“No and no. What about you? She spent a couple of days at your place…”

“No. I hardly saw her. She was off visiting friends from high school. You know, off at dinner, back at two a.m., sleep to noon, and then paddle around the house until she started all over again.”

Sally Freeman-Richards took a deep breath. “Well, Scott,” she said slowly, “I’m not sure that it’s something to get all that bent out of shape about. If she’s having some sort of a problem, sooner or later she’s going to bring it up with one of us. Maybe we should give Ashley her space until then. And I don’t know that it makes much sense to assume there’s a problem before we hear that there is one directly from her. I think you’re reading too much into it.”

What a reasonable response, Scott thought. Very enlightened. Very liberal. Very much in keeping with who they were and where they lived. And, he thought, utterly wrong.

She stood up and wandered over to an antique cabinet in a corner of the living room, taking a second to adjust a Chinese plate displayed on a stand. A frown crossed her face as she stepped away and examined it. In the distance, I could hear some children playing loudly. But in the room where our conversation continued, there was nothing other than a ticktock of tension.

“How, precisely, did Scott know something was wrong?” she asked, repeating my question back to me.

“Correct. The letter, as you quote it, could have been almost anything. His ex-wife was wise not to jump to conclusions.”

“A very lawyerly approach?” she demanded.

“If you mean cautious, yes.”

“And wise, you think?” she questioned. She waved her hand in the air, as if dismissing my concerns. “He knew because he knew because he knew. I suppose you might call it instinct, but that seems simplistic. It’s a little bit of that leftover animal sense that lurks somewhere within all of us, you know, when you get the feeling that something is not right.”