Instead, her attention was drawn to Harry’s voice, faintly distorted down the distance of the hall.
“Carved oak,” he was saying. He appeared to have cheered up considerably. “All original. You don’t find houses like this anymore. You wouldn’t believe the kind of offers Aunt Anne turned down over the years ...”
That was interesting. The Joseph Milton House, with its sweeping views of the water, would undoubtedly fetch millions on the market. And Anne Bridges, Rourke knew, was childless.
She wondered who would inherit the house.
Lenora had to miss a day of work to go in to speak with the police. Of course she knew, in a sense, that work wouldn’t missher: One driver more or less wouldn’t slow the rhythm of deliveries, the arterial churn of spatulas and headphones and underwear and gaming consoles and wind chimes andlife, purchased life, endlessly circulating to and from their destinations.
But skipping work, disrupting her schedule, unsettled Lenora. It left her week distended, misshapen in the middle, like an overstuffed package.
She was nervous about what she would say, and what the police would say toher, and how she would explain the sudden panic that had overtaken her when she was standing over Anne Bridges’s body: a certainty that something terrible was coming for her.
But the woman she spoke with, a Detective Rourke, was surprisingly reassuring. She didn’t look like a cop, at least not the cops who were so often featured in the true-crime docuseries she watched with her parents—square-jawed men, most of them, with eyes that seemed permanently narrowed in suspicion. Detective Rourke looked a bit like someone you might find running up and down at a kids’ soccer game, cheering on her grandchild. She had thatrah-rahenergy, that warmth and enthusiasm.
She wanted to know whether Lenora needed anything—water, tea, coffee. Later, as lunchtime was approaching, she offered to buy Lenora a sandwich from the deli down the street.
When they were installed in front of their lunches, she began very gently to probe Lenora for details about what she remembered. Had she noticed any strange cars on the street? Anyone acting suspiciously?
Lenora knew what the detective was getting at and shook her head. “But Anne had been dead for at least an hour by the time I found her,” she added.
Detective Rourke gave her a funny look—as if Lenora, who had been sitting across from her for forty-five minutes, had only just blinked into view. “How can you be sure of that?” she asked.
“Because of Topher,” Lenora said promptly. “Anne always let him out at nine a.m. Always. But she didn’t that day. So she must have been dead already.” To Lenora, so devoted to her rituals and routines, it was obvious.
Detective Rourke kept staring at her strangely. “You’re very observant,” she said. “You’d make an excellent detective.”
Lenora felt the heat rise to her face. Maybe, she thought, it was true, after all. Except that Lenora had hated seeing Anne on the floor that way, all broken and bloodied, looking not quite human. But it was true that Lenora noticed things: patterns, things that fit together, and things that didn’t.
Detective Rourke had Lenora close her eyes and describe her arrival at the Joseph Milton House.
In Lenora’s mind, she was again approaching the front porch, while the sharp bark of the next-door neighbor’s dog accused her of something. She was again suddenly aware of the silence, of somethingmissing—rearranged, somehow.
“What do you mean,rearranged?” Detective Rourke wanted to know.
But Lenora couldn’t explain it. It was just a feeling, a frustrated sense of something out of order, something that didn’t quite fit.
“I don’t know,” she said. The room felt small, airless. Or her lungs weren’t working properly. She had the suddenidea that the walls would tumble down around her, like a cascading tower of boxes to bury her alive. “I was too scared.”
“You were very brave,” Detective Rourke said and reached out to squeeze Lenora’s hand. Lenora suddenly felt like crying. She hadn’t been brave. She’d run away from the scene. She’d run away fromthat man.
She said so to the nice Detective Rourke.
“What man?” Detective Rourke asked.
Lenora, her throat still shuttering against the urge to cry, blurted out, “Anne’s nephew. The one who looks like a bug.” And then: “The one who killed her.”
She hadn’t meant to say the words. But as soon as she did, she knew they were true. It was too late; the tide broke in her chest. Lenora couldn’t control herself anymore.
She began to cry.
The following day, Harry Bridges came to the police station to make an official statement. Now dressed, with his hair carefully slicked over a patch of scalp, wearing jeans and a T-shirt that Rourke couldn’t help but feel were better suited to Los Angeles, Harry seemed to have recovered from his earlier shock.
Recovered quite well, Rourke thought. He’d brought an iced coffee with him, as if they’d assembled for a friendly work chat.
“I just can’t believe it,” Harry said as they took a seat in the small conference room. No reason to bring him to Interrogation, make him feel like a suspect. Not yet, anyway. “Everyone loved Aunt Anne. Didn’t they?”
It was always the same, when someone died unexpectedly. The tragedy transformed every victim into asaint. But Rourke thought in this case it was probably true; Anne had been very well liked.