Page 29 of Wrong Mail

"Officer, is Peggy all right?"

"I can't tell you that."

"Ron, it's me, it's Frank, I've known Peggy Erickson eighteen years."

"I know, Mr. Werner. I'm sorry. Now, can you all step back.”

He isn't rattled. That's what turns my stomach over. He's calm and polite, standing deliberately between us and that driveway, his body squared. Every one of his answers is the same.

And it comes to me with awful clarity.

You don't stand like that for an accident. You don't square your body across a driveway to keep people out unless what's up that driveway is a crime.

I stand at the tape with my arms folded and take in the scene. It's the oldest reflex I have. I read the exits, the faces, the thing that doesn't fit. People I know may be dead up that drive, and here I am reading it like evidence.

I hate that it still works.

I do it anyway.

The Ericksons' front door stands open. Officers move in and out. One of them stands in the lit hall with his hands on his head.

From the tape, in the dark, I can't see much of anything. But I've stood at the edge of enough scenes to know what people look like when it's bad, and everyone up that drive is moving like they already know how this ends.

Julia arrives at a dead run.

She's come down the road in bare feet, clutching her phone. She gets about ten yards from the tape before Hanson steps into her path with his palm up.

"Ma'am. You can't go in there."

She stops and says Peggy's name once, and it's the loudest thing on the street. Then she sees me, comes over, takes hold of my arm with both hands, and doesn't let go.

"Lil found them," she says. "She went over to check on Peggy."

"Found who?"

"Both of them." Julia's voice breaks. "Peggy and Brant."

Her words become white noise for a moment. Only this morning, Henry stood at my gate with a canary. I keep landing on that, even now, even here. The same day. It has all been the same day.

I look back at Julia.

Her hands are shaking. Julia, who runs six miles before breakfast, who mentally redesigns every room she's standing in, who reads autopsy reports out of curiosity. Her hands are shaking on my arm.

And the worst of it, the thing I can't say out loud to anyone, is that even now, with her coming apart against me, some part of me won't stop working.

Then I put my hand over Julia's hand and we stand there in the heat with everybody else, watching the lights sweep across the street.

The medics bring them out much later, on covered stretchers.

There are two. That's all I'll let myself take in. Two stretchers, one and then the other. The street makes a sound I've never heard a street make. Lil Crawford sits down on the curb. Three houses up, a sprinkler ticks over an empty lawn. Nobody has thought to turn it off.

Frank Werner says, to nobody, “Why?”

And nobody answers him.

A moment later, an unmarked SUV comes in slowly, no lights flashing, and stops half on the verge.

A man gets out. He's in his mid-forties, plain clothes, a badge clipped to his belt.