I showered and shampooed, once again going through the tedious process of combing and drying my mess of hair. At least curly, wavy hair was fashionable now. It was a pleasant change to have others actually envy me my abundance, rather than peer at it with pity in their eyes. I flipped through the garments in my closet without much interest. The cerise wool dress my mother had brought me was too fancy for the occasion, so I finally decided I'd wear a longsleeved garnet silk blouse, a black-and-garnet patterned skirt, and my black pumps. Looking at my collection of glasses—I'm very nearsighted—I had a wild impulse to select my purple-and-white-framed ones. Oh, hell. The Lowrys would be offended if my glasses were frivolous. I got my new black-rimmed ones with the delicate gold wire-and-bead decoration and set them out on my vanity table. This morning I'd put on my favorite workday red specs, and I viewed them in the mirror with some satisfaction. They added a spark of liveliness to my unhappy face.

"So, why'm I sulking?" I asked the mirror.

That particular question never got answered, because the front doorbell rang. What a lot of visitors I was having today, if you counted the deputies coming twice.

Through the opaque oval glass pane in the front door, I saw the silhouette of a woman with a baby carrier in her arms. I assumed it was my friend Lizanne Buckley Sewell, who'd had her baby boy two months before. I disarmed the alarm and opened the door with a smile that collapsed in on itself. I stared blankly at the plump, dark, pretty young woman who stood on my front porch with a perfectly strange baby, who seemed smaller than Lizanne's infant. "Aunt Roe!" said the dark young woman. She looked exhausted, and she also looked as if she expected a warm welcome.

I had not the slightest idea who she was.

The next instant everything clicked, and I would have thunked myself on the forehead with the heel of my hand if I'd been alone. I was aunt to only one young woman, and that was Martin's niece, the daughter of his sister Barby. "Regina!" I said, hoping my recovery hadn't been too obvious.

"For a minute there, I didn't think you recognized me!" she said, laughing. "Ha, ha. Come on in! And this is little..." Regina had had a baby? It was covered with a blue blanket and wore a red sleeper. Martin had a—great-nephew? How could I have missed that? Granted, we don't often see Martin's sister and her daughter, but I would have expected a certain amount of phone calling to herald the new arrival.

"Oh, Aunt Roe! This is Hayden!"

"And you call him Hayden." I nodded with a wise look. "No nicknames." I could hardly recall ever having been more at sea.

"No, me and Craig are set on him being called Hayden," Regina said, trying to look firm and determined and failing completely. Martin may not have gotten all the looks in the Bartell family—Barby and Regina are both pretty, in their way—but he'd surely gotten a disproportionate amount of the brains and resolution.

I craned out of the front door, trying to see if Craig Graham was maybe getting luggage out of the trunk. "Where's your husband?" I asked, never imagining this would be a sensitive question.

"He didn't come," Regina said. Her generous mouth clamped tight. "Oh." I hoped I didn't sound as blank as I felt. "And how's your mother?" I was gesturing to Regina to come on in, still peering around in the hopes of spying a companion. She'd driven all the way from Corinth, Ohio, on her own? "Mama's on a cruise," Regina said, too gaily. This gal was having serious mood swings.

"Hmmm. Where to?" I repeated my "come in" gesture, more emphatically. "Oh, she's taking a long one," Regina chattered, finally stepping over the threshold. "The boat stops by some islands in the Caribbean, then over to two stops in Mexico of several days apiece, then back to Miami." "My goodness," I said mildly. "She's with a friend?" "That guy," Regina said, depositing the baby, still in his infant seat, on the coffee table in front of the couch and unslinging a huge diaper bag from her shoulder. There was still a fabric-care tag dangling from the shoulder strap of the diaper bag.

"That guy" was Barby's fiancé, investment banker Hubert Morris, whom the divorced Barby Lampton had met when she'd bought a condo in Pittsburgh, the closest major city and airport to Corinth, Ohio, Barby and Martin's childhood home. Though Barby hadn't lived in Corinth since her teenage years, Regina had met her husband-to-be while she and her mother were in Corinth visiting an old friend of Barby's. Regina had married the boy—I mean, young man—only two months later.

Martin and I had flown up to Pittsburgh for the wedding, maybe seven months ago. We'd gotten the impression that the young couple would be living in very straitened circumstances. Craig Graham had been a dark, lanky no-brainer, whose greatest apparent virtue had been that he cared for Regina. He was eighteen to Regina's twenty-one. The groom's share of the wedding duties and expenses had been borne by Barby, who had tried to be unobtrusive about it. Of course, Martin and I had noticed. But Barby had made it clear to us (to Martin, anyway, since she seldom talked to me directly) that after the wedding, the young couple was going to be financially independent, as far as she was concerned. She'd made some pointed remarks about who had made beds and who would be lying in them. "Would you like a drink? Coffee, or hot chocolate? Though maybe those things aren't good for the baby." My friend Lizanne was breast-feeding; and, though I hadn't asked, she'd generously given me a very thorough grounding on the subject. After being indoctrinated with Lizanne's opinions on the virtues of, and necessity for, mother's milk, I was taken aback when Regina gave me a blank look.

"Huh? No, I'm bottle-feeding," she said, after a pause. "Gosh, if I nursed him, it'd have to be me that fed him every time."

I kept a smile planted on my face. "So, some coffee?"

"Please." She slumped back. "I've been driving for hours." She had driven all the way from Ohio. This was very strange, and getting stranger.

I brewed some coffee, shuddering at Regina's protest that instant would have been fine. After I'd poured a cup for each of us, adding cream and sugar to Martin's niece's, I listened to Regina blather about the long drive, the baby, her mother's condo, her Aunt Cindy...

"Oh, I'm sorry!" she apologized. "I shouldn't have said anything." "Aunt Cindy" was Martin's first wife, the mother of his only child, Regina's cousin Barrett. I sighed internally, still kept my smile pasted on, and assured Regina that she needn't apologize. A little corner of my brain repressed an urge to ask Regina why she wasn't at Aunt Cindy's instead of Uncle Martin's, if Aunt Cindy was so great.

"Did you see Barrett on TV the other night?" Regina said enthusiastically. "Boy, didn't he look handsome? I always call all my friends when Barrett's going to be on television."

Regina was digging at all my sore—or rather, sensitive— spots. Barrett had not come to our wedding. He'd been up for a big part, he'd told his dad, the implication clear that a new part for Barrett was more important than a new wife for his father.

And he hadn't visited Lawrenceton in the three-plus years Martin had lived here. But he'd found the time to come to Regina's wedding, where he'd managed to dodge us with an almost unbelievable agility. Martin had told me he'd had a drink with Barrett in the hotel bar after I'd gone up to bed the night before the wedding, and that had been the contact he'd had with his son—whose career he'd been subsidizing.

I was beginning to wish Martin's only niece had stayed in Ohio. I was also beginning to puzzle at the reason behind her visit. She was being mighty evasive.

"Regina," I said, when she'd finished blathering about Barrett's career, "I'm delighted that you came to visit, but this evening, just for a couple of hours, may be a little awkward. Your uncle and I have a long-standing dinner engagement, and though we could call and tell the Lowrys we have to take a rain check, I'm afraid—" Regina, who happened to be holding the baby (Hayden, I reminded myself), looked up with something approaching alarm. "You two go on like you had planned. I'll be fine here. Just point me at the microwave and I'll be glad to fix my own supper. After all, I just appeared on your doorstep." It seemed to me—almost—that Regina was anxious to get us out of the house. I could feel my eyebrows draw together in a frown. "Excuse me a minute," I said. Regina, her attention focused on the baby, gave me an absent nod.