Unlike Worthington's family, who have refused to speak to any member of the press -- before banging down the phone, one aunt informed me that they were "united in their quest for privacy" -- the Jacketts were initially open after Worthington's death, though their lawyer later turned off the spigot. Part of it was because they're trying to win custody of Ava and seem to think that the media might help them do so, although all the tabloids have done is point out the discrepancy between Jackett's shellfish-constable salary and Ava's substantial inheritance, and part of it was because they've been through therapy over Jackett's affair with Christa -- a lot of therapy.

"I never wanted to be a fisherman," explains Jackett, who has a tough, deliberate way of moving and speaking that's bit De Niro-esque. "My dad was a fisherman. I hated fishing! But Susan got pregnant when I was 22: I was fucked. I think I felt like my life had passed me by. I think that's why I had this affair."

"You think," sighs Susan, "after 30 years, you know a person. But I guess we had just drifted in separate directions."

"I was having a midlife crisis," protests Jackett.

Possibly as a result of all this therapy, the Jacketts were able to forge a relationship with Worthington, who had asked Jackett to tell his wife about Ava by the time Ava turned 2 -- she wanted to be ready with an answer when Ava asked who her dad was. "I guess in Europe or somewhere, that kind of request would be normal," says Jackett. "For me, it took some getting used to. But somehow my wife, an amazing woman, was able to transcend the emotions of hurt and betrayal, and take her feelings in a direction of focusing on the child." He says this often, like a mantra: "The child is innocent."

In the last year of her life, Worthington added another complaint to her long list of woes: money.

Worthington asked Jackett to put Ava on his health insurance, and he complied; Jackett, at the urging of his very understanding daughter, asked Worthington over for tortillas and baby-sat once in a while when she ran errands. Worthington had given the Jacketts a car seat so they could take Ava to their home in their car. Ava was supposed to come over for a visit the day Worthington was murdered, but at the last minute, Worthington heard about a play group that had invited over a music teacher to tutor the kids, so she asked to reschedule. "Yeah," says Jackett, smirking a little, "Christa was always trying to introduce Ava to cult-cha."

"Well, we were disappointed, because we wanted to see the baby," says Susan, and then, much more emotionally: "Honestly, we were becoming friends! Christa just loved that child so much, it was infectious." The Jacketts insist they are ready for the challenge of raising this citified woman's daughter: First, of course, they have to break the news to Ava that Jackett is her father. Worthington never had the chance.

In the last year of her life, Worthington added another complaint to her long list of woes: money. Though she cared little about what money could buy her, she became obsessed with the freedom it would afford both her and Ava in the future. How was she supposed to write fiction, she complained to friends, if she always had to worry about the next paycheck? "It wasn't that Christa felt that the world owed her a living," says friend Steve Radlauer, "but she did feel that there was enough money around with her name on it that she didn't need to struggle with stupid articles that she didn't want to write."

Though Worthington reportedly received $1,700 from her trust each month, the big money was still controlled by Toppy (Worthington had no siblings, so presumably it was all to pass onto her upon his death). She didn't quite know how much there was there, but she did know that he had cash on hand: After her mother died, he'd sold their waterfront Hingham home and moved into a small two-bedroom near a busy intersection in Weymouth -- the difference between the two properties was almost half a million. "I don't know if it was because Christa felt her dad didn't pay enough attention to Ava," says a friend, "or because she had some lingering anger at him for withholding love from her when she was a child, but all I can say is that she became consumed with figuring out what he was doing with that money."

After much browbeating by Worthington, Toppy finally confessed that some of the money was going to pay for an apartment he had rented for his girlfriend in a Boston suburb, Quincy, and to pay her "medical bills," he explained cryptically. As it turns out, Elizabeth Porter is a heroin addict with arrests dating back to 1992. A beat-up brunette with her curly hair dyed red, she has at times been a prostitute -- and oddly enough, she was involved in another high-profile murder case last year, as she once "escorted" Dr. Dirk Greineder, the Boston allergist convicted of murdering his wife. She's also HIV-positive.

This was too much. On Worthington's recent trip to New York, for Brantley's party, Worthington said that she was looking into having Toppy declared legally incompetent, effectively putting herself in charge of his finances. "Porter," says a friend of Christa's, "was about to get her oil well unhooked."

The story has moved quickly since Worthington died: That week, Porter was hauled into the police station for a lie-detector test, along with Ed Hall, the man who lived with her in the apartment where Toppy paid the bills. Hall passed; Porter's results were reportedly inconclusive -- possibly affected by heroin. Two mornings later, Porter and Hall were arrested on a stoop in nearby Roxbury while shooting up, and the Quincy landlord took advantage of this arrest to evict them. Hall remains in custody, perhaps because he's unable to come up with the $500 bail; Porter was last seen at a Boston emergency room with Toppy. He had taken her in because he was afraid she had pneumonia.

Toppy is also being asked to take a lie-detector test. And there is no indication that the police have stopped entertaining alternative scenarios: Late last week, they were working the phones again, asking Worthington's New York friends to "rack their brains" about anyone who might've wanted to do such a horrific thing to their friend. "We're working around the clock, and we're optimistic -- this is in no way a cold case," says Jim Plath, the supervising detective on the case at the Yarmouth state-police barracks. "But this is a tough one. It's a really, really tough one."

They're not talking about what Ava might have seen.

The yellow police tape at the end of Christa Worthington's driveway is garlanded with bouquets. Candles in glass jars, left by well-wishers in the days following Christa's death, are still stuck in the muddy dirt.

The yard is a chaotic jumble of stoves and refrigerators, wheelbarrows, and baby carriages -- they're toys. Inside the gray-shingled bungalow, every available surface is covered with toys or boxes of cereal or pastel pacifiers; children's books are stacked on each step of the main stairway, a stairway whose banister is covered over with fishnet, perhaps one use of the material Tiny Worthington never considered. Even the Christmas tree is still up. This was Ava's place, the world Christa made for Ava.

A few days before Christmas, Worthington went to a dinner at a friend's in the Village. The adults chatted as Ava frolicked. Christa's friend Terry Reed remembers Christa stopping in mid-sentence. "I can't stand it, she's too adorable," Worthington said. "I was supposed to wait for Christmas, but I can't." She brought out a shopping bag and presented Ava with her present, a pink tulle tutu, in which Ava continued her happy dance. "Isn't she amazing?" said Christa. In her life, Ava was the one relationship that stayed perfect.

Susan Jackett, the woman who may well end up acting as mother to Ava, couldn't be more different from Christa. "Since my mom died," she said, sitting in her kitchen, "I've been on this spiritual path, reading books about life after life, and I think that Christa's spirit didn't leave the house till the police got there: I think she just stayed there that night, to look over her baby. She just hovered."

For Ava, no doubt, she'll hover for a lifetime.

Additional reporting by Rebecca Gobur, Luisa Ehrich, and Jada Yuan.

From the February 4, 2002 issue of New York magazine