“The Brass Elephant is just a few blocks away. Could we have a drink there?”

“Oh, yes. That bar you like so much.”

“How do-”

The widow Youssef’s smile was at once sad and superior. “We’ve been making quite a study of you. Do you think it’s a coincidence that I’m at this particular gym at this particular hour? I don’t exactly have time to work out.”

Tess wasn’t sure what was more unnerving-the idea that someone could so easily discern her patterns or the woman’s use of the first-person plural. Who was this “we,” exactly?

“I can be there in five minutes,” she said. “It’s not a bar that stands on formality, but it does prefer that the patrons wear something below the waist.”

It wasn’t clear if Wilma Youssef understood that this was a joke or if she simply didn’t see the humor in anything. She gave Tess a chilly smile and nodded her assent.

“Club soda,” Wilma Youssef told the bartender.

“Nursing?” asked Tess.

“Yes, but I never drank. Neither did Greg. We met through a Christian fellowship group at Cornell.”

The information seemed at once pointed and defensive to Tess, but all she said was “Oh.” And then to the bartender, “I’ll try that weird gin drink you make, the one with peach schnapps. Maybe it will make me feel as if spring is on the way.”

“We’re not what people mean when they speak of the religious right,” Wilma said, picking up on Tess’s unvoiced skepticism. “But we were conservative by most people’s standards. Didn’t drink or use drugs. We also happen to believe that homosexuality is a sin. So I always knew that Greg’s death was not as it appeared. Nothing could make me believe that.”

Funny, the Christian fellowship stuff was the one piece of information to date that made the scenario more plausible to Tess. She wondered if Youssef’s killer had known this and factored it in.

“When the story with the new information ran in the Beacon-Light, I was so hopeful. At first. I thought it meant that Greg’s killer had been found and the truth would finally come out. But now police tell me that you’re determined to shield the killer.”

“Not the killer. Just a-” Ever vigilant, Tess stopped herself short of using Lloyd’s gender. “Just an individual who was holding a piece of the puzzle, unawares.”

“Some lowlife.”

“Is that part of your doctrine, too? Assigning people their value on earth?”

Nothing seemed to shake Wilma Youssef’s eerie poise.

“I’m a widow with a three-month-old child. A boy who will never know his father. It’s important to me that Greg’s name be cleared.”

“It seems to me that it has been. We still may not know who killed him, but it seems more likely now that it had something to do with his work, right?”

She chewed a piece of ice. Tess wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Widow Youssef subsisted solely on ice.

“I received something…unexpected,” she said, once the ice cube had been crunched into oblivion beneath her small, perfect teeth.

“What?”

“I prefer not to say.”

“I won’t tell anyone.” The woman clearly wanted to confide in someone. Perhaps she had been drawn to Tess in part because she thought Tess owed her that much. “If you know anything about me, it’s that I keep my promises, that I’m willing to go to extraordinary lengths to do just that.”

“I can’t say.”

“Which is it? Don’t want to or can’t?”

“Both. I don’t know what this thing means. I don’t want to know, because then I can say I didn’t know, if someone else finds out. Greg had…” In Wilma’s pause, Tess supplied a thousand possibilities, an array of wonderful and intriguing nouns. It was a bit of an anticlimax when Wilma Youssef finally said, “A safe-deposit box.”

“So? Lots of people do.”

“This one was secret, kept in a bank down in Laurel, quite a distance from where we live. I wouldn’t even have known it existed if the renewal paper hadn’t arrived in the mail last month. Apparently the bank doesn’t even know he’s dead.”

“That’s awful,” Tess said, meaning it.

Wilma sighed. “You get used to it. Almost. The telemarketers that call and ask for Mr. Youssef-they don’t even lose their place in the script when I say, ‘He’s dead.’ They just plunge ahead, telling me about the new ‘products’ available on my charge cards.”

Wilma Youssef was making it awfully hard to out-and-out loathe her. Her values may not have been Tess’s, but her situation engendered sympathy. All the more so because she didn’t seem to expect it.

“Well, if you need help getting access to it, that can be accomplished pretty quickly through probate. I know some lawyers-Well, you know some lawyers, obviously. I’m sure there are ways to expedite.”

“I don’t have a key.”

“Still, there has to be a way-”

“I didn’t come to you for legal counsel. I’m not worried about straightening out Greg’s estate.”

“What are you worried about?”

She gave a tiny, embarrassed shrug.

“Have you told the police about the safe-deposit box?”

“No. It’s not required, not by law.”

“But it could be relevant to his murder.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Neither do I. But that’s because we don’t know what’s in it. And maybe it will be something silly or inconsequential. But the fact of its existence is not going to go away.”

“You promised not to tell.” Said swiftly, almost accusingly.

“That I did.”

“We told each other everything, Greg and I. Everything. We didn’t have secrets from each other.”

“With all due respect, you clearly had at least one.”

To Tess’s horror the woman burst into tears-gusty, loud sobs that seemed all the more enormous coming from this doll-like woman. Tess and Wilma were the only customers in this part of the bar, but it was still mortifying. Luckily, her sobs ended as quickly as they came, like a summer cloudburst.

“Sorry,” she said with a sniffle. “Hormones.”

“Ms. Youssef-”

“You may call me Wilma.”

“Wilma. That’s a hell of a name to settle on a kid.”

“Yes, a life of Flintstones jokes. When I found out I was having a boy, I immediately insisted that he would be called Gregory Jr.”

“Anyway, Wilma”-it was hard not to give it the Fred Flintstone inflection, now that the fact had been acknowledged, but Tess resisted. “What exactly is it you want from me? To break the promise I made to someone else while keeping yours? To assure you that what I know can’t have anything do with a safe-deposit box in Laurel? Or do you want my permission to keep your secrets as I’m keeping mine?”

The woman sat quietly, her hands folded in her lap. “I want the truth, but I’m frightened.”

What could Tess say? It was in the end what everyone wanted-painless truth. Problem was, she wasn’t sure such a thing existed.

Wilma Youssef, however, had the damnedest ability to squander whatever sympathy she managed to arouse. She continued, “My husband and I were good people. We worked hard. We didn’t deserve this.”

“The implication being that some people do deserve what happens to them.”

“Well…yes. Yes. I’m sorry, but people who take drugs, who sell them, who live without benefit of marriage, who have children as if they’re throwing litters of puppies-they bring their problems on themselves. Greg was trying to do good in the world.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“The only way of looking at it.”

“No. No, not even close. Imagine being born into that world. Remember how it was said that Bush, the first one, was a guy who was born on third base and thought he’d hit a triple? Well, these kids aren’t even in the ballpark and they don’t have any equipment-no bats, no balls, no field. It’s like they’re in some weird reality show where they have to play the same game with rotted tree limbs, spoiled grapefruits, and hundred-fifty-pound sacks of rocks tied to their backs.”