"I do know," he said, and he would have told it to few other creatures that lived. "I had a younger sister myself."
"Even after he left home—can you imagine the way he continued to watch over me? How often he stepped in and used a word or two to straighten out a lonesome, confused, unhappy girl whom nobody else liked; how he steered me toward the kind of people I can feel at home with; how he healed the breach with my parents, when I had to get away and they didn't understand; how he got me out of a wretched business office and into the museum, where I can like what I'm doing and believe it has some value. You knew Bruce, did you know that side of him?"
"No," said Kintyre. "He wouldn't have talked about it. Still, yes, I can imagine."
"And he was lured somewhere, and tortured, and murdered," she said. The lacquered fingernails stood white where she caught the table edge.
Kintyre didn't touch her himself, but he held out his hand. She gripped it for a while. Her face was lowered. When she let go and looked up again, he saw tears.
"I'm sorry," she gulped. "I promised not to bawl, and then—"
Kintyre let her have it out. It didn't take long, nor was it noisy.
She said at last, in a wire-thin voice: "Why was it done? Who would do it, to him of all people in the world?"
"I don't know," said Kintyre. "I just don't know."
"But you can guess, can't you? You know everyone concerned. That writer he was having the fight with. That businessman who owns the thesis manuscript. Gene Michaelis. You could be wrong! Even his girl, God help me for saying it. Who?"