I found Julie Marbury on a Friday afternoon in a rented house at the end of a dead-end road on the south side of the city, a two-story place with a cracked walk and a bare yard and a cat asleep on the porch rail. I had looked her up the way anyone looks anyone up, and it had taken forty minutes, and then I drove out there and sat in my car at the curb for a long time before I knocked.
She opened the door in a sweater and jeans with paint on them. She was smaller than I expected. That was the first thing I thought, and it annoyed me, that my first thought was about her size.
"Elizabeth," she said. Not a question.
"You know who I am."
"Yes." She stepped back. "You'd better come inside. The cat will get out."
I went inside. The house was full of half-finished things, canvases stacked aga
