“She asked if she could. I heard her saying to her mother that she had to tell me something.”

“What was it she had to tell you?”

“That she had her first bubble bath.”

“Did she also say she coughed?” I was quiet, looking at him. In that moment I understood why people hate lawyers, especially when they’ve been dusted over by one who’s good at the job. “Mr. Noonan, would you like me to repeat the question?”

“No,” I said, wondering where he’d gotten his information. Had these bastards tapped Mattie’s phone? My phone? Both?

Perhaps for the first time I understood on a gut level what it must be like to have half a billion dollars. With that much dough you could tap a lot of telephones. “She said her mother pushed bubbles in her face and she coughed. But she was—”

“Thank you, Mr. Noonan, now let’s turn to—”

“Let him finish,” Bissonette said. I had an idea he had already taken a bigger part in the proceedings than he had expected to, but he didn’t seem to mind. He was a sleepy-looking man with a bloodhound’s mournful, trustworthy face. “This isn’t a courtroom, and you’re not cross-examining him.”

“I have the little girl’s welfare to think of,” Durgin said. He sounded both pompous and humble at the same time, a combination that went together like chocolate sauce on creamed corn. “It’s a responsibility I take very seriously. If I seemed to be badgering you, Mr. Noonan, I apologize.” I didn’t bother accepting his apology—that would have made us both phonies. “All I was going to say is that Ki was laughing when she said it. She said she and her mother had a bubble-fight. When her mother came back on, she was laughing, too.” Durgin had opened the folder Footman had brought him and was paging rapidly through it while I spoke, as if he weren’t hearing a word. “Her mother… Mattie, as you call her.”

“Yes. Mattie as I call her. How do you know about our private telephone conversation in the first place?”

“That’s none of your business, Mr. Noonan.” He selected a single sheet of paper, then closed the folder. He held the paper up briefly, like a doctor studying an X-ray, and I could see it was covered with single-spaced typing. “Let’s turn to your initial meeting with Mary and Kyra Devore. That was on the Fourth of July, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.” Durgin was nodding. “The morning of the Fourth. And you met Kyra Devote first.”

“Yes.”

“You met her first because her mother wasn’t with her at that time, was she?”

“That’s a badly phrased question, Mr. Durgin, but I guess the answer is yes.”

“I’m flattered to have my grammar corrected by a man who’s been on the bestseller lists,” Durgin said, smiling. The smile suggested that he’d like to see me sitting next to Romeo Bissonette in that first gulag-bound boxcar. “Tell us about your meeting, first with Kyra Devore and then with Mary Devore. Or Mattie, if you like that better.” I told the story. When I was finished, Durgin centered the tape player in front of him. The nails of his pudgy fingers looked as glossy as his lips.

“Mr. Noonan, you could have run Kyra over, isn’t that true?”

“Absolutely not. I was going thirty-five—that’s the speed limit there by the store.

I saw her in plenty of time to stop.”

“Suppose you had been coming the other way, though—heading north instead of south. Would you still have seen her in plenty of time?”

That was a fairer question than some of his others, actually. Someone coming the other way would have had a far shorter time to react.

Still… “Yes,” I said. Durgin went up with the eyebrows. “You’re sure of that?”

“Yes, Mr. Durgin. I might have had to come down a little harder on the brakes, but—” ’5t thirty-five.”

“Yes, at thirty-five. I told you, that’s the speed limit—”

“—on that particular stretch of Route 68. Yes, you told me that. You did. Is it your experience that most people obey the speed limit on that part of the road?”

“I haven’t spent much time on the TR since 1993, so I can’t—”

“Come on, Mr. Noonan—this isn’t a scene from one of your books. Just answer my questions, or we’ll be here all morning.”

“I’m doing my best, Mr. Durgin.” He sighed, put-upon. “You’ve owned your place on Dark Score Lake since the eighties, haven’t you? And the speed limit around the Lakeview General Store, the post office, and Dick Brooks’s All-Purpose Garage-what’s called The North Village—hasn’t changed since then, has it?”

“No,” I admitted. “Returning to my original question, then—in your observation, do most people on that stretch of road obey the thirty-five-mile-an-hour limit?”

“I can’t say if it’s most, because I’ve never done a traffic survey, but I guess a lot don’t.”

“Would you like to hear Castle County Sheriffs Deputy Footman testify on where the greatest number of speeding tickets are given out in TR-90, Mr. Noonan?”

“No,” I said, quite honestly. “Did other vehicles pass you while you were speaking first with Kyra Devore and then with Mary Devore?”

“How many?”

“I don’t know exactly. A couple.”

“Could it have been three?”

“I guess.”

“Five?”

“No, probably not so many.”

“But you don’t know, exactly, do you?”

“Because Kyra Devore was upset.”

“Actually she had it together pretty well for a—”

“Did she cry in your presence?”

“Well… yes.”

“Did her mother make her cry?”

“That’s unfair.”

“As unfair as allowing a three-year-old to go strolling down the middle of a busy highway on a holiday morning, in your opinion, or perhaps not quite as unfair as that?”

“Jeepers, lay off,” Mr. Bissonette said mildly. There was distress on his bloodhound’s face. “I withdraw the question,” Durgin said. “Which one?” I asked. He looked at me tiredly, as if to say he had to put up with assholes like me all the time and he was used to how we behaved. “How many cars went by from the time you picked the child up and carried her to safety to the time when you and the Devores parted company?” I hated that “carried her to safety” bit, but even as I formulated my answer, the old guy was muttering the question into his Stenomask. And it was in fact what I had done. There was no getting around it. “I told you, I don’t know for sure.”

“Well, give me a guesstimate.” Guesstimate. One of my all-time least favorite words. A Paul Harvey word. “There might have been three.”

“Including Mary Devore herself?. Driving a—” He consulted the paper he’d taken from the folder. “—a 1982 Jeep Scout?” I thought of Ki saying Mattie go fast and understood where Durgin was heading now. And there was nothing I could do about it. “Yes, it was her and it was a Scout. I don’t know what year.”

“Was she driving below the posted speed limit, at the posted speed limit, or above the posted speed limit when she passed the place where you were standing with Kyra in your arms?”

She’d been doing at least fifty, but I told Durgin I couldn’t say for sure. He urged me to try-/know you are unfamiliar with the hangman’s knot, Mr. Noonan, but I’m sure you can make one if you really work at it—and I declined as politely as I could.

He picked up the paper again. “Mr. Noonan, would it surprise you to know that two witnesses—Richard Brooks, Junior, the owner of Dick’s All-Purpose Garage, and Royce Merrill, a retired carpenter—claim that Mrs. Devore was doing well over thirty-five when she passed your location?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was concerned with the little girl.”

“Would it surprise you to know that Royce Merrill estimated her speed at sixty miles an hour?”

“That’s ridiculous. When she hit the brakes she would have skidded sideways and landed upside down in the ditch.”

“The skid-marks measured by Deputy Footman indicate a speed of at least fifty miles an hour,” Durgin said. It wasn’t a question, but he looked at me almost roguishly, as if inviting me to struggle a little more and sink a little deeper into this nasty pit. I said nothing. Durgin folded his pudgy little hands and leaned over them toward me. The roguish look was gone.