Page 94 of Wrong Mail

"Murdered," I say. The word comes out of me with no air behind it.

"In her kitchen. My baby sister." His jaw works. "Twenty feet from where her kid was sleeping. And the cops have got nothing. They keep saying that. No break-in. No mess. Like she just lay down on the floor and stopped breathing.” He drags the back of his hand across his mouth. "So no. You can't talk to her. Nobody talks to her now."

No break-in. No mess.

I feel the world tilt under me. Not the porch beneath my feet, but the one I've been trying to make sense of since Henry brought me that folder. There were almost no defensive injuries to the Ericksons. The room was barely disturbed. Bodies found as though they had already been subdued before the worst of it began.

I put my hand on the door frame to keep myself in the world.

And it all comes back in the wrong order.

Lena’s name on David’s phone at seven in the evening. The stillness in him when he saw it. Just work, he’d said. Then, later, he was running out for party things, when there were never any party things. There was only a green dot leaving our house, crossing the water, and stopping at the hospital for three hours.

And when I finally made him tell me why he’d been there that night, he gave me three words. Someone from Portland. He wouldn’t say who, or why. He shut the door on the rest.

Lena’s brother has just told me his sister lived here, in Portland.

Someone from Portland.

She is the someone he wouldn’t name. The night the man who broke into our home died in that building, David wasn’t there for a patient, and he wasn’t buying anything for a party. He was with her. With Lena.

And now the man in that bed is dead. Lena is dead. And I’m standing on her doorstep two days later, trying to make it a coincidence.

I can’t.

"When?" I hear myself ask. "When did she die? You said two days ago. Are you sure?"

"Tuesday." He looks at me like I'm slow. "They think she died on Tuesday."

Tuesday?

The day Julia disappeared. The same day.

I stand there trying to put my husband in two places at once, and I can't put him anywhere at all. I don't know where David was on Tuesday. I haven't known where David has been for weeks. He goes out and doesn't say. He comes home pale. He has an old life in Oregon, a dead woman in it, and a hole in every account of himself.

I can't swear he wasn't here, in this city, at this door.

I have to ask it. It's the question I came hours south to ask.

"Was she getting money from him?" I ask. "From David."

"You're damn right she was." The laugh has nothing in it. "Every month. For the kid he didn't want any part of. He paid to stay gone. That was the deal." He looks at me, and his face changes. "He never told you there was a kid, did he?"

A child? Suddenly the four thousand dollars a month makes sense. A year of payments. I'd let myself imagine gambling, paid sex, a whole second life. But it was for a child.

"I'm sorry," I say, which isn’t much. "I'm so sorry. I didn't know."

"Everybody's sorry." He starts to close the door, then stops and looks at me with something that isn't quite pity. "Go home to your husband, Mrs. Grant, and find out from him whatever you came down here to find out."

The door shuts. Through it I hear the kettle scream and cut off. A child asks a question. The man answers gently, and something in me gives way where I stand.

I go back down the path past the chalk.

My phone buzzes in my coat before I reach the car. It’s David. Three words appear on the wet screen. I read them standing in the road with the rain coming down.

They've suspended me.

I don't answer. My thumb finds the app instead, the way it always finds it now. The map opens, and there's the green dot, sitting still and bright over our home.