“So I’ve heard.”

So much for catching up on the life of Connie Ting. What is her problem? I liked the high-school version better.

“Mother’s puttering around in the kitchen,” she says.

“Why don’t you follow me back there?”

Amy, bless her art historian’s soul, would love this house: delicate vases, painted fans, teak furniture, jade, calligraphy, and paintings compose a veritable museum. All of it could be antiques, but, given my knowledge of art, for all I know this stuff may have been won at a carnival by turning a hand crank and dredging up junky trinkets. It looks expensive, but I’m easily fooled about these things.

Mrs. Ting (whom I wouldn’t have recognized) is seated at a yellow kitchen table drinking what appears to be a cup of tea. She is wearing a wind suit which is startlingly similar to the one Angela had on yesterday. Her hair is snow-white and pulled into a tight bun behind her head. Gold-rimmed spectacles magnify her eyes as she looks up at me. Connie asks, “Mother, do you remember Gideon Page? He’d like to visit with you for just a few minutes.”

Connie isn’t going to make this easy. Mrs. Ting gives me such a blank stare that I wonder if she is senile.

“Hello, Mrs. Ting,” I say loudly as if she were deaf, although Connie has spoken in a normal tone.

“How are you? I used to play tennis during the summers with Tommy. He always beat me.”

Mrs. Ting studies my face.

“You look like your grandpa,” she says, her thick accent making the years drop away.

“He saved Willie’s life. He made Willie go to Memphis to have his appendix out.

No hospital around here. Willie almost died.”

I blink, uncomfortable with the irony. My grandfather saved her husband’s life, now, I’m trying to save the life of the man who is charged with killing him. But what did Mr. Carpenter say? My grandfather didn’t cure anybody. Still, he knew enough to opine it wasn’t a stomach ache caused by a bad bowl of rice.