“So she said strange things?” Petrie asks.

He wants it to be simple, this Q&A, simple questions and simple answers. A constricted inquiry: the color of the car, the caliber of the bullet. You see that his life in rooted in the sturdy matter-of-factness of evidence. He wants identifications that are positive and fingerprints that match. How will you ever be able to show him the cloud and the mist, the view blurred by rain, bad lighting, distance, prints whose whorls spin into the unknowable void?

You look at the notepad he balances on his lap, the small blue pen with which he has been scribbling notes. One of them says “Bleak House.”

“Is mentioning a book title strange?” you ask. “You seem to think it is.”

“Perhaps I do,” you admit. “Did.”

“Why would you think that?” Petrie asks.

“I don’t know,” you answer. “It’s just that it was strange, the way Diana was doing it again. Talking in that way. She hadn’t done it since the Old Man died”

Petrie appears briefly to return to that rainy day ten years earlier, a young detective then, thinner, but only slightly, everything else the same, the self-confidence, trusting his eyes and ears, the testimony of voices that come from moving lips.

“The weather was dreary,” you add softly. “That day. And cold. We had trouble with the fire.”

You wonder to what extent Petrie recalls the room’s stark details, the Old Man dead in his chair, eyes closed, mouth open, Diana beside him, cradling him softly, you on the tattered brocade sofa, peering out into the backyard where a mound of ashes still smoldered, the remains of what had once been a bathrobe, a pair of tattered house shoes, a large green pillow.

“So this manner of speech struck you as some kind of reversion?” Petrie asks.

Reversion. A technical word. The sort Petrie clearly prefers and may have encountered in one of his criminal psychology classes: Prior to psychotic breaks, certain reversions in behavior may present themselves. These include bed-wetting, infantile speech, and various forms of obsessive nostalgia.

“Like someone who suddenly starts using an old accent,” Petrie explains, “from the place he’d lived as a child, returning to the past. Did Diana do much of that?”

“Just using literary references,” you tell him. “No other … reversion.”

Petrie is obviously disappointed by your answer, would have preferred designated signposts.

“All right,” he says. “Did you notice any other changes in Diana?” There were so many, you think now, and they had seemed so large.

But were they? Were they really?

“Yes,” you answer. “There were other changes.”

“Like what?”

The list is long. You pick one randomly.

“Her music. She’d always listened to a wide range of music. Classical. Folk. Rock. You name it. But a wide range. After Jason’s death it became very narrow, repetitive. Only one singer.”

“Who?”

You see the CD pass from Diana’s hand to Patty’s, and in that vision, now so fraught with tragic error, you wonder that you have not made those same hands tremble.

Petrie’s pen comes to attention. “Who?”

You feel the name in your mouth like bits of bone in an evil potion. “Kinsetta Tabu.”