The Eighth Day by John Case

in front of the pet store window for Caleigh’s “critter fix.” She was crazy about animals—their apartment building’s strict no-pet policy was the bane of her existence. Every Sunday, she pored over the real-estate listings, looking for a “pet-friendly” place. She dragged Danny to them, but the rental market was so tight that the apartments on offer were, without exception, “the real dogs”—as he put it.
    By now Caleigh and the pet store owner, Magda, were good friends. Tonight, as usual, he and Caleigh had to go inside the store so a puppy (this time an “otter hound”) could be picked up and cooed over.
    Five minutes later, they arrived at their favorite Italian restaurant, I Matti, where the maître d’ greeted them with a theatrical “
Buona sera!”
Clasping Caleigh’s hands in his own, Marco asked, as he always did, if Danny was treating her right. And when she admitted that he was, the maître d’s stern look dissolved into a smile and he ushered the two of them to a primo table overlooking the street.
    When he’d gone, Danny murmured that “the guy’s in love with you—you know that, don’t you?”
    Caleigh rolled her eyes and waved it off. “That’s just Marco. He’s like that with everybody.”
    “Right! And that’s why we get this table—you and me and, if he’s lucky, the mayor. I don’t think so.”
    “Well . . .” She shrugged.
    When they’d ordered, she said, “Tell me about the case.”
    “ ‘The case’?”
    She blushed. “Yeah! That’s what it is, isn’t it? You’re on a ‘case.’ Just like Nero Wolfe.”
    Danny frowned. “Nero Wolfe was a fat guy. And old! And he never left his apartment.”
    “Well,” she said, “except for that.”
    He shrugged. “It’s going okay, I guess. Lucrative, anyway.”
    Soon a plate of bruschetta pomodoro arrived with glasses of Greco di Tufo, and he told her about his disappointing visit to George Mason University. “So, after that, I went to the courthouse.”
    “What for?”
    “The guy’s will.”
    “But what’s the point? I mean, I’m sure a will might be interesting, but—” A bite of bruschetta fractured into little cubes of oily tomato. “Yikes,” she muttered, and pushed them into a mound on her plate. “I might not be up to the challenge of pasta,” she confided.
    It had been a decade since she’d come east from Pierre, and Danny could still hear the Plains in the flat vowels of her voice, just as he could see the Sioux blood in the high cheekbones of her face. She was as polished as a pearl and as hip as anybody, but even Swarthmore, Harvard, and Washington hadn’t been able to obliterate the farm girl in her. She knew not just how to drive a tractor but how to repair its engine.
    His own bruschetta exploded when he took a bite, and Caleigh giggled. “We may not be ready for dining in public,” she decided. “So anyway, what about this will?”
    “I think the guy was an orphan,” he told her.
    “Really? Why?”
    “Because he left everything to this charity in New York. Otherwise, the courthouse was kind of a bust. The will was five years old, and there wasn’t anything in it about his papers. No ‘directed disposition of personal items’—nothing.”
    “What about his executor?” she asked.
    Danny shook his head. “It’s just a law firm—the one that drew up the will.”
    “So . . .” Caleigh winced. “He didn’t have any friends? Relatives?”
    “Not that I can see.”
    “That’s terrible!”
    Which was just like her,
Danny mused—feeling sorry for somebody she’d never even heard of. And a
dead
somebody at that.
    “Then what happens to his papers?” she asked.
    “I don’t know.”
    “But they might let you have them, right?”
    Danny frowned. “Mmnnn . . . maybe not.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because there are lawyers involved and lawyers are funny about ‘papers’ and . . . technically, they belong to the beneficiary.”
    “You mean, this charity—”
    “The