Page 67 of Wrong Mail

"You haven't gone near it?”

"No. Why?”

I think of the locked gate, the silent app, the man on the couch saying a middleman through a mouth that barely worked.

"I can't explain it yet," I say. "Not cleanly. But I need you to promise me something."

"Mal."

"Don't go into his house."

The quiet changes.

"I mean it, Julia. I know you're thinking about it."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were thinking about it."

She doesn't answer fast enough.

"Promise me," I say.

A breath.

"Okay," she says. "I promise."

And I let myself believe her, because I need to. Because believing her lets me put the phone down and pretend I've kept one person out of this.

Chapter Twenty-One

David texts at half past eight to say he'll be late. A bowel resection that went long. Don't wait up. I read it twice, looking for the tells, and when I can't find any I feel foolish for looking.

So I'm alone with Oregon.

Henry left the maps and I haven't touched them. I make myself eat something, then I'm back at the island with the maps and the expensive houses where the couples were murdered. I tell myself I'm just looking. I've told myself that so many times now the words have stopped meaning anything.

At first I don't know what keeps pulling me back. There's something in the pattern; I feel it before I can name it. The houses, the dates, the empty stretches between one killing and the next. It's the pull of a fact that matters before I can say why, and I recognize it from my old work. I used to trust it, before the crash, before the water, before everyone around me started treating instinct as one more symptom to manage. So I do the thing I used to do for a living, back when I had a self that did things. I open the laptop and start pulling the addresses.

The first surprise is how easy it is. It's public, most of it. A house leaves a paper trail in a way a person doesn’t.

The Marches, Josephine County. I find their vineyard. Then I find that it sold eleven months after they died to a limited company out of Medford, through an agency I've never heard of. Fine. People die, estates sell, the world turns, Henry said so himself. I go to the next one.

The Hollises, the river house outside Bend. Sold. Nine months after. Different agency. Different town.

The Ackers. Sold, a year on. The Trevinos. Sold. The Dawsons. Sold. The Pruitts, the gray-shingled house that could be mine, sold fourteen months after somebody walked into it in the dark. Every single sale went through a different little agency in a different town. No two are the same. I sit there in the light with my heart going too fast, and it isn't fear. It's the old thrill, the one I used to chase, the one I'd almost forgotten I was allowed to feel.

Because here is what's still in me under everything the crash took, the thing nobody had to teach me. My instinct. And it's telling me to follow the house. People lie and forget and lawyer up and disappear. Houses stay where they are. If you ask them right, they tell you exactly what happened around them and when.

And these houses are all saying the same thing. Someone knew them. The man who did this didn't pick these homes off a map. He knew when they'd be vulnerable. He knew who was home and who was traveling. Just like the men who came into my house knew I was there. The killings lead to empty houses, and the empty houses lead to sales. It feels like one motion. Every house sold through a different agency, no name twice. And the next question, the one my old self would already be asking, is who stands behind all of them. Who do they really answer to? If I could just...

I grab my phone.

It's ten to nine. David is across the water with his hands inside somebody. Julia's voice is in my head, saying not in your kitchen with David gone. I call Henry anyway. He is the only person who will understand what I'm looking at, and tonight the wanting is louder than the fear.

He picks up on the second ring like he was waiting.

"I have something I want you to look at," I say. "Can you come over?"