Swan Dive

sister. Then what?
    ”Oh. Then I get to have lunch with Niño and his ladies.”
    I’d always heard that widowers were corruptible.
    ”Please.”

    The drive to Epton took about an hour. I’d looked up the family name in the telephone book, and it was the only one in town. A stop at a gas station pointed me toward the street, and the center of gravity of the dozen or so cars parked along the road appeared to be the address.
    I slowed down. The shallow lawn rose steeply to the stoop. The inner door to the house was open but the outer, screened door was closed, the upper part filled by the broad back of a man in a dark suit. He seemed to be talking to someone, then swiveled sideways to let a young woman in a knee-length black dress edge past him and outside. She clicked down the path in modest heels, face downcast and palms locked onto elbows.
    An old woman fussedly came halfway out the doorway and yelled something at her in Greek. This one wore black too, only more so: shoes, stockings, long skirt, sweater, even kerchief on her head. The younger woman ignored her, the older one giving a curiously European ”good riddance” wave before going back into the house.
    I pulled by the younger one. Her features matched the ones I’d seen in Holt’s mug shot of Teri, but plainer and somehow less vital, the way a Xerox of a Xerox used to look.
    She reached the sidewalk and turned to walk in the direction I was driving. I accelerated to the first empty stretch of curb and parked. I got out of the car and came around to the passenger side while she was still twenty feet away. Drawing closer, she treated me warily, as though she had just noticed me standing there. I could see her left hand: no engagement or wedding ring.
    ”Ms. Papangelis?”
    ”Yes?”
    I showed her my ID quickly as I said, ”My name’s Cuddy. I’m investigating the death of your sister.” She sighed and closed her eyes. ”Again?”
    ”I’m afraid so.”
    She opened her eyes and gestured vaguely behind her. ”Today?”
    ”The sooner we get all the information we can, the better our chances of—”
    ”Okay, okay.” She looked up the street. ”Would it be all right if we just walked around for a while? I’m kind of tired of the house and all.”
    ”Sure.”
    We continued on the route she’d started, past the old homes with narrow driveways and detached rear garages that could have been in any blue-collar neighborhood within fifty miles.
    ”Ask your questions.”
    ”We still don’t know for sure whether the killer was after Marsh or your sister. Can I call her Teri?”
    ”Theresa. You can call me Sandy or Sandra, I don’t care. But Teri was her... the name she used with her customers. I always called her Theresa.”
    ”It might help us focus on who was the target if you can tell me something about her.”
    ”Like what? I mean, I already answered all the questions you guys had the last time.”
    ”Tell me what you haven’t said already. What you think I ought to know.”
    ”God. What you ought to know.” She took a breath. ”There were just the two of us, we had a brother, but he died while he was being born. Theresa was five years older than me, and always in trouble. I mean like school trouble, grades and attendance and that kind of thing. I was always the perfect student, skipped two grades, my father scraped and saved to send me through parochial school, you know? He would have done the same for Theresa, but she didn’t care, and probably didn’t have the aptitude to do the work. So she went one way and I went another.”
    ”Which way did you go?”
    ”Teachers’ college. Framingham State . Got out last year, now I’m teaching in Salem . Salem , New Hampshire , not Massachusetts .”
    ”Did you stay in touch with your sister much?”
    ”Depends on how you mean. She and Mom don’t... didn’t get along too well. When she found out about what Theresa was doing...”
    ”When was that? That your mother found out.”
    ”Not really till all this. I mean, my father suspected, for a long time, I think. But my mom... do you know much about Greek families?”
    I thought back to what Eleni had told me about the men she hated in Greece . ”Not much.”
    ”Well, it’s no disgrace for a man to go see a... they’d use the word ‘whore.’ The men joke about it in the living room, while the women make believe they can’t hear them from the kitchen. But it’s a real disgrace for your daughter to turn into one. That’s one