Page 51 of Wrong Mail

I take a deep breath and let it out. "Anyway. The clippings. Have you had a chance to read them, since they came back to you? Have they been any use?"

"Some." He drinks. "There's a pattern. I've been sure of that for years. But the man himself is a ghost. Nothing sticks to him. It's like he just up and vanished."

“He's no ghost. If he hasn't been caught for some other crime, I'd put it down to human error. He's made a mistake somewhere. Someone just hasn't found it yet."

"How do you know that?"

"They all do," I say. I circle around what I'm about to say before saying it. "Do you think the Ericksons are his?"

"Do you?" he says, and hands it straight back to me, and waits.

I look out the window at the parking lot shimmering in the heat. "I probably shouldn't tell you this. But after the break-in, the police sat with us. They had footage of the two men on camera coming up our road. So I asked whether they had the same for whoever murdered the Ericksons." I turn my cup again. "They don't. Whoever murdered the Ericksons came in off the water. No road, no cameras. And here's the part I keep chewing. The Ericksons had an alarm system. A good one. According to the police, it was switched off the night they died."

"Which tells you what?" he asks.

"That he knew it would be off. Or he was close enough to them to be let in."

"Or," Henry says, gently, "that they turned it off themselves, like half the people who own one." He takes a breath and lets it out. "Mallory, you'd be amazed how many families do it. People spend a fortune on a system and then leave it dark because it goes off at three in the morning when a raccoon crosses the deck, or because they're expecting someone, or they simply forget." He sets his cup down. "You knew them. Which is it?"

I think about Peggy going down to the dock at the social, and the man who followed a few minutes behind her. I think about the kind of privacy a woman like that might want the cameras off for, and who she'd want them off for.

I don't say any of it.

"I don't know," I say. "She was a private person."

Henry lets that sit, and doesn't fill it, and I'm the one who breaks.

"Would you say it matches the pattern of the Oregon cases?"

He takes another sip. "No forced entry. A wealthy couple in an expensive home. Sure. But it's been two years since any reported murders."

"That we know," I say. "Here's my theory. Killers don't stop without good reason. A man like this stops because he's dead, or he's in prison for something else, or he's settled down. That's the usual list. But there's one more, and few people think of it, because it's the hardest to check." I lean in. "He moved. He picked up and went somewhere else, under a different sky, and the county that was counting bodies stops counting and thinks it's over. The question is, has anyone looked at Washington? At whether we've had anything similar?"

Henry goes still, and then he sets his cup down and looks at me like I've handed him something.

"No," he says slowly. "I haven't. Twelve years of tunnel vision on one state and it genuinely never occurred to me to look over the fence." He shakes his head. "But this is what I'm talking about."

"What do you mean?"

"The day I brought the bird by. I asked for a fresh set of eyes and you said you would think about it." He turns the cup. "You see, Mallory, your memory might have been affected by the crash, but it hasn't touched the other thing. Your instinct. That's what these unsolved murders need. Someone who can see what others may have overlooked."

I wave him off. "You give me too much credit."

"And maybe you don't take enough."

"You sound like my editor."

He chuckles. "Then it's clear your editor's right." He says it plainly. "Look, your husband loves you and means well, but he's wrong. I think a mind like yours going quiet isn't safety. It's damage, the slow sort." He holds up a hand before I can answer. "I know you're going to say that David wouldn't have it. That your therapist wouldn't."

"They wouldn't."

"But do they run your days, or do you?" He doesn't sharpen it. He just asks. "David's out of the house, what, ten hours? Twelve? What fills that for you? Is any of it the thing you used to be?"

That one goes in. I don't let it show, or I try not to. I think he sees it anyway, because he softens at once and pulls back.

"Mallory, you're an adult, you don't need anyone's permission," he says. "This isn't a job. You look at what I've got, you tell me honestly what I've missed, that's all it ever is. No one has to know but us."

"I'll think about it."