Page 114 of Whistle

She shook her head.

“Those trains... I don’t see them on the dining room table this time,” Harry said.

“After what happened to his father, Auden didn’t want to play with them anymore. We boxed them up and put them in the garage.”

“Maybe you could return it.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “The man I bought it from, he was so nice. Auden might want to get it out again someday.”

“Well,” Harry said, putting his hands on his knees and pushing himself up. “I wanted to drop by and see how you were doing. I won’t take up any more of your time.”

She saw him to the door and closed it softly behind him as he went to his car.

So much for that theory, he thought, keying the ignition. Edwin Nabler hadn’t set foot in the Pidgeon house. But that didn’t mean he was ready to abandon his hunch quite yet.

When he got to Wendell Comstock’s house, there was a moving van backed into the driveway. Two men were walking a couch up the ramp and into the back of the truck when Harry wandered through the open door of the house. Save for a couple of chairs, the living room was empty. He found Wendell in the kitchen, using a tape gun to seal a large cardboard box, one of several on the counter. The table and chairs were gone, making the room seem larger than it normally would have.

“Mr. Comstock.”

The greeting startled the man. He turned, and when he saw the chief he put down the tape gun. “Oh, hello,” he said.

Harry waved a hand at the boxes. “I see you’ve made some big decisions.”

“I can’t be here any longer. Got a sister across the border in New York State, a lead on a job there in Fenelon. Need to put some distance between me and this place. Something I can help you with?”

“Not... really. Bit of a follow-up.”

He asked Wendell basically the same questions he had asked Christina Pidgeon. Any service calls? Workmen in the house? Deliveries?

No, no, and no.

“Those trains that were set up in the basement? Someone do that for you?”

Another no.

“What are you getting at?” Wendell asked. “You think someone who’d been in the house came back and killed Nadine?”

“Not suggesting anything. Just asking.”

“Because they ruled it a suicide. That’s what the coroner said. You saying something different?” Wendell became agitated. “Because if you think something different happened, then I have a right to know!”

Harry shook his head definitively. “No, Mr. Comstock. I haveno evidenceto suggest that.”

“Then what the fuck are you doing here?”

Harry raised a palm. “I’ll let you get on with what you were doing.”

As he walked out of the kitchen, he stepped aside to make way for one of the movers coming up the steps from the basement, carrying a cardboard box withtideprinted on the side. When they were outside, Harry heard one of the movers say to the other, “I think he said that wasn’t going, but... you know what, just throw it in the truck.”

Neither the Pidgeons nor the Comstocks had been visited by Nabler. This so-called commonality wasn’t proving to amount to much.

Harry had one last stop planned. He parked out front of the Dorfman house. There was, on the roof, a slightly darker patch on the shingles where Dorfman’s body was immolated.

His mother, June, looking like someone who’d not slept since Harry’s last time here, came to the door after he rang the bell.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said, and began to cry. “Thank you for trying to save my son.”

She invited him into the kitchen and asked if he would like a drink. Scotch, a beer, vodka?

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