Page 34 of Wrong Mail

"One more thing, Mrs. Grant." He picks his folder up off the arm of the sofa. "You used to write about murders like this. Didn't you?”

The heat coming in through the open door only makes the sudden dryness in my mouth worse.

I never told him that. I said freelance. I said long-form journalism. I said it's been a while.

"That was a long time ago," I say.

Rodriguez nods.

At the door, it's Hanson who turns back.

"Oh, one last thing." He's polite about it, almost apologetic. "Your doorbell camera. Ring, or whatever you've got. Could you send us the last few days? We're pulling everything on the road. Anything at all helps. Sometimes it's just a car going by."

He must know we don't have one. Rodriguez scanned the house on the way up the drive. The eaves, the corners, the porch. He was looking for cameras.

But Hanson asks anyway, and he watches David while he does it.

"We don't have one," David says.

Hanson blinks.

"You don't have a doorbell camera?"

"We don't have anything." David gives a small, tight laugh. "We've got a gate and a dog."

"What my husband means," I say, "is that we moved to Hunts Point because everyone told us it was one of the safest places in the state."

I realize in that instant how naive that must have sounded. Next door, a house sits empty behind police tape, proving me wrong.

Hanson looks at Rodriguez. Rodriguez looks at the empty corner above our front door, where a bracket would go, and where there's nothing.

"You should think about installing one,” he says.

Chapter Twelve

The house makes a sound at ten past eight in the evening. I stand still in the middle of the hallway, trying to work out whether it was real.

That's the new arithmetic. It's been going on all day. Every noise arrives and I have to do a small piece of mathematics on it. Which side did it come from? Was it the good side? If it was the good side, then it happened. If it came from the right, then it's already halfway to being something I invented.

Don't panic. It's just the ice maker. It's always the ice maker.

I check the front door.

It's locked.

I knew it was locked, because I locked it, and because I checked it forty minutes ago. I check it again anyway. I stand there with my hand on the wood, going through the same worn-out argument with myself I have every night.

David is upstairs on the phone. He's been up there since we ate.

The heat hasn't moved. It's been sitting on this house for days and tonight it's worse than it's been. The AC is on its highest setting, doing nothing except making a noise on my good side that I keep mistaking for a car in the drive. Out on the lake the water hasn't stirred, not a ripple on it, just black glass. The air feels like it's waiting for something.

Next door, the house still has tape across the drive.

I go to the window and look for it through the cedars. I can't see much. That's the thing about this street, the thing everybody pays for. Forty feet of trees between one life and the next. Even now, a day after they carried Peggy and Brant out of it, all I can make out is a scrap of tape lifting in a wind that isn't there. One light the police left burning still glows in a downstairs room.

I stay at the window longer than I mean to, and my mind does the thing I can't stop it doing. How does someone get into a house like that? No broken door, no smashed glass. That house has cameras and a gate, and still somebody walked in and back out. And under that, the worse question keeps circling. Why them?

I prop my phone against the fruit bowl and open the laptop beside it. The original clippings are with Henry, where they belong. But I have every one of them here, dozens of pictures I took before I carried the package up the road.