Page 80 of Wrong Mail

"A woman rang me this morning."

A woman?

The words catch somewhere in me.

"She wouldn't leave a name," Diane says. "Said she didn't want trouble. Only that there was a man living in my mother’s house who had no business being there. She thought somebody ought to check." She glances over her shoulder into the hall. Behind her I can see it now. Boxes, dust sheets, a few things out of place in a house that should have been empty. "So, I got on a plane. I let myself in with the spare key. That's when I found a man's razor and shaving cream in my mother's bathroom and a bed that had been slept in. I've spent the last three hours ringing the number on my contract and getting a voicemail that's full. I was just about to call the police when you knocked."

David and I look at each other, and I know we're thinking the same thing. The missing footage. The support line that goes nowhere. The system Henry put on our house.

"I don't understand," I say. "Henry told us he bought the house from your mother."

"Then he lied," Diane says. "He's not the owner. My mother is."

Something cold moves through me before I understand why. Then I do. I know what this is.

A house people believed was empty. A woman everyone was told had gone away. A man living there because no one knew enough to stop him.

I'm not recognizing it from Eleanor Langford, or from this house. I'm recognizing it from somewhere in the erased part of my life.

Before the crash, before the water, before the people around me started deciding which truths were safe for me to touch.

I reach for it, and there's nothing there.

That's the part that frightens me most.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Rodriguez comes to the house in the early evening, straight from the Langford place. He brings Hanson with him. They sit on the same sofa as before, and Rodriguez tells us, kindly, that there's nothing here.

The rain has thinned to something that doesn't announce itself, a fine gray drizzle that's been falling on the lake all day. David has made coffee nobody drinks. We sit in the living room like people waiting on a diagnosis, which is a thing I've done in this marriage before.

"Let me tell you what we've got," Rodriguez says, "and then you can tell me what I'm missing."

He lays it out straight, without any drama.

Henry Westburn is a real man. That's the first thing, and it lands strangely, because some part of me had started to believe he might not be. He has a driver's license and a work history. He's a licensed agent with the property company Diane Langford hired to handle her mother's home. The company took Eleanor's keys and began preparing the property for sale once Eleanor could no longer manage it herself. Henry was the agent assigned to it.

"He had every right to be there,” Rodriguez says. "His company had the keys and the contract to manage the sale. What he didn't have was permission to live there."

He shifts on the sofa.

"The problem is proving that. Eleanor's furniture is still there. He didn't move anything in. A razor, a toothbrush, some food in the fridge... that tells me somebody stayed there. It doesn't tell me he was living there."

"What about the sign?"

"That bothers me more. He pulled it so people would stop asking questions about the house." Rodriguez rubs a hand over his knee. "Diane terminated the contract and reported him to the licensing board. She could take him to court if she wanted."

"But?" I ask.

"She wants him gone. She wants the house sold. That's it."

"But he lied to us," David says. "He told me he was in security. He sat at my dinner table and lied about who he is."

Rodriguez exhales, tired. "He didn't invent the security company. His brother owns HomeShield. It’s real. The property company Henry works for uses that firm on its listings, so there was enough truth in the story to make it believable. But no, he's not security. He's a realtor. He just let you believe otherwise."

“So, I’m right. He lied,” David says.

"He misrepresented himself. That matters. But it's not the same thing as a crime."