Page 3 of Wrong Mail

"No," the medic says. "You were the only one inside."

Then someone passes between us, and the dark comes up over me the way the water did, taking me under again.

Part One

Chapter One

Now

Hunts Point, Washington

Even killers live somewhere.

I read that once, back when reading things like that was my job, and it never left me. Not the crime itself, which I've forgotten along with so much else, but the line.

It was about somebody's ordinary neighbor, the man who waved over the fence and took in their mail when they traveled. He turned out to have spent his weekends doing something that made a whole street reconsider every friendly thing he'd ever said to them.

People always say the same thing afterward. He seemed so normal. He kept to himself. He was polite. We never would have guessed.

I think about that more than a person should as I ride in the back of a car, watching Hunts Point draw closer on the far side of the lake.

The bridge out of Seattle feels endless, a floating strip of concrete laid across water. The tires thrum over the joints, and I hold the door handle until we're across and back on solid ground. The driver watches me do it in the mirror. He doesn't say anything. I tip well for the not saying anything.

"Nice out here," he says finally, because they always say it. "Quiet."

"It is."

It's more than quiet. It's nine in the morning in the first week of August, and the air hasn't moved since dawn. Lake Washington lies still, hazed white at the far edges where the heat blurs water into sky.

The cedars barely stir. Every house we pass sits back behind its gate and a long clean driveway. The homes are all glass and stone, tucked behind clipped hedges, with sprinklers ticking over lawns nobody is ever standing on.

Who lives inside? Where do they work? What do they do for fun? Do they have fun, or are they too busy keeping up with the Joneses?

But more importantly, how do they pay for such a lifestyle?

These are all the questions I hear from the people who drive me, because I won’t do it anymore.

And I have answers.

I know because I’m one of them.

At least I am now. I wasn’t before.

I’m not sure who I was before.

What I do know is that you could drive the length of Hunts Point Road and believe not one person lives here. That's the point of the place. The money buys the trees, the trees buy the silence, and the silence is what everyone is really paying for.

As we turn onto the peninsula’s road, two men in polos are working a real-estate sign loose from the grass of Eleanor Langford's drive. I only remember it being there a few days. Across the face of it somebody has slapped a red banner.

SOLD.

I twist in my seat to look as we pass. Beyond the sign, the house looks the same, gray shingle and white trim. But the porch is empty now. In good weather, Eleanor used to sit there with a paperback and a glass of something.

That’s when it strikes me.

I haven't seen her out there in a while.

I make a note of that somewhere in the back of my mind. My memory won't hold anything on its own anymore, so I've learned to catch things as they go by.