11:50 a.m.
WINTER LANDSCAPING on Philadelphia’s Main Line was mostly about preventive care. Which was why Mauricio Lopez, fifty-three, had winterized the sprinkler system way back in October and wrapped the young trees to protect them from frost. He’d also fertilized in advance of the first hard freeze. And he made sure to replenish the mulch as needed.
Mauricio insisted on using the leaves he raked up in the fall as mulch in the dead of winter, despite his employer’s wife telling him not to bother, that they could afford to buy a fresh supply. Mauricio told her it was not about the money; it was about the health of the roots beneath the freezing soil. The mulch acted as an insulating blanket. Nature supplied it for free. Why not use it?
Much of that work had been done, so Mauricio had little to do aside from occasionally pruning dead branches and brushing road salt away from the front-facing bushes. Otherwise, daily maintenance of the vast grounds was simply a matter of looking around for anything out of place.
And Mauricio saw something very out of place late Sunday morning.
Any foreign object on the ground almost always turned out to be an errant golf ball from the nearby country club. Sometimes the children in the neighborhood left a baseball or toy. Once Mauricio even found a hobbyist’s drone that had crash-landed near a birdbath. And occasionally, there were dead animals—birds, mostly. When Mauricio found them, he quickly disposed of the corpses. If the kids were around, they’d want to hold a funeral. Which was sweet, but it ate up a lot of his workday.
This morning, he noticed a foreign object that was mostly buried in a flower bed. The only reason Mauricio saw it was that the low winter sun glimmered off its surface.
A car, Mauricio thought. The older child had had an obsession with Matchbox sports cars last summer; this had to be one of them.
Mauricio knelt down, hearing his knee joints pop, and brushed away some of the frost and mulch covering the toy. But it wasn’t a little sports car buried in the flower bed.
Mauricio Lopez lived his life largely unplugged. He had a landline so Mrs. Hughes could reach him as needed, but he avoided “smart” devices. He did not own a computer, TV, or radio. He enjoyed reading books about ancient history. He liked to garden.
So when Mauricio arrived for work that morning, he had not heard the news about his employer. For all Mauricio knew, Mr. Hughes was preparing for this evening’s game. In fact, despite his closeness to the family, Mauricio Lopez might very well have been the only person in the tristate area who didn’t know Archie Hughes had been shot and killed in front of the art museum the night before.
But still, the sight of a gun caused him to tremble violently.