Page 53 of Wrong Mail

"And what about Dr. Kane?" she asks. "The lovely Giles. Does he know about all this looking?"

I don't answer.

"Right," she says. "That's what I thought."

She gets up and moves things around the counter that don't need moving, and when she speaks again it's quieter, and it's aimed somewhere past me.

"Just be careful, my lovely. That's all I'm saying. People show you a face, the one they've decided you should have. You go along thinking that's who they are. And then one day the light changes and you see the other one, and by then you're in too deep to walk it back."

I watch her not look at me.

"Why do I feel," I ask, "like we've stopped talking about Henry?"

Julia's mouth does something complicated. "You know me too well."

"We know each other too well."

That gets the grin back, at least, the real one, and she drops back into her chair and reaches for the wine she shouldn't be opening at lunch and opens it anyway.

"Now," she says. "I'm beginning to see why Peggy kept her options open."

I laugh, and I don't concede a single thing, because conceding would mean giving up the one new good thing in a bad year, and I'm not ready to hand it back.

David leaves for the hospital at seven, an evening he can't get out of. The house goes quiet around me the way it usually does, and I stand in it for a while and then I get my shoes.

I haven't lied to him. I want that on the record, for whatever it's worth to whoever's keeping it. I don't tell him I'm going, and he doesn't ask. So I let the not-asking do the work a lie would have done. I know the difference even as I lean on it.

It's only a few minutes up the road to Henry's. I can walk it. I text Julia before I go: Heading to Henry's, back by ten. It isn't fear. It’s just some careful animal in me that wants one person in the world to know where I am. She doesn't reply, which says enough.

Henry opens the door before I've knocked, which means he's been listening for my arrival.

"You came," he says, as if surprised I would change my mind.

Inside, the house is cooler than mine and smells faintly of other people. It's furnished the way houses are when nobody has chosen anything for a long while. There are good heavy pieces, a hall table with a bowl on it, and framed family photographs that I don't look at closely enough. He walks ahead of me and turns on lights as he goes.

"Don't mind the mess. I'm still deciding whether to keep the previous owner's furniture."

"She left it?"

"Didn't have room for it anymore."

He's given a back room over to his sister, and it's smaller than I expected. There's a folding table under the window. On it are a laptop, three ring binders, a box file, and a map of Oregon spread out with pins pushed through the cork beneath. Nothing is on the walls. It's organized the way I would organize it, by date down one axis and by county across. I stand in the doorway and feel the vertigo of walking into a room and finding my own mind laid out on someone else's table.

"You've been busy," I say.

"I collected what I could over the years." He steps back to give me room. "You're the first person I've shown it to. Take a seat.”

We start with the dead. That's how he puts it. He takes me through the cases. I make myself look at each one.

The Marches, Josephine County, twelve years back. Their home was on a vineyard, no children close by, found by a gardener on a Monday. The Hollises, outside Bend, a river house, an alarm a year old that never sounded. The Ackers. The Trevinos. The Pruitts.

The list goes on, up to twenty-eight murdered across roughly fourteen households. Middle-aged couples, mostly. They were wealthy, all of them. Homeowners of big houses set back from the road, on water or nestled in trees. The houses you buy so no one can see you, and then no one does. Houses that make people wonder what you did to pay for them. Homes like those in Hunts Point.

"Tell me what you see," Henry says.

He's leaning against the window frame with his arms folded, watching me, not the table. I file it under loneliness, under twelve years of wanting one person to take this seriously, so I read on.

“Well, like you said. There’s no forced entry," I say. "Not one broken window or door in any of it. People like this lock up. The Hollises had an alarm and it never went off. So the houses didn't keep him out, because the houses were never the problem." I move along the dates. "The scenes are calm. The reports keep using the word contained. Nobody fought much. It's as if they let him in."