Page 9 of Wrong Mail

"He might have been waiting weeks for it. If I put it back in the system it only delays it, and then it gets lost, and then what?" I shake my head. "No, I'll take it over tomorrow. It'll be fine. He'll be out working anyway. Everyone on this street is."

"I think you've lost your mind," she says instead. "I mean, doesn't it strike you as even slightly odd? Our brand-new neighbor has ordered himself the entire back archive of the Cascade murders."

"No odder than a woman who runs six miles every morning listening to two men in Ohio argue about decomposition rates."

"That," Julia says, with enormous dignity, "is educational."

From outside, a man’s voice calls her name. Once. Cold and hard. Not a question.

“Julia!”

It's Chris. Julia's sorry excuse for a boyfriend. I don't see him. I never really see him. I only ever hear him, that voice arriving before he does. It’s a tone that turns a name into a leash. Julia's face empties out for a second, then paints itself back into place, and she's already moving toward the door.

"Duty calls," she says brightly. "I'll come by later, we'll open wine, we'll solve the murders." She pauses in the doorframe with her hand on the screen and looks back at me, and the grin has gone somewhere quieter. "The David thing. I'm kidding."

"I know you are."

"Mostly," she says, and winks, and is gone, down the drive toward the voice with her ponytail swinging.

I stand alone in my kitchen. My husband's coffee cup is still warm on the counter, and an envelope of murders is hidden under a catalog. I don't laugh.

Chapter Three

The water looks calm, which somehow makes it worse.

The pool wants me to get in, but I stand at the edge of it and can't.

It's late morning, and the heat has become a physical thing, a hand pressing flat on the top of my head. The water lies in the deep end, blue and motionless. Not a ripple. In this heat the pool is the one cool promise, and every other person within thirty miles would already be in it.

Julia would do a clean racing dive off the far end without breaking conversation. David would float on his back with his eyes closed and call it the only medicine that works.

I put one foot on the top step, where the water goes warm and clear over the tile, but my body refuses to go any further.

It isn't a decision. That's the thing nobody understands who hasn't felt it. It isn't that I choose not to swim. Some older, deeper part of me has already made the choice and won't be argued with.

When I look at that blue surface for too long, the edges of it start to shiver. The blue goes dark. Brown. Cold.

And then I am not standing beside the pool anymore.

I am in the river.

Glass blooms green around me. The seat belt cuts across my chest. Water presses against my mouth, my nose, my eyes. Somewhere above me, rain drums against the roof.

I step back onto the hot dry stone so fast pain shoots up through my heel.

For a second I don't know where I am.

Then the heat comes back. The lawn. The maples. And the water is just a pool again.

“Fine,” I say out loud, to nobody, to Luna, who has followed me out and is watching me from the shade with her head on her paws. "You win."

I head over to the birds instead.

The aviary stands at the far end of the lawn, tucked among the maples. It’s a broad timber-framed enclosure, with fine wire mesh running from a low stone base to a sloping cedar roof.

From the kitchen, it almost disappears into the trees.

Inside, narrow branches cross between potted shrubs and nesting boxes. The birds have room to hop and dart through the filtered light. Yellow and blue and white flash behind the mesh.