Gaits of Heaven

shit.”
    “Most secrets are online, anyway,” said Leah.
    Caprice nodded.
    “The information that patients confide in their therapists is very definitely not online,” said Rita. “Kevin, thank you. I’ll have to take precautions I should’ve taken anyway.” After Kevin left, the discussion continued.
    “Maybe the aim was to find information to discredit someone for some other reason,” I said. “Something to use in a divorce, maybe.” I thought of Anita the Fiend. Hiring some thug to obtain personal information about Steve was exactly the kind of thing she’d have done during their divorce. Fortunately, he hadn’t been seeing a psychiatrist. Besides, marrying Anita was the only discreditable thing Steve had ever done, and it was public record.
    “The aim might not have been practical,” said Rita. “The more I think about it, the more it feels symbolic. Penetrating a presumed repository of secret knowledge? It was probably more a plea for help than anything else.”
    “Some people just like knowing other people’s secrets,” Caprice said. “My mother was like that. She teased Daddy. She’d tell him to remember that she knew all his secrets. She did that with other people, too. Maybe that’s what got her—” To my astonishment, Caprice broke into tears.
    Ever so gently, Rita said, “Maybe this is a thought you need to finish, Caprice.”
    Between sobs, Caprice said, “She used to get me to help. On the Web. I’m good at that. It was stupid stuff, really. If people were older than they said they were, how much they paid for their houses, whether they owed back taxes... nothing anyone would’ve murdered her for knowing.”
    Leah took her hand. “But you still wish you hadn’t helped.”
    “It made me feel... dirty.”
    “You probably didn’t have much choice,” Leah said.
    “I did. I just didn’t know it.”
    Leah hugged Caprice, and then Rita and I did, too. Lady and Sammy crowded in. I like to think that the dogs were sympathetic. What I know is that if there’s one thing dogs hate, it’s being left out. Not that human beings like it. I, for example, had a disquieting thought that raised a question in my mind, and the question made me feel isolated. When Kevin had come here to question Caprice, she’d greeted him as Lieutenant Dennehy. Her use of his rank had struck me because I’d remembered that on the day of Eumie’s death, in the Brainard-Greens’ yard, I’d wanted to soften everything for her and consequently had introduced Kevin just as Kevin Dennehy. Furthermore, none of us ever called him Lieutenant Dennehy. So, how had Caprice known his rank? The answer was obvious: Google. She’d checked him out on the Web. Since she’d met Kevin only after Eumie’s death, she’d done the search for herself, not for her mother. Kevin’s rank was an entirely public matter; there was nothing even remotely secret about it. Furthermore, it was becoming common practice to use Internet search engines to find out who was who, hence the transitive verb to Google, as in She Googled him. The point wasn’t that she’d done it, though; the point was that she’d put the blame for using the Web in that fashion entirely on her mother. Eumie, Caprice claimed, had liked knowing things about people. Eumie, I thought, wasn’t the only one.
     

CHAPTER 26
     
    On Saturday evening, Rita sits across the table from Quinn Youngman, who is eating a grass-fed organic baby duckling with farro, ramps, favas, cardoons, and guanciale, or so the menu promised. Rita’s dish, also described quite grandly, tastes to her like a plain roast chicken with mashed potatoes. Next to the chicken is a tiny puddle of violently red liquid. She wonders whether the puddle is, in fact, a sauce or whether it is blood that accidently dripped from the cut finger of someone in the kitchen. Consequently, she avoids tasting it.
    “Pleasant little bistro,” Quinn remarks.
    “Very,” says Rita, who thinks that Quinn probably likes this overpriced establishment because it is in a cellar and thus reminds him of the coffeehouses of his radical youth. Her own youth, which was thoroughly conformist, took place twenty years after the time of Quinn’s turbulence, so she has only his word for what that era of his life was like. Their age difference, she tells herself, means nothing. Quinn Youngman, M.D., is an attractive older man, an appropriate choice for her. Of his rebelliousness, nothing remains except the memories on