By now, Topher was scrabbling at the front door. She could hear his little claws raking at the wood. Instinctively, she reached out and pushed open the door—Anne wouldn’t like the door scratched up—and startled backward when Topher rocketed out onto the porch and made a dash for the front yard, still barking madly, streaked with something dark and wet. Turning back to the door, Lenora could see a flower vase overturned in the entryway, gutting dirt and a mat of flattened daffodils across the tiles. Topher had peed, too, and left a little trail of turds by the welcome mat, which Lenora navigated carefully as she stepped inside.
Now the silence was roaring in her ears, filling her head with an explosive pressure. She felt her heartbeat when she swallowed. She was afraid to cry out. The house smelled bad,wrong, like dog excrement.
“Ms. Bridges?” she forced herself to call out. “Anne?”
Nothing. She glanced into the darkened kitchen as she passed and saw that nothinglookedout of place. Dimly, shebecame aware of the shush of water upstairs, thewhooshof a toilet, and felt a momentary relief: Maybe Anne was simply in the bathroom, after all. Still she went on, drawn by an invisible tether of dread, and something else—something like a premonition. A cold wind touched her as she turned into the living room. The French doors were blowing open, cracking against the walls. The floor was carpeted in a shrapnel of shattered glass.
And there was a body on the floor.
Lenora knew, immediately, that the small, dark object wedged between the sofa and the coffee table was not a person, only a body. For a second, she didn’t recognize Anne. Her hair looked too dark.
But that was only the blood, matting her hair to the side of her caved-in face.
Murdered.The word leaped out of her imagination, like a deer startling at the twin glare of headlights.Murdered.Her attention skittered over the deformity of Anne’s face, still upturned to the ceiling, a mess of blood and tissue; to the open French doors; to the blood-spattered copy ofThe Historical Homes of New Englandlying on the coffee table. She’d been shot, perhaps. Or beaten with something. It was hard to tell. Lenora looked around instinctively for a gun or a bludgeon, some kind of weapon. But there was nothing in the room. The murderer must have taken it.A burglar,she thought.An intruder. A stranger.
But the words kept running through her head:It’s always the one you trust.
She stood there for what felt like an eternity, with her heart scrabbling so high in her throat it trapped a scream in her chest, while digital seconds bled away in her pocket, registering her stillness, registering all the steps she wasn’t taking, recording her paralysis. Finally, there was a scream—not from Lenora, but from someone behind her. A second later, that insect-like man, Anne’s nephew, came rushing past her in a bathrobe, hair wet from the shower and strangely sweet smelling, almost perfumed.
“Aunt Anne! Aunt Anne!” He shoved aside the coffee table and dropped to his knees. Lenora saw the blood seep from the carpet to stain the folds of his bathrobe, to cling to his hands. She was freezing suddenly; she heard her teeth chattering in her skull. This was nothing like standing at her grandmother’s open casket. Her grandmother had looked almost like a doll, or a mannequin. Peaceful.
There was nothing peaceful about the mess of blood and tissue smearing the carpet.
Finally, Harry Bridges looked up at her, eyes wild, almost rageful. “What the fuck are you doing?” he spat out. “Call the police.”
The police.The word electrified her, jump-started her body into motion again. She imagined the police descending, a brute force like the punch of a wave, assaulting her with questions, entrapping her, maybe accusing her. She thought of the packages still piled in her van, all of them invisibly affixed to a schedule, to a route, to a ritual that must be completed, or else ... Something. Something would break or explode.
“I’m sorry” is what she said out loud. “I’m—I’m on a schedule.”
She counted her steps with her heartbeat, a frantic rhythm that ran her out of the house.Onetwothreefourfivesixseven. And then freedom—fresh air, the smell of raw wind, the relief of sunshine. She could still, indistinctly, hear Harry yelling inside the house.
She nearly tripped over the package on the porch, the one she’d scanned for return. She retrieved it almostautomatically, her mind seizing on the reassuring idea of a job, a task, a procedure.Deliver a package. Send a package back. Things that Lenora knew how to do. Things that made sense to her.
Eightnineteneleventwelve.Down the steps, with the heavy package in her arms.Thirteenfourteenfifteensixteen.Still her heart was racing, trying to gallop out of her chest.Seventeeneighteennineteentwenty.
By the count of forty, she was back in her van again, inhaling the familiar must and the faint smell of coffee still cooling in her traveler’s mug.
Safe.
She had a delivery for the Plantes. Maybe, she thought, it was something for the new baby. She liked that idea. Life—life was always a good thing.
She put the car in drive, and turned up the radio so she wouldn’t hear the sirens screaming closer.
Detective Erin Rourke, twenty-seven-year veteran of the Westport Police Department, had been called out to only a handful of murders in her career—two of them domestics, one a hit-and-run, and one the result of an adolescent feud that had bled up from the city of Stamford to the quiet streets of one of Connecticut’s wealthiest coastal towns.
But B&Es she’d seen. They got plenty in the area, a magnet for criminals from some of the poorer communities in the I-95 corridor. For them, it was a quick zip over to a sprawl of leafy streets and stately houses, many of them left empty when their residents decamped for holidays in the Caribbean or Europe. And the neighbors in this part of the world weren’t too friendly; people kept to themselves, cocooned in their square footage, attuned to the nuclear hum of their family life. Easy enough to break a window and get in and out with a few laptops or a watch before the modest police force could respond to the alarm. She’d been working those sorts of cases for more than two decades, and by now had an accordion memory, ever expanding to include the names of everyone in this part of the county who could be counted on to cause trouble: peoplepatternedfor trouble, drawn to it inexorably, the way others are drawn to bad relationships or alcohol. Sometimes she felt that her work was almost mathematical, all about making sets and subsets, finding exclusions, trimming the data down to its proof. At other times, it felt almost spiritual—more about instinct than observation, a listing in her stomach when she nudged close to a lie.
The murder of Anne Bridges would be a shock: a fatal puncture, immediately collapsing the illusion of safety that money was supposed to buy. Anne Bridges was well known in the area—well liked, too. But Erin Rourke supposed that anyone could become the victim of random violence. That’s what made itrandom.
And yet . . .
Looking at the scene, Rourke felt it: a queasiness, an inner discomfort, as if something she’d been fed was faintly rotten. At first glance, the scene suggested a robbery interrupted. The French doors were broken; the murder weapon, whatever it was, had been removed from the scene. And yet Rourke couldn’t think of a single reason that a standard robbery might provoke this kind of violence. Homeowners did occasionally surprise thieves in their living rooms; nine times out of ten, however, the thief simply fled. And if the murder wasn’t random—if it wasn’t a mistake, if Anne had been targeted—the question was why.
And by whom.
Over by the broken French doors, Anne’s nephew, Harry Bridges, was giving his statement to Detective Stetson. Rourke was only vaguely paying attention; they’d have to sit him down for an official interview later. For now, Stetson was simply running him through the order of events.
Harry had slept heavily and late. Too much wine with dinner, he’d explained. He’d gone directly to the shower and emerged to find a woman in his living room. A delivery girl, he thought. He’d met her only two days earlier; she seemed friendly with his aunt. But he couldn’t, for the life of him, remember her name.