"You're sure the box was hers? She might have been holding it for someone else."

"Irene recognized the teacup. I could see it in her face for the half second before she started screaming."

"Let's see what else we've got here," Dietz said. "Maybe there's more."

We spent a few minutes carefully unpacking the box. Every piece of china-cups, saucers, creamer, sugar bowl, teapot with its rose-sprigged lid, some fifteen pieces in all-was wrapped in the same edition of the paper. There was nothing else of significance in the carton and the news itself didn't reveal anything of note.

I said, "I think we ought to get Irene out of bed and find out what's going on."

Dietz picked up his car keys and we were out the door.

We rang the Gershes' bell, waiting impatiently while Jermaine came to the door and admitted us. I had pictured her tidying things in our absence, but the living room looked exactly as it had when we'd left it, a little more than an hour ago. The couch cushions were still askew where Irene's thrashing had displaced them, the birth certificate, death certificate, and the "Vital Documents" file still strewn haphazardly across the coffee table. I caught a whiff of drying urine. The characteristic silence had descended again, as if life itself here were muffled and indistinct.

When I asked to see Clyde or Irene, Jermaine's dark face became stony. She crossed her arms, body language echoing her manner, which was clearly uncooperative. She said Mrs. Gersh was sleeping and she refused to wake her. Mr. Gersh was having "a little lay-down" and she refused to disturb him, too.

"This is really important," I said. "All I need is five minutes."

I could see her face set with stubbornness. "No, ma'am. I'm not about to bother them poor peoples. You leave them lay."

I glanced at Dietz. The shrug was written in his face. I looked back at Jermaine and indicated the coffee table with a nod. "Can I pick up the papers I left here earlier?"

"What papers? I don't know nothin' about that."

"For now all I need are the forms Irene and I were working on," I said. "I can come back later for a chat with her."

Her gaze was pinned on me with suspicion. I kept my expression bland. "Go on, then," she said. "If that's all you want."

"Thanks." Casually, I crossed to the coffee table and picked up the birth certificate and the entire document file. Thirty seconds later, we were out on the porch.

"What'd you do that for?" Dietz said as we headed down the steps.

"It just seemed like a good idea, I said.

22

I asked him to pull around the corner and park in an alleyway. We sat there in the dappled shade of an overhanging oak while I sorted through the contents of the Gershes' "Vital Documents" file. Nothing looked that vital to me. There was a copy of the will, which I handed to Dietz. "See if this tells us anything astonishing."

He took the stapled pages, reaching automatically toward his shirt pocket. I thought he was looking for a cigarette, but it turned out to be a pair of reading glasses with half-rims that he'd tucked there instead. He put them on and then looked over at me.

"What?" he said.

I nodded judiciously. "The glasses are good. Make you look like a serious adult."

"You think so?" He craned so he could see himself in the rearview mirror. He crossed his eyes and stuck his tongue out, just to show how adult he could look.

He began leafing through the will while I glanced at insurance policies, the title to the house, a copy of the emission inspection information for a vehicle they owned, an American Express flight insurance policy. "God, this is boring," I said.

"So's this."

I looked over at him. I could see his gaze skimming down the lines of print. I returned to my pile of papers. I picked up Irene's birth certificate and squinted at it in the light.

"What's that?"

"Irene's birth certificate." I told him the story she'd told me about the autobiography for her senior English class. "Something about it bothers me, but I can't figure out what it is."

"It's a photocopy," he said.

"Yeah, but what's the big whoopee-do about that?"

"Let me take a look." He placed it up against the windshield, letting the light shine through. The heading read: state of california department of health VITAL STATISTICS, STANDARD CERTIFICATE OF BIRTH. The form thereafter was comprised of a series of two-line boxes into which the data had been typed. He held it close to his face, like a man whose eyesight is failing rapidly. "Lot of these lines are broken and the type itself isn't very crisp. We ought to check with Sacramento and track down the original."