I stood at the window and watched her go. She hailed a cab at the curb. I kept watching as the cab carried her off into the light stream of Saturday morning traffic. I watched the people passing back and forth on the sidewalk with their newspapers under their arms.

The air coming in from the window was as clean as it gets in Manhattan. I could even smell Christmas in it, the scent of the oncoming cold. I plucked my latest cigarette from my lips and jammed it out in the ashtray on my desk. I felt empty inside. I did not think I would see Chandler Burke again.

I decided to stop thinking about it. I decided not to think at all. I made a couple of phone calls, then climbed into a clean suit and went downstairs. I walked to the donut store on the corner of Lexington. I bought myself some breakfast in a bag and carried it to the local garage. There, I had the attendants exhume my old maroon Dart, the Artful Dodge.

I munched my donut as I left town. I tore a hole in the cap of my coffee cup and sipped from it, steering with one hand. The Dodge and I rolled over the bridge and out of the borough. We headed down to the Long Island Expressway. I kept not thinking. I kept the radio on.

I turned off the L.I.E. and headed into the little brick neighborhoods of Queens. Small trees lined the roads here. Two-story, two-family houses stood close together behind the trees. They were squat brick structures with white curtains shifting at the windows. When I turned a corner, I could see small, square backyards fenced in with chain link behind them. I could see laundry fluttering back there.

Valerie Colt’s house was no different from the others. Two stories of brick. A concrete walk out front. A square of grass out back. As I came up the walk, I could see the blue light of the television flickering behind the white curtains. I could hear bangs and sharp voices and canned laughter. The kids were watching Saturday morning cartoons.

Mrs. Colt opened the door for me. I’d called to let her know I was coming. She was dressed for the occasion in jeans and a pink blouse that set off her red hair. She still wore too much makeup where the wrinkles gathered at her mouth and eyes.

She let me in and led me through a modest kitchen. I glimpsed the kids through a doorway on the right. A boy and a girl, stretched out on their bellies, chins in hands, eyes on tube. Mrs. Colt took me down a hall into a cramped living room. On one wall, glass doors looked out on the backyard. The grass was dead out there. The lone tree was bare and gray. There wasn’t much light coming in. The room seemed dank and shadowy.

She pointed me to a wooden chair. She took the sofa. She folded her hands between her knees. She leaned forward, watched me with her sharp, bright eyes. “You said on the phone you had some questions you wanted to ask.”

“Yes,” I said. I hesitated. I wasn’t really sure now why I had come. “I thought maybe you could give me some … some idea, some insight into the way your husband thought.”

Mrs. Colt leaned forward a little more. “Thought about what?”

I ran a hand up over my head. “Mrs. Colt, I’ve been looking into your husband’s murder,” I said. “And the more I find out, the more I become convinced it had something to do with the time he spent in Sentu.”

She was too smart for that. The corner of her lips curled. “That’s not what you mean, is it? Not really. You don’t mean something to do with Sentu. You mean something to do with Eleanora. Don’t you?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.

Then she startled me with a quick peal of laughter. The sound ran up the scale and drifted away like the last chord of a song. When she laughed like that, I could imagine her as a young girl. An easy, spirited kind of girl who could do things to you with a backward glance. I could see the girl that Colt had fallen for.

“I need to know more about her,” I said. “Are you sure she’s dead? Was there anyone else who … who felt about her the way your husband did? Anyone who might have fought with him for her? Do you know if she … if she …?”

“If she loved Tim back?” said Mrs. Colt. The laugh was still in her voice.

I nodded. “Yes.”

Mrs. Colt smiled wryly at me. She stood up. “Mr. Wells, as it just so happens, I can give you everything you want.” In one corner, there was a small writing desk. It was covered with papers. They lay loose all over the surface, disorganized. But the one she wanted was right on top.

She handed it to me. A crumpled piece of blue stationery. Cheap paper but elegant somehow, womanly. The handwriting was a woman’s, too. Neat and swift and small. A schoolgirl hand. The ink was faded. At the edges of the letter, there were white patches blotting out some of the words. Constant fingering had worn away the surface of the paper.

I glanced up. Mrs. Colt was walking away from me slowly. Her hips swung haughtily as she walked. She turned smartly and settled on the sofa again. She propped her elbows on her knees, folded her hands under her chin. She watched me, smiling. That wry, bitter smile.

For a long time, I could not look at the page in my hand. I knew what it was. I suppose it was what I’d come to find. But I could not look at it. I felt the paper under my fingers. I imagined her touching it, holding it like I was. I lowered my eyes and read.

My dearest love,

Tonight, I think the end is very near. In a week, certainly no more than two, the rebels will be upon us, and so will the holocaust. The city will be put to the torch, the people put to the sword. My small enterprise—which has thrived amidst the day-to-day corruption of the government—will no doubt be among the first “reforms” of the new regime. I, who have seen and survived such reforms before, feel somehow certain that I shall not survive to see another.

I have been wondering—on this warm summer’s night to which you have so unchivalrously left me—I have been wondering why I should feel my fate so heavily. The scrape is similar to others I’ve been in, the odds of escape the same. Why should I feel doomed this time of all others? Why no hope from your ever-hopeful Eleanora?

But of course, that is the answer. It is that I am yourEleanora now. Yours and always yours and yours alone, my darling, my darling …

I looked up. “You found this,” I said. I had to say something. I was embarrassed by the letter, by the passion of it.

Mrs. Colt’s smile had faded. All that was left was a trace of irony at the corner of her lips. Irony and pain. “The police gave it to me,” she said. “They gave me the papers Tim was carrying when he died. The ones they didn’t think they’d be using in their investigation.”

I nodded. I kept nodding as, irresistibly, my eyes were drawn back to the page. The letter went on:

There are now, for me, so many ways to die. That’s the rub of it. Before, there was only the danger of losing my own life. But now—now, you might lose your life and make mine useless, worse than death. Or we might be separated forever somehow so that death would be a comfort. I never feared imprisonment before, but that also would be dying now because it would keep me away from you. I never feared torture before or all the cruelties they devise for people like me. But what if I were disfigured or disabled, rendered, I mean, incapable of giving myself to you? Which is all I want to do always. What good would life be to me then?

Last night, you said that you could not go on living if I died. That, too, murdered me a little. If I knew you would be safe and well, maybe I would not fear this onrushing catastrophe. I wish I could tell you that I do not love you—or even that I hate you—so that you would forget me. But would you believe me? How could you? Say you would not. Say you never could.

Do you know what I think? I think that only people who love each other as much as we do really know the face of death, because only we really know the face of life. And if this fear, this certainty of the end … if this intimacy with death is what we have to pay for our intimacy with living and each other, then I wanted to tell you tonight, my darling, that your smallest kindness to me was worth it, that your whispered word was worth it, that the briefest sight of you was worth it as nothing else could be, and that no matter what happens, I am

Yours, yours, yours,

Eleanora

My love, I thought. Eleanora, my love, my love.

Mrs. Colt’s green eyes were glistening when I looked up now. I saw the pain there, the pain she lived with day by day.

“You see, Mr. Wells,” Mrs. Colt said. Her hands were still tucked under her chin. “You see, you didn’t come here to find out about Tim’s death, did you? You came here to find out about her. All your questions—Is she really dead? Did she really love Tim? I half knew—right from the day I came to your office—I was almost sure that you would come to me like this.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I looked at you and I thought: He’s one of hers, just like Timmy. Just like Timmy: he belongs to her.”

I stared down at the letter. I shook my head, uncomprehending.

Mrs. Colt lifted her chin off her hands. Her back straightened. She gazed at me with towering hurt and pride.

“What is it you want anyway?” she asked me. “What is it men like you want from us?” She smiled quizzically. She really wanted to know. “I was a good wife to Tim, Mr. Wells. I was a wonderful wife.”

I murmured, “I’m sure. I …”

“I was everything he could have asked for.” She gestured at the wrinkled blue page in my hand. “Everything except an illusion.”

My fingers rubbed the paper in my hand, as if to reassure myself that it was real.

But she went on: “She wasn’t like that: all courage and beauty. No one is like that. Not all the time, not day after day. Tim had a romance with her for a few weeks in a dangerous place and it was special. I understand that. But she’s dead now. She’s dead and it’s over and … and I was here. I couldn’t afford to be an illusion, Mr. Wells. I was here day after day.”

I stood up. I walked to the desk with the papers on it. I held Eleanora’s letter for another moment. Then I placed it on top of the pile.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Mrs. Colt said behind me. “You’re thinking that I chose what I have, that I’m kidding myself.”

I faced her a moment. I felt tired. Very tired. Too tired to think. “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

She didn’t care what I said. “Maybe I am,” she continued. “But you’re kidding yourself, too. You fooled yourself into thinking Tim’s murder had to do with Eleanora, but it’s just you … it’s just the way you feel … it’s …”

The words were choked off. She shivered. She hugged her shoulders and turned her head so I couldn’t see her face.

I stood where I was, near the desk. I stared at her. I was shaken by what she’d said. I had known it was true, deep down. I had known it was true all along. But when she said it aloud, it suddenly struck me with full force: Colt’s murder was not about Eleanora. It never had been.

Everything seemed to change the moment I acknowledged that. It was as if I’d been sitting in a room while twilight came. As if I hadn’t really noticed it was getting dark. It was as if Mrs. Colt had come in then and said simply, “Why are you sitting in the dark like this?” and hit the light switch. All at once, everything seemed clear.

All at once, I knew who had killed Tim Colt.