The day that Anne Bridges was bludgeoned to death in her living room, Lenora Sforza had a package to deliver to her: a new book trilogy, she assumed, which Anne had spoken of ordering only the day before.
Typically, Lenora didn’t interact much with the people on her routes. But some of them she felt she knew intimately, given how often she delivered to their houses. There was the Plante family, whose yard was always littered with discarded plastic toys and whose packages were usually oversize—stuffed, Lenora imagined, with jumbo toilet paper rolls, reams of cotton underwear, coloring books, and replacement Band-Aids. She had counted four children at one point, and Melissa Plante was pregnant again. There was Becky Corazzano, who lived on Upper March Street. Lenora worried about Becky Corazzano. She delivered new packages to her almost daily, despite the fact that she could clearly see, through the front windows, dozens of packages still unopened and others spewing cascades of new bags or shoes or makeup onto the living room carpet. A hoarder, she thought. Or a shopaholic. But Becky was friendly enough.
There were the Lovings on Crescent, whose teenage daughters were constantly ordering and returning clothing. At least Lenora assumed it was clothing, given the way the two girls often appeared, breathless, to snatch the package from her hands and wheel back into the house, giggling. Spoiled. There was no question that the Lovings spoiled those girls.
All these were observations, and beliefs, that had accumulated for Lenora almost automatically over time, like an aggregation of snow. She didn’t need to think about them.She didn’t even need to be especially curious (although she was, often, curious about the homes that she saw, about the people who lived there, about the contents of the packages she was delivering or returning). She simply needed to drive her daily routes, over and over, and slowly the pattern emerged, as if it had been carved away, whittled, by all the miles she’d put in.
At night, Lenora dreamed of rivers of cardboard, origami landscapes that reconfigured with her every move, transforming into birds and trees with cardboard cutout leaves. She liked packages and packaged things: shrink-wrapped heads of lettuce in the grocery store, the nesting bowls her mother used for mixing things in different quantities, plastic perfectly molded to accommodate her earbuds. She liked things that were wrapped, snug, secured, and tidily fit into their proper containers. Everything, Lenora thought, should have its proper home.
Being a delivery driver suited her. Living at home with her parents suited her. Lenora knew, dimly, that her life was different from the rest of her former classmates’, who had, by now, graduated from college and gone off to law school or to work, who were showing off engagement rings and baby bumps on social media. But Lenora was used to being different. She’d struggled in school. She was too easily overwhelmed and so distractible. The sound of a classmate chewing gum might consume her entire attention, echo in her head so loudly that she lost track of her own thoughts. Or she would fixate on something different in the classroom, somethingoff—a new poster on the wall, a rearranged desk—and feel her ribs begin to crack, her skin begin to scream, until she simply had to do something. Close her eyes, count to eight, start humming.
She was better now. She had Techniques. She was more mature. Still, it was better for Lenora to focus on one thing, one task, at a time. It was easier for her when she could follow a schedule, drive a familiar route, perform the same job again and again. Ritual was safe. Ritual was acontainer.
She made her deliveries in the same 2015 Dodge Grand Caravan where Ethan Perle had once held her sweaty palm in the back seat on the way home from the sophomore homecoming dance and then leaned over to kiss her, his tongue vanishing into her mouth quickly, like a fish into the safety of a coral reef. It was the same van where she had often had sex with the thirty-three-year-old professor at the community college she’d attended for two years, who had removed and pocketed his wedding ring carefully every time before beginning to touch her, as if out of respect—for the wedding ring or Lenora, she wasn’t sure.
She worked a block of six hours in the morning, from 7:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., when she returned home to eat a sandwich with her father, now retired from the fire department, and to check on her aging cat, Bean. In the winters, she worked a half block in the afternoon, returning home before four o’clock; she didn’t like to drive after sunset, found the unfamiliar shape of the streets in the dark unsettling. But during the spring and summer, she sometimes worked until after eight o’clock, when her mother would begin texting her:Are you okay? Are you coming home soon? Dinner’s almost ready.
Lenora was always okay, on her way, and hungry.
Ritual and routine: the container, the organizing principles into which little pieces of a life could be tucked away for safekeeping. Dinner was at the little table in the kitchen where it had always been, with her father’s chair pivoted slightly toward the television. Sometimes, Lenora and her parents watched an episode ofDatelineafter the disheshad been cleared and neatly slotted in the dishwasher—Lenora’s job, and one she enjoyed—and Lenora loved sitting in the darkened living room between her parents, making predictions about who the murderer would turn out to be.It’s the husband,her mom would say in irritation.It’s always the husband. It’s always the one you trust.Lenora agreed, it usually was the husband. But sometimes it turned out to be the wife instead, or the son, or daughter, or business partner. People, Lenora thought, who were dissatisfied with their own containers, people who spun loose, grabbed at things that were not theirs to have.
At eight thirty, Lenora gave Bean his medication. Then she showered and got in bed in her childhood bedroom, which had changed little over the years, making sure that the blankets were tucked neatly around her and mentally saying good night to the objects in her room.
Every morning, she woke up at six thirty to do it over again. For exactly five minutes, she lay in bed, breathing in and out, touching her rib cage, finding her heartbeat in her chest, making sure that it hadn’t moved overnight. As a child, Lenora had once read a story about a woman whose heart began to decay after a romantic disappointment, flaking off in pieces, dandruff-like, until it couldn’t sustain a pulse. Lenora knew that hearts didn’t simply begin to deteriorate, at least not that way, shedding pieces of the organ into the bloodstream. Still, she liked to be sure that her heart was where it was supposed to be. She liked to put a hand on her chest and feel the balloon of her lungs fill with air. She enjoyed thinking of the body as its own neat little package, tightly and tidily packed with its various components: organs, entrails, thick cords of muscle and tendons.
In another life, she might have made a very good veterinarian, or even doctor. Bodies didn’t scare her. Deathdidn’t scare her. When her grandmother had died of colon cancer, Lenora’s cousins had shied away from the coffin. But not nine-year-old Lenora. When no one was looking, she had even dropped a hand in the coffin to poke a bit at her grandmother’s face, sliding the skin over the scalloped edges of her cheekbones, marveling at its coolness. She couldn’t help it. Her mother’s mother had been Catholic, unlike the rest of her family, all of them more or less lapsed Presbyterians. She had specifically requested an open casket. Most of Lenora’s other relatives had been cremated; her father, for example, insisted that when he died, his ashes should be scattered around the ninth hole of the Westbridge Golf Course. In other words, Lenora had been aware, even at nine, that her grandmother’s was very likely the only dead body she would ever see up close.
And for a long time, she was right.
Anne Bridges lived in the Joseph Milton House and gave tours of the garden to school and senior groups during the summertime. Lenora had once been on such a tour, back when she was in elementary school. She no longer remembered anything about Joseph Milton, an industrialist who’d invented something boring but important—something related to the piston, Lenora thought—and whose sweeping house on the Long Island Sound, with its balustrades and decorative widow’s walk, had been declared a Historical Monument. Anne was a widow and a retired book editor. Lenora knew this because she was always delivering packages of books to Anne’s house, and Anne would greet her sheepishly, tell her not to mention anything to Penelope at the Book Nook, the local downtown bookstore. The joke confused Lenora, who didn’t know Penelope, and wasn’t much of a reader. She preferred podcasts, especially ones about murder. Often, she made her deliveries with her phone in her back pocket and one earbud in, scanning and unloading and navigating ice-slicked sidewalks as a voice in her ear unspooled a mystery that seemed always to come in slight variations of the same themes: envy, greed, power.
That morning, the morning that Anne Bridges was bludgeoned to death, Lenora noticed that Anne didn’t come to the door, as she usually did, when Lenora came lumbering up the front walkway with a new package.
There was no ice on the paving stones that day—a raw spring morning, lobbing sunshine and wind back and forth in a tussling match. The sound was kicking up shivering gray waves that blew the smell of the sea onto the lawn. Next doorto the Joseph Milton House, the little Boston terrier fenced off at #23 began to bark sharply at Lenora’s approach. She had forgotten to bring her dog treats. She didn’t see Anne’s dog, either, a mutt named Topher who was usually out at this hour, sniffing around the garden beds, peeing on things, agitating around Lenora’s ankles.
But that car was still in the driveway, the BMW that belonged to Anne’s nephew. Lenora had noticed him, too, only a couple of days earlier, when she had last delivered a package to the Joseph Milton House.
“Here she is,” Anne had said in a singsong when Lenora had come through the gate that day, as if Lenora were a long-awaited guest. “Lenora, this is my nephew, Harry. Harry, this is Lenora. She feeds my shopping habit.” And she winked.
Harry had said nothing. His gaze had merely skated over Lenora, the way a water strider might skim the surface of a lake. In fact, there was something insect-like about him in general: his long legs splayed out in front of him; the anxious, hunted look in his eyes; the tufts of thinning hair, blowing up like antennae in the wind.
Now, Lenora climbed the porch stairs, half expecting Anne to appear at any moment, wrestling in a pair of earrings with one hand, trailing the smell of perfume. Anne had mentioned that some packages had gone missing from her porch of late. She wanted Lenora to ring the doorbell for every delivery.
Next to the door was the package Lenora had delivered two days earlier, now neatly taped up for return. Lenora scanned it for return and shifted it closer to the stairs, so she wouldn’t forget it on her way back to the van. An awkward size, surprisingly heavy. Not books, Lenora knew, which had their own heft and feel, even inside cardboard. Anne had seemed surprised to receive it.
“My God,” she’d said. “I don’t even remember what I ordered. I hope I’m not turning senile. I’m not that old, am I?”
Lenora had said nothing. Every time she talked to Anne, she was aware of the minutes bleeding away on her phone, tracking her stillness, her inactivity, via the Fleet app. She was supposed to stay constantly in motion, like a hummingbird, flitting between houses, barely alighting with one package before peeling away again. Besides, the question was directed to her nephew, who had materialized next to her, saying, “Careful. You shouldn’t be lifting that, Aunt Anne.”
He was probably right; Annewasthat old, actually, even if she colored her hair and wore a full face of makeup that brightened her complexion, made her look as if she were still on her way to New York City for a meeting with a famous author or to command a room full of marketing executives.
This morning, the wind had changed directions, blowing sideways, canting hard toward the south. Lenora pressed the doorbell and was unexpectedly relieved when she heard the answering sound of Topher’s barking.
Still, Anne didn’t come, and Lenora became aware, standing on the porch, of some unease. Why had she been relieved to hear Topher inside, yipping at the doorbell? It was the silence, she realized. She’d turned off her podcast at the front gate in anticipation of seeing Anne and exchanging a few words with her, and now she was painfully aware of the shushing of the water, the wind sifting through the denuded branches of a magnolia tree, the distant cry of gulls, the muffled sound of a car door slamming somewhere down the street.
Too quiet. In all the times Lenora had approached Anne’s house with a delivery—as often as two or three times a week—she’d never once heard it so quiet. Anne always kept at least a window or two open, even in the dead of winter, andthe sound of the radio kept her constant company. They’d bonded over that, after Anne had observed Lenora’s habit of wearing her earbuds when making deliveries. Lenora had recommended several of her favorite podcasts:Crime JunkieandAnatomy of Murder. Anne had said, “Anything to chase out the echoes, right?” and Lenora had felt, for a moment, both the thrill and the dread of exposure. It did feel like Lenora’s head was full of echoes when there wasn’t something to fill it—some task or story, some routine to complete, some show to watch. The inside of her head frightened her. There was no end or boundary to it. There were no walls. Nothing but more and more space, collapsing one into the other. Anne, she thought, was the same way.
So why was there no music? Why hadn’t she turned the radio on?