Page 58 of Wrong Mail

I'd walked Luna down to her place in the last cool of the morning, my arm finally out of the strapping. The freedom made it ache.

Julia met me at the side gate in running clothes, hair up, wearing no makeup. She still looked beautiful. She took one look at my face and said, "Okay. Kitchen. Let's talk."

Her house is all glass and water and pale stone, a home right out of a magazine. She's arranged it so that wherever you sit you're looking at the lake. Normally she'd be telling me what she wanted to do to the room before we'd even sat down. Today she just puts coffee in front of me and sits down to wait, her hands folded on the stone. Luna lies on the floor between us like a referee.

So I bring her up to speed.

I tell her about the gun. David's gun. About the app that watches us both, and how it caught me at Henry's and David called it a glitch. About a name on David's phone just after seven. Lena Holloway. How he stepped out for party errands and drove to the hospital instead, and never picked up when I called. About how I sat up watching a green dot until half past ten.

Then I tell her about Henry. The room at his house. The victims. The place where I felt more like myself than I've felt in two years.

Julia listens to all of it without moving, which is not like her. When I finish she doesn't say anything at first. Then, very carefully, she says, "I want to say the David things first, because they're easier."

"They're not easier."

"They're easier for me to say to you." She turns her cup. "Starting with the gun, because the gun's the one I can explain away for you. A man can keep a gun for a hundred dull reasons. Two years forgotten in a cupboard is more sad than sinister. It isn't proof of anything beyond a forgetful mind. The deeper question is what else is in that house you know nothing about." She sets the cup down. "But the name, and the hospital." She clicks her lips. "A strange woman calling him at seven, and a lie about where he went. Mallory. You know what that adds up to, in any other kitchen in America."

I raise a protesting finger. "Don't."

"An affair. That's what it looks like. That's what it looked like the second you said the name." She holds up a hand. "I'm not saying it's true. People lie about ordinary things every day. I'm saying that if my David had a Lena calling at seven and then lied about going to the hospital, I'd have looked a little closer at his phone by now, and I wouldn't have felt bad about it."

"He's not cheating, Julia. He wouldn't." But I hear how it comes out. Julia hears it too. Neither of us says anything for a second, and the lake sits there being beautiful.

"Whatever," she says. "Park David. Because David isn't the one I'm frightened of. Answer this. The night the Ericksons died, the police went house to house down this whole road. They sat in my kitchen for the best part of an hour. They sat in yours. So they sat in his. What did he tell them?"

I shrug. "I don't know. I wasn't in the room."

"It hasn't once come up? Where he was, the night two people were killed?"

I exhale. “His alibi must have checked out." I hear myself reaching for it before I can stop. "The cops worked the whole street, and they never went back to him. If there'd been a loose thread, Rodriguez would have pulled it."

"Or there was nothing to pull, because there was no way to put him anywhere. He’s been on this road, what, a fortnight?" She turns her cup on the stone. "I looked him up, by the way. Middle of the night, like the sad case I am. Henry Westburn, Hunts Point, security consultant. There is almost nothing. No trail at all. Everyone has something, Mal. Social media. An ugly grad photo. He has less than nothing, and less than nothing takes work to build."

That makes me laugh, and it surprises us both. "That isn't evidence. Not everyone is like you, Julia. He’s a man who likes his privacy."

"Maybe." She lets it go and comes at it from the side, which is how she always corners me. "The security system he put in your house. Does it keep what the cameras see?"

"Some of it. We haven't had it long." I don't know why I answer, except that it's true and she'd have it out of me either way. "It uploads to the cloud. You can pull it from a phone, a laptop, anywhere there's a signal."

"So a system like that, at his house, would show exactly where he was that night. Or where he wasn't. You know... whether it squares with whatever he told the police."

"We don't even know he's got it running at his place. He just moved in. And I'm not asking him, Julia. I am not going to stand in his kitchen and ask for his alibi."

“I will.”

I narrow my gaze. “No.”

"Then ask Rodriguez."

"And say what? That I've got a feeling?" I set the cup down harder than I mean to. "They wouldn't listen. And I'm not doing that to him, Julia. Henry's been kind to me."

"I know." She says it gently enough that it stops me. "I know he has. But something about him still feels wrong, and I can't talk myself out of it. Blame the podcasts if you want. I listen to four a week. I see killers in delivery drivers and men buying oat milk." She holds my eyes. "You don't feel it? Not even a little?"

I don't answer. I just shrug. I watch her clock the shrug.

"He's in security," she says, quieter. "If anyone alive knows how to walk into a house and put an alarm to sleep, it's the man who fits the alarms."

"I thought of that," I say. "So I looked. The Oregon families didn't use the same company. Some didn't have a system at all. There's no thread there, Julia. No installer who touched all of them."