback.”

Clare rolled her eyes.

“I will check in with Renee when they get back from Phoenix.”

“Thanks.” Clare fished her keys from her parka pocket. “Let’s hope it starts.”

“Oh, I think it’s warmed up.”

“Yeah. It’s twenty degrees instead of fifteen.” Clare walked Mrs. Marshall around the snow piled against the curb to her Lincoln and held the door open as the elderly woman got behind the wheel. “What was that remark about you not knowing your mother?” she asked.

Mrs. Marshall pursed her lips. “My mother, because of several tragic events over which she had no control, was the subject of all sorts of gossip over the years. I’ve already heard every variation of her supposed secrets. I don’t need to sit around and have Allan Rouse repeat old stories.” She started up her car. “I’ll see you on Sunday.”

“I’ll be there.” Clare shut the Lincoln’s door and walked to her Shelby. Thankfully, it started.

On the drive back to St. Alban’s, she passed the clinic. It looked vaguely accusing to her in the hard-edged morning light. For the first time, she noticed the carving in the granite lintel over the door giving its original name: THE JONATHON KETCHEM CLINIC. She wished Mrs. Marshall hadn’t interrupted Allan Rouse. Maybe the older woman had already heard it all, but for her own peace of mind, Clare very much wanted to know what the clinic had meant to Jane Ketchem.

Clare didn’t have cause to drive into Cossayuharie much, so she was worried she’d go right by Debba Clow’s place. Narrow roads ran like cow paths around rolling hills and pastures in Cossayuharie, most of them unmarked and all of them passing clapboarded houses and dairy barns, until all at once the driver ran out of fields and was in the sharp switchbacks of the mountains.

“Don’t worry,” Debba had said over the phone. “It’s impossible to miss our house. We have purple shutters.”

Cresting a large hill, the written directions pinched between her hand and the wheel, Clare saw the Clow residence where Debba had promised it would be, straddling the road at the bottom of a narrow valley. Debba had underreported the impossibility of missing it.

It was shaped like the typical Cossayuharie farmhouse, an overlarge, under-maintained structure that had started life as an 1850s four-up-four-down and had shotgunned backward through an 1870s parlor, an 1890s kitchen, and a 1920s extra bedroom. However, the Clow farmhouse also had the less typical 1960s addition of a rotting psychedelic bus in the side yard, multiple 1970s solar panels, something that looked like a steppe-dweller’s tent, and a paint job that defied categorization. The purple shutters were the least of it. As Clare shifted into neutral and let the Shelby roll downhill-her personal gas-saving technique-she could see yellow-and-black checkerboards over the chimney bricks, door lintels encrusted with D-I-Y mosaics, and painted jungle vines flowering up the front porch posts. The porch stairs were colored like Easter eggs and embellished with stencils of what proved to be, as Clare pulled into the dooryard, farm animals. She could make out pink pigs on the lavender step, brown cows on the yellow.

Clare got out of her car, crunching and slipping in the poorly plowed drive. Across the road from the house, an enormous barn had been partially gutted, its old doors widened into something resembling a municipal garage. There were two purple buses parked inside. She shook her head. She couldn’t wait to see what Karen Burns, whose brick town house was straight out of Traditional Homes magazine, would make of the Clow place.

She slipped and slid past Karen’s Saab and climbed the stairs to the front door, which was painted to resemble an underwater scene. She pressed the bell-a turtle-and stared at an octopus waltzing with a mermaid while she waited.

“Hi! You must be Reverend Fergusson.” The door was opened by a woman in her late forties or early fifties, with the lean, weather-beaten face of someone who spends most of her time outdoors and active. “I’m Lilly Clow, Deb’s mother.” She took Clare’s hand and combined shaking it with pulling her inside. “It’s colder than a Norwegian well digger’s you-know-what out there,” Lilly said. Deb’s mother looked vaguely Norwegian herself, dressed in an embroidered sweater with her gray hair hanging in long braids. “Thanks for coming out.”

“Thanks for having me,” Clare said, shucking her coat. “It’s quite some place you have here.”

“Yeah, it’s wild, isn’t it? The kids love it. The paint fumes are probably destroying whatever brain cells I have left, but what the heck. C’mon back to the kitchen, it’s warmer. Deb and the lawyer are meeting there while I ride herd over the kids in the playroom.” Lilly led the way through a room that was either a living room or an artist’s studio, and another that was either a dining room or a craft shop.

“Reverend Fergusson’s here,” Lilly announced as they entered the kitchen. Karen and Debba looked up from their seats at a scrubbed pine table and greeted her distractedly.

“We’ve got some nice herbal tea already made up,” Lilly said. “Or I could offer you some juice, or some bottled water.” The table was set with three mugs and a honey jar that had all the earmarks of someone’s first pottery project. A more professionally made teapot sat on a woven mat in the center of the round table.

“Coffee?” Clare asked.

“Sorry, no coffee. We have some chai tea in the fridge if you want caffeine.”

“Ah. Thanks, I’ll just help myself to what’s here.”

“Okeydokey. Me and Raffi will be entertaining the kids if anyone needs us.” Lilly opened a door in the back of the kitchen. Clare caught a blast of “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” before it latched shut.

She pulled out a chair-mercifully unpainted-and sat down. Karen had a yellow legal pad in front of her and had been jotting notes. “Have I missed much?”