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Frost dutifully stood up to follow her, and a second later, so did Alice. And that was it, the migration was off and running. Maura set down her wineglass and she followed the others, if only to be polite.
They all gathered at the living room window and looked across the street. This was a solidly middle-class neighborhood of modest houses set on modest lots, a neighborhood where a man once could raise three kids on his salary alone. Jane had grown up here, and Maura imagined her riding her bike on this street and shooting hoops with her brothers in the driveway. She glanced at Jane and saw the pugnacious scowl and square jaw that Jane must have had as a little girl. Angela had that same stubborn jaw. In the Rizzoli family, determination clearly ran down the female line.
Jane muttered to Maura: “I’ll apologize later.”
“For what?”
“For being drafted into the Angela Rizzoli Detective Agency.”
“I meant to tell you, I saw Mike Antrim last night at rehearsal. He’s worried, Jane. Their whole family is.”
“Yeah, I imagine they would be.”
“He wants to know if there’s anything on that guy at the cemetery.”
Jane sighed. “I wish I had something to report, but I don’t.”
“What about that burner phone? Have there been any other calls made from it lately?”
“None. That phone’s gone silent.”
“Okay, tell me what you all see,” said Angela, still focused on the house across the street. She handed Frost a pair of binoculars.
“What am I supposed to see?” he asked.
“Tell us if anything about that house bothers you.”
Frost peered through the binoculars. “I can’t see anything. All the blinds are down.”
“Exactly,” said Angela. “Because they’re hiding something.”
“Which is their right,” pointed out Alice, the annoying voice of authority. “No one’s obligated to expose themselves to the world. Although Mr. America over there seems happy to be doing it.”
“Oh, that’s just Jonas,” said Angela. “Ignore him.”
But it was hard to ignore the silver-haired man lifting weights next door to the Greens. He stood in front of his living room window, bare-chested and pumping iron in full view of the neighborhood.
“That man doesn’twantto be ignored,” said Jane.
“Well, he is in awfully good shape for a man his age,” Alice noted.
“Sixty-two,” said Angela. “He was a Navy SEAL.”
“And it, um, shows.”
“Forget Jonas! It’s the Greens I want you to look at.”
Except there was nothing to look at. All Maura saw were lowered blinds and a closed garage door. Weeds grew through the cracks in the driveway, and if she did not already know that someone lived there, she would assume the place was vacant.
“And look, it’s back again,” Angela said as a white van slowly drove past. “Second time this week I’ve seen that van come by. That’s something else I need to keep my eye on.”
“So now you’re doing neighborhood vehicle surveillance?” said Jane.
“I know it doesn’t belong to anyone on this block.” Angela’s head slowly swiveled as she watched the van make its way down the street and out of sight. Maura wondered how many hours a day Angela stood at this window, taking in this view. After fourdecades here, she must know every car, every tree, every shrub. Now that her children had grown up and her husband had walked out, was this what her world had shrunken down to?
A few houses away, a lawn mower roared to life as a skinny man in Bermuda shorts trimmed his grass. Unlike Jonas, this man seemed completely disinterested in his appearance, flaunting knee-high socks and sandals as he pushed his mower.
“That’s Larry Leopold. He’s so good about keeping up his yard,” said Angela. “He and Lorelei are the kind of neighbors everyone wants. Friendly people who take pride in their property. But the Greens, they’re different. They won’t even talk to me.”
