Maggie hadn’t talked about the Althorp case in a long time, but I’ll bet anything that if she was at the supermarket checkout and saw that Celeb magazine with Peter Carrington’s picture on the cover, she would buy it. Which explains her sudden uneasiness at the thought of my being in his presence.

I kissed the top of her head. “Maggie, I’m hungry. Let’s go out and have some pasta. My treat.”

When I dropped her home an hour and a half later, she hesitated, then said, “Kay, come back inside. I want to go to that affair. I’ll write you a check for a ticket.”

“Maggie, that’s crazy,” I protested. “That’s too much money for you.”

“I’m going,” she said. Her determined expression left no room for argument.

A few minutes later I was driving over the George Washington Bridge, back to my apartment, her check in my wallet. I knew the reason she had insisted on attending. Maggie had appointed herself as my personal bodyguard while I was under the roof of the Carrington mansion.

As she waited for her visitor to arrive, Gladys Althorp studied the picture of her missing daughter. It had been taken on the terrace of the Carrington mansion the night Susan disappeared. She was wearing a white chiffon evening gown that clung to her slender body. Her long blond hair, slightly tousled, tumbled onto her shoulders. She had been unaware the camera was on her, and her expression was serious, even pensive. What was she thinking at that moment? Gladys asked herself once again, as her fingers traced the outline of Susan’s mouth. Did she have a premonition that something was going to happen to her?

Or did she finally realize that night that her father had been involved with Elaine Carrington?

Gladys sighed as she slowly stood, resting one hand on the armchair for support. Brenda, the new housekeeper, had served her dinner on a tray and then headed back to her apartment over the garage. Unfortunately, Brenda wasn’t much of a cook. Not that I’m really hungry, Gladys thought as she carried the tray to the kitchen. The sight of the uneaten food made her feel slightly nauseous, and she quickly scraped it into the compactor, rinsed the dishes, and placed them in the dishwasher.

“Just leave it for me, Mrs. Althorp,” she knew Brenda would protest in the morning. And I’ll say it only takes a minute to tidy up, Gladys thought. Tidy. That was the way to describe what I’m doing now. Trying to tidy up the most important piece of business in my life before I leave it.

“Maybe six months,” the doctors had agreed when they delivered the verdict that she hadn’t yet shared with anyone.

She went back into the study, her favorite of the seventeen rooms in the house. I’ve been wanting to downsize for years, and I know Charles will once I’m gone. She knew the reason she hadn’t. Susan’s room was here, everything still exactly as it had been when she left that night after knocking on the bedroom door to let Charles know she was home.

I let her sleep late the next morning, Gladys thought, once again replaying that day in her mind. Then, finally, at noon I looked in on her. The bed was still made. The towels in her bathroom hadn’t been touched. She must have gone right back out after announcing she was home.

Before I die, I have to try to learn what happened to her, she vowed. Maybe this investigator can find some answers. Nicholas Greco was his name. She had seen him on television talking about the crimes he had solved. After retiring as a detective from the New York City Police Department, he’d opened his own agency and become well known for solving crimes that initially had seemed unsolvable.

“The families of victims need closure,” he had said in an interview. “There’s no peace for them until they have it. Fortunately, there are new tools and new methods being developed every day that make it possible to take a fresh look at cases that are still open.”

She had asked him to come at eight o’clock tonight for two reasons. That she knew Charles would be out was one of them. The second was that she didn’t want Brenda to be around when he was there. Two weeks ago, Brenda had come into the study when she was watching a tape of Greco on television. “Mrs. Althorp, I think the true cases he talks about are more interesting than the ones they make up,” Brenda had said. “Just looking at him you can tell he’s smart.”

The front door chimes pealed promptly at eight o’clock. Gladys hurried to open the door. Her first impression of Nicholas Greco was both comforting and reassuring. From his television appearances, she knew he was a conservatively dressed man in his late fifties, of average height, with sandy hair and dark brown eyes. But meeting him, she liked the fact that his handshake was firm and that he looked her directly in the eye. Everything about him invited trust.

She wondered what his impression of her might be. Probably he’d just see a woman in her midsixties, far too thin, with the pallor of terminal illness on her face. “Thank you for coming,” she said. “I know you must have many requests from someone like me.”

“I have two daughters,” Greco said. “If one of them disappeared, I wouldn’t be at peace until I found her.” He waited, then added quietly, “Even if what I learned was not what I was hoping to hear.”

“I believe that Susan is dead,” Gladys Althorp said, her voice calm, but the expression in her eyes suddenly bleak and sad. “But she would not have disappeared on her own. Something happened to her, and I believe that Peter Carrington was responsible for her death. Whatever the truth is, I have got to know it. Are you interested in helping me?”

“Yes, I am.”

“I have put together for you all my files about Susan’s disappearance. They’re in my study.”

As Nicholas Greco followed Gladys Althorp down the wide hallway, he managed quick glances of the paintings along the way. Someone in this family is a collector, he thought. I don’t know if these are museum-quality, but they certainly are pretty fine.

Everything that he could see in the house had an air of good taste and quality. The emerald green carpet was thick and soft underfoot. The crown molding on the stark white walls provided an added frame for the paintings. The area rug in the study where Gladys Althorp led him contained a mellow red and blue pattern. The shade of blue in the couch and chairs matched the blue in the rug. He saw the picture of Susan Althorp on the desk. To the side was a decorative shopping bag, bulging with legal-sized documents.

He walked over to the desk and picked up the picture. Since deciding to take on the case, he had done some preliminary research and had seen this picture on the Internet. “This is what Susan was wearing when she disappeared?” he asked.

“It was what she was wearing at the Carrington dinner. I was not feeling well and my husband and I left the party before it broke up. Peter promised to drive her home.”

“You were still awake when she came in?”

“Yes, about an hour later. Charles had the twelve o’clock news on in his room. I heard her call to him.”

“Isn’t that a bit early for an eighteen-year-old to be home?”

Greco did not miss the tightening of Gladys Althorp’s lips. The question had evoked anger in her.

“Charles was an overprotective father. He insisted that Susan wake him up whenever she came home.”

Gladys Althorp was one of many grief-stricken parents Nicholas Greco had encountered in his career. But unlike many of the others, he suspected that she had always managed to keep her emotions rigidly private. He sensed that, for her, hiring him was a difficult step, a quantum leap into frightening territory.

With a professional eye, he observed the extreme pallor of her complexion, the air of fragility about her entire body. He had a strong suspicion that she might be terminally ill, and that that was the reason for her decision to contact him.