She closed her eyes and made circles with her head in a stress-reducing ritual I imagined she performed many times during the course of a morning like this one.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with either of them. I do represent a great many properties apart from that decrepit, blood-soaked nursery. It’s from an agency we sometimes work with. Nina Mazzo’s.”

I called Nina and made an appointment to see her that afternoon. This time I didn’t pretend to be Thelma Turner.

Lucy stared at the image we’d printed out from my computer. “Kevin Brookfield must be a helluva lot better looking than this picture if every woman in this burg would be so all-fired happy to see him relocate here.”

“We don’t know that Donnelley is Brookfield. You may be looking at a picture of someone else. But Brookfield has something. No denying. It’s something else,” I said, trying to figure out what it was. Lucy and I had time before our meeting with Nina Mazzo, so we doubled back to the Paradise to pick the brains of the town’s resident expert on men. Maybe Babe could put her finger on it.

“It’s true. I am generally acknowledged to be an expert on a great many subjects-movies, music, and men included,” Babe said. We’d parked ourselves in a rear booth and made our guru join us.

“What makes a woman gravitate toward a man?” Lucy asked.

“She kidding or is this some Sphinxlike riddle?” Babe said.

“We’re serious.”

“You mean if he isn’t wealthy, famous, or powerful and doesn’t look like Johnny Depp, act like Mr. Darcy, and make love like Don Juan?” She gave it some thought. “Okay, he’s got a sad story. How’s this? He’s a single parent whose wife died young-and tragically-and he nursed her until the bitter end. Could be his mother dying but not as effective as the wife. The kid’s not necessary; in the absence of a kid, a dog would work. Dogs are chick magnets, but best for generating one-night stands, not lasting relationships.”

Lucy and I were extremely impressed. “Where do you get this?” she asked.

“Soap Opera Digest, 1994. Classic story line. I think it was on Another World,” she said. Babe continued spinning her hypothetical situations. “Hoping to reconnect with a childhood sweetheart is another good one, but the dead wife story works really well. Shows he’s a romantic and will stay faithful-even after you’re in the ground.” She stood up to go back to work.

“Did Brookfield say anything like that to you?” I asked.

“He suggested it. Single guy, not too handsome, not too neat, so probably straight, looking for real estate in a new town, to start a business. To start over. Charming, no ring, or ring line, as if he’d just taken it off. A little flirty but nothing overt. Screams ‘you can trust me, I have a broken heart.’”

Even if she was wrong, it was a damn good answer on the fly and something to be filed for future reference. Oddly enough, apart from the wife and the part about being new in town, she had also just described Mike O’Malley-romantic, faithful, looking after an aged parent, and a dog owner, always a plus. And just at that moment entering the diner.

“Oh, this looks a mite scary. Three beautiful women conspiring? Or is it gossiping?” O’Malley said. He sat at a counter stool a few feet away and waved off the young waitress’s efforts to bring him a menu.

“Why is it when men talk, they’re discussing, and when women talk, we’re gossiping? That’s very misogynistic of you,” Lucy said. “Very disappointing. I’m going to stop telling Paula and Babe that you are the cutest guy in Springfield.”

“This conversation is taking an intriguing turn, but I’m afraid I don’t have the time for verbal foreplay. I just came in because I saw your car and thought you might like to know. You can tell Caroline that she doesn’t have to worry about Countertop Man anymore. He’s dead.”

“Did I miss something?” Lucy said.

Babe, Mike, and I replied as one, “Yes.”

“Catch her up,” Mike said, getting up to leave. “I’ve got to go.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You can’t go now. Was he…murdered?”

McGinley and his car were found in a ditch in Macedonia, Ohio. The local police got in touch with O’Malley because he’d made the most recent inquiry into McGinley’s record, and as a courtesy, the cops in Ohio thought they’d inform him.

“What do you think happened?” Babe asked.

“Fell asleep at the wheel, got drunk, and drove-who knows? Pretty bad accident, though. Gas tank caught fire.”

“Does that usually happen when a car goes into a ditch?”

“Apparently this ditch led to a twenty-five-foot drop from a two-lane bridge.”

“Could he have been run off the road?”

“Yes. He also could have had an Elvis sighting or been abducted by aliens. I didn’t ask.”

“Why not?” I said.

Because he was a cop in Springfield, Connecticut, not Macedonia, Ohio. But that didn’t mean that I couldn’t ask. And I would, but first we had an appointment with Nina Mazzo.

“You could be a private investigator,” Lucy said. “Seriously.”

“I think not.”

“Look at how good you are at this stuff.”

“That’s what Babe said. Maybe if the gardening thing doesn’t work out.”

When I had researched Nina the first time, I learned a little about the profession. Most PIs came from a background of law enforcement. Who knew? It was the image of them standing in the shrubbery snapping pictures that made the job seem faintly cartoonish and not quite legitimate, but it was. Fewer than 40 percent of their cases were related to infidelity and divorce (I would have guessed more), but that’s all most people ever thought of when they heard the words private investigator. That or Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. Hopefully, Nina would tell us if tracking down missing persons and delivering unmarked packages like the one Caroline Sturgis had received made up the other 60 percent of the business.

We drove downtown and saw the property values drop sharply from one block to the next until we passed under the railroad tracks.

“This isn’t much of an area,” Lucy said.

“Depends what you’re looking for. If you’re a contractor, this is as good as Decorator’s Row in New York.” We passed antiques alley, the flagstone and paving center, and the kitchen and bathroom remodeling district and I made a right onto the stretch of road where Nina’s building was located. As we pulled into Nina’s parking lot, I told Lucy about Mazzo’s recently reduced circumstances and her fervent wish that the economy would bounce back so there would be more philandering husbands.

“That’s the most twisted logic I’ve heard in a long time. It would make a very salable feature film.”

“You two are gonna get along just fine.”

We had to wait for three men balancing a massive slice of soapstone on a dolly to pass before we settled into a spot around the corner from the Mazzo Agency.

“What was that?” Lucy said, watching the hunk of rock go by.

“I hear the apartment dweller in you coming out. That’s a slab of stone which will be cut into a countertop.”

Lucy had been wrong about Ellis Damon, but she wasn’t wrong about something else-when people lie, they frequently use or say something familiar because they think it will make the lie more plausible. McGinley may not have been in Springfield to help his friend The Countertop King get his business off the ground, but perhaps he got the idea after a visit to Nina Mazzo. I remembered how hot Nina kept her office, so I peeled off my jacket.

“Are you expecting to come to blows?” Lucy asked as I locked the car.

If Nina was surprised to see me, she hid it well.

“How about that-you know I have another prospective client who looks just like you, I think she said her name was Thelma Turner. And who might you be, Etta James?”