To most of the people in La Mesa, Rose French’s only claim to fame was the brilliant explosiveness of her periodic binges. Frank Clyde and a few others knew that she had been a great star in the days of silent pictures, had married and left five husbands, and that Rose at sixty still had the vitality of a force of nature. Frank was a young social worker who sometimes let his feelings color his work, and Rose was his favorite case history. When that history came to a sudden end in a deserted garden, Frank was deeply affected. The coroner’s jury pronounced Rose dead of natural causes, but Frank had his doubts. They deepened when her past began to emerge in the present. One of the shadowy five to whom she had once been married turned up in La Mesa, prosperous and aggressive. Then the implausibly moronic couple in whose garden the body was found began to behave like people with something to hide. Frank became a detective in spite of himself.