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find.”
    Like Jutta Hald.
    “Did he leave a suicide note?
    “Just ‘Goodbye’ and a Mallarme poem on the typewriter. One my mother loved.”
    Every poem has an unwritten line. In this case, Aimée thought, a tragic one.
    She thought again of Jutta Hald.
    “Sorry to ask, but was he holding the gun?” It would have had to be a large caliber for a bullet to cause splatter like that.
    “I think so … no, it had fallen onto the floor.”
    “It fell on the floor?” she said. Something didn’t add up.
    “The room was dark, Papa was slumped over.”
    Had shock confused Christian Figeac?
    “Over his desk?”
    Christian Figeac’s face contorted. “Maybe it fell when I tried to pull him up.”
    The desk and chair were in the middle of the room, the wall a few feet away. “Was it a handgun?”
    He nodded, adding, “Papa drank, a lot. We wiped up most of the whiskey.”
    And the evidence of foul play if any had existed.
    “Were the flics suspicious?”
    “They weren’t involved. It was a suicide. Papa always said true writers die for their art.”
    “How’s that?”
    “Molière, for example—he died in his chair onstage at the Comédie-Française.”
    She walked past the desk. “Where was the manuscript he was working on and his research notes?”
    Figeac’s eyes welled with tears. “Idrissa said there were things in boxes. I don’t know.”
    He sniffled, rubbing his dirty sleeve across his eyes.
    Aimée bent, then stopped. Footprints trailed across the dust.
    Either someone had walked backward in his own footsteps, or he had floated up to the ceiling. She wasn’t so certain it hadn’t been the latter. Stale dead air filled the space. The calendar on the wall was opened to July….
    “Where’s the gun now?” she asked.
    Christian Figeac looked stricken, as if his memory had blanked. “So much happened at once …” he trailed off.
    “What kind of gun was it?”
    “Papa’s prized possession was a fancy-handled one, a gift from Hemingway, his favorite author. They drank in the Ritz bar after the war. He kept it over there.”
    Aimée looked. A plaque beneath empty glass read .25- CALIBER DESIGNED BY TOCHER FOR HEMINGWAY . The outline where a small pistol had rested was visible against the yellowed background.
    “The autopsy results?”
    “No flics , no autopsy. Our family’s tired of public circuses.”
    She knew, in cases of suicide, families had the right to refuse an autopsy and insist on immediate burial. The police would be happy to declare it a suicide if the corpse was that of an old geezer who drank. Even more so if he’d left a note. Or if he was a depressed writer suffering from writer’s block.
    But Romain Figeac, according to his son, didn’t fit the latter category. And the wall smudges bothered her.
    Still, she was here to find out about her mother. And Christian Figeac wasn’t asking her to investigate his father’s death. Just his ghosts.
    “Papa’s big fear was when he died someone would take photos and sell them.” He looked away. “Like they did of my mother.”
    Not only bad taste, Aimée thought, but sick.
    “Where would your father have kept his files?”
    No answer.
    Aimée turned around.
    Christian Figeac had disappeared.
    Aimée walked toward the kitchen. She wanted to go through Romain Figeac’s papers, search for connections to her mother, Jutta, or Haader-Rofmein. The similarity of Jutta’s and Figeac’s deaths was inescapable.
    “Monsieur Figeac?”
    No answer.
    She edged down the hall, peering into the dining room. The Prix Goncourt plaque, tarnished, and a médaille d’honneur sat in a dusty glass case. A framed yellowed newspaper clipping about his mother’s Cannes Film Festival nomination occupied one wall.
    She agreed with Christian Figeac—the place felt like a museum. A frisson of apprehension went through her. For a split second she wondered if he would follow the route of his parents … with his girlfriend gone, in a bout of panic, he might be