“It can’t be her father.” His mind had cracked after six months in a German concentration camp, and he refused to acknowledge Gabriella’s death when my father wrote to inform him of it. I’d had to translate the letter, in which he said he was too old to travel but wished Gabriella well on her concert tour. Anyway, if he was alive still he’d be almost a hundred.

Maybe Gabriella’s brother Italo was searching for her: he had disappeared in the maelstrom of the war, but Gabriella always hoped he survived. Or her first voice teacher, Francesca Salvini, whom Gabriella longed to see again, to explain why she had never fulfilled Salvini’s hopes for her professional career. As Gabriella lay in her final bed in Jackson Park Hospital with tubes ringing her wasted body, her last messages had been for me and for Salvini. This morning it dawned on me for the first time how hurtful my father must have found that. He adored my mother, but for him she had only the quiet fondness of an old friend.

I realized my hands around the newspaper were wet with sweat, that paper and print were clinging to my palms. With an embarrassed laugh I put the paper down and washed off the ink under the kitchen tap. It was ludicrous to spin my mind with conjectures when all I had to do was phone Malcolm Ranier. I went to the living room and pawed through the papers on the piano for the phone book. Ranier seemed to be a lawyer with offices on La Salle Street, at the north end where the pricey new buildings stand.

His was apparently a solo practice. The woman who answered the phone assured me she was Mr. Ranier’s assistant and conversant with all his files. Mr. Ranier couldn’t speak with me himself now, because he was in conference. Or court. Or the John.

“I’m calling about the notice in this morning’s paper, wanting to know the whereabouts of Gabriella Sestieri.”

“What is your name, please, and your relationship with Mrs. Sestieri?” The assistant left out the second syllable so that the name came out as “Sistery.”