7

On the rare occasion when my dad was denied a favor, he resorted to the con. In every other way he was as ethical as the best of cops, except for that willingness to announce to anyone who said no to him—from the super in our building to a captain in the NYPD—“Hey, you owe me one.” He mixed a little disappointment, some anger, and a sprinkle of disgust with the sorrow of a humanitarian whose benevolence has meant nothing.

So when he came over the next morning, it took him just two calls to get Pete’s last known addresses. The most recent was from the early 2000s, when he’d been a Madison Avenue top packaging star—or best supporting—and, if Google Earth could be trusted, he’d lived in what looked like a Norman château. The house was a mere nine miles from mine, in an affluent hamlet sandwiched, like a tasty country pâté, between Old Brookville and Upper Brookville. It had been just him and his wife Jenny then. I assumed they must have been planning a family since the house had five bedrooms. They’d sold the house in 2009 and moved first to a garden apartment in Shorehaven. Two years later, they bought their house on Amberley Road.

We hopped into the car, and I drove east on Northern Boulevard, past a zoning mishmash of fast-food restaurants and high-end shopping malls. My dad seemed slightly bummed that he didn’t have to play his “you owe me” card since he was almost immediately able to reach a Nassau County PD homicide cop he’d worked with on two cases. “Hey, Bernice, kiddo!” he boomed into the phone. Detective-Sergeant Wollman had no problem with professional courtesy. He told her what he needed, and added, “I’d appreciate it, and for fast you get extra credit.”

We were still in Nassau County, but suburbs had turned to country. Old Gold Coast estates and potato farms had been subdivided into mini-estates. There was a barn here, a paddock there. The side roads looked torn up, but in an English village way, like a setting for a Father Brown episode, that would play to an Anglophile’s aesthetic.

The local cops worked out of an intensely sweet white cottage with black shutters. Letters in an old-fashioned font spelled out OLD BROOKVILLE POLICE and arched over the door. But we didn’t have to stop there and make friends, because Bernice Wollman called back my dad in less than five minutes. He put her on speaker so I heard her say, “Okay, Dan. None of the locals on duty ever heard a word about Pete Delaney. So assume model citizen until you learn elsewise.”

“Will do,” he said. I prayed he wouldn’t tell her she was a real sweetheart for helping him out. “You’re a pal, Bern. Thanks.”

Most of the houses were traditional—Tudors, Georgians, and a couple of Dutch colonials. But there was one that didn’t fit: a single-story built on high pilings that was mostly glass and rough grade wood. It looked as if the original owners had come to the neighborhood after winning a full set of architectural drawings for a beach house at a charity raffle. But since it lay directly across the street from the château the Delaneys had owned, I decided to go there first. However, my dad eyed the long path leading to the house and the staircase leading to the entrance and said, “You go. I just came along for the ride.” I felt myself swallowing. Nerves. I hadn’t done door-to-door in ages. “It’ll look like overkill if two investigators come for a background check. You can handle it.”

The woman in the beachy house looked at me as if she saw something that made her want to throw up. But then I realized it was ordinary caution. Her lips were pressed tight together, except some doctor had so overdone the filler that a closed mouth gave the impression of imminent spew. Actually, she was pleasant, and told me: Sorry, they’d only moved in a year before and really didn’t know much about the neighbors. No, she hadn’t heard a word about any people who had moved away.

I walked across the street—a healthy stroll—and knocked at the door of what had been Maison Delaney. A voice said over a speaker, “In a minute!” but it was more than that. I started thinking how for so many years on the Joint Terrorism Task Force, I hadn’t had to conduct routine investigations—no knocking on doors to ask the kind of questions that were the bread and butter of detection. No ninety-second Q and A’s. People were brought to me. I got to question them in one of several examination rooms. I had access to my own tea bags and honey. Sometimes I’d go to one of the triply secure spaces in the Metropolitan Correctional Center. At either place, whenever I finished (for better or worse), I had something resembling a connection with the person I’d been interrogating.

Still, I liked this—going in cold, being outdoors, going from house to house. Of course, federal agents and cops more often found themselves in piss-scented buildings, climbing creaking stairs to the fifth floor of a walk-up, listening for trouble but often just hearing the crunch of insects’ exoskeletons under their shoes.

The house was owned by a couple named Tuccio, both dermatologists. Neither was home, though. The housekeeper, whose name was Martina, was easygoing and probably lonely. She gave me a guided tour of the house that for a second made me recall Wynne once saying that the color of grout should not be chosen lightly. Anyway, Martina mentioned that the kitchen was going to be redone, so I got a view of what had probably been the Delaney kitchen, with turn-of-the-century stainless steel appliances, a glass cooktop, and dark wood cabinets with windows. One member of those silently seething couples you see on House Hunters Reno would shake his/her head and proclaim, “I cannot live with that,” but it looked okay to me. Upscale but not fancy. Martina, who wore a half-apron she tied with a big bow in the back, said she was sure she had never heard the name Delaney mentioned. But she gave me the name of a friend around the corner who’d been working at her employers’ house for more than thirty years.

My dad waved at me as I passed him and said he was dandy, watching an episode of Death in Paradise he’d downloaded on his cell phone.

I finished up the rest of that block, which was three houses on one side and two on the other. Only one person was home, a guy in his late teens who looked as if he was still stoned from the night before, but he mumbled that they had moved into the area just four years earlier. No, never heard of a Delaney.

Neither had Martina’s friend around the corner, Olga, though she had begun working for the family she took care of when they moved in twenty-eight years earlier. She thought she might have heard the name Delaney, but only in the context of the youngish couple who didn’t have any children yet. No, never heard anything negative about them. She didn’t think they were an important part of the community but gave me two peanut butter cookies and the name of a woman farther down her street who had been around forever, one of the few original owners left. Olga opened the door and pointed at the house, which might have been the largest log cabin ever built. I slipped the cookies into the pockets of the lightweight blazer I was wearing.

Mrs. Lena Rattray, the owner, told me not to call her Ms. Then she asked for ID. I pulled a Bulldog Investigators business card from my cross-body bag. One of my dad’s fellow retirees had sent it to him when he and a New Jersey cop started their own business. This particular card was more useful than most because the name on the lower left was E.J. Lyons; it was perfect for me to flash.

She went and got her glasses to examine the card. At length: it was as if she were studying for a final. The she held it aloft so that light from the antler chandelier in her hallway illuminated it further. She didn’t seem suspicious, just intrigued by it, as if she had some arcane specialty like business card paper stock. Finally, she handed it back to me: “What’s the E and the J for, Mrs. Lyons?” she asked.

“Emma Jane,” I said.

“You have a background?” she inquired, taking off her glasses and hooking an earpiece over the scoop neck of her long-sleeve mustard yellow T-shirt. I guessed she was in her late sixties, with that slightly coarse salt-and-pepper hair and mottled skin that signified an unfortunate lack of vanity (which bothered me to be thinking because I knew it was antifeminist, but a little argan oil never killed anybody). She did look fit, though, or maybe “strapping” would be a better word, with big shoulders, long arms, and large feet. They were firmly planted, in part because she was wearing some leather equivalent of white sneakers with ultrathick soles.

“A background as an investigator? Yes,” I lied pleasantly. “I was with the NYPD for twenty years.” I went into the story about investigating someone for a big job in a private equity firm—someone who had lived in the neighborhood about ten years earlier. “Peter Delaney. His wife’s name is Jenny—Jennifer. They lived in that house on Rolling Hills Road that looks like a French château. It’s a light pink now, but it may have been …”

“I know the house. Delaney. I thought he was in advertising.”

I had a few seconds of dizziness, the way you do when you realize you hadn’t thought something out well enough and you expect to hear your supervisor say: You’re a goddamn shithead, Schottland! I nodded enthusiastically at her superb memory. “That’s right! He had been a packaging designer with one of the major agencies. But he lost his job in 2008.” Mrs. Rattray nodded back. “Then he went back to school for a master’s in finance.” She nodded again, which signaled that she had accepted not only me, but the entirety of my C-minus narrative.

“Want some coffee or Coke?” she asked. She didn’t seem a natural in the hospitality department, but I was at least a break in her day.

I told her I was overcaffeinated that morning but could do with some water. I followed her sensible footsteps through the massive log house into the kitchen. It looked like one of those Adirondack lodges you see in movies where guests gather around a fire at night, tell ghost stories, and then someone lets out a bloodcurdling shriek. But it was, after all, Long Island, and the only sound she let out was Oops! when the morning coffee she was pouring over ice cubes overflowed her glass. I took a sip of my water and listened as she told me what she knew about Jenny Delaney, which wasn’t much. She’d heard from one of the neighbors that Jenny Delaney was expert at knitting and crocheting, a woman of many afghans. She also seemed very sweet and friendly, but not overly friendly, not like in the pushy sense. For me, “pushy” was one of those warning words, but happily nothing else followed

“She sounds nice,” I said neutrally. “What about Mr. Delaney?”

“I hardly ever saw him. Just at a couple of community get-togethers.”

“Did he ever act as if he’d had too much to drink?”

Mrs. Rattray shook her head. “No. And he certainly didn’t seem like one of those quiet drunks either, the ones who walk back to the bar and the next thing you know they’re on the floor and blaming the rug.” I gave the first Huh of a laugh before realizing she hadn’t meant her remark to be humorous.

“Drugs?” I asked. “Did he ever seem overtalkative? Laughing more than a situation called for.” I took one more sip of the water she’d given me. I did not tell her that it’s a good idea to dump your ice cube bin every month because ice picks up freezer odors. Hers had a vague taste of frozen hot dogs.

“No. Nothing like that.”

“Did he ever act … blissed out, as if he were seeing the face of God?”

“That’s a good way to put it,” she said. “I know what you mean, but not from him. Bliss didn’t seem part of his makeup. Not from drugs. Not from anything as far as I could tell.”

“I see you’re very observant,” I told her. Her head went down, probably a nonconscious nod of agreement.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” she said; “there was nothing about him that I ever saw that would make him unfit for an equity job, not that I know exactly what that is.” Well, neither did I. “So as far as your investigation goes, I don’t think there was any problem when he lived here.”

“No loud music? Any fights with neighbors? Any sign of abusive behavior on his part? Not just physical: could have been verbal.” She shook her head again. “Did he spend a lot of money? Expensive cars, remodeling the house?”

“Not that I ever saw.”

“Is there anything else about him you have observed? Positive or negative.”

Mrs. Rattray got busy aligning the hem on the sleeves of her T-shirt. “You know I hate to say something that could ruin his chances …”

“Please—unless there’s some blatantly bad behavior, there’s nothing that would stop him from going where he’s headed.”

“He was hard to talk to. Not shy. Some men are shy.” She licked her dry lips. “Some men are just awkward in social situations. Probably more me than him, anyway.”

Her stopping, I sensed, had to do with not wanting to be seen as a gossip rather than not wanting to talk. Still, I had always been skilled at encouraging witnesses to talk but not to overstate (which could be a disaster with a grand jury or in a courtroom). “It may not be you, Mrs. Rattray. Not all gut reactions are correct, but a lot of them are.” I tilted my head slightly, as if to better pick up not just her words, but her vibes.

“I always felt inhibited talking to him,” she finally said. “Not because he couldn’t give me a sentence or two back. I just couldn’t tell what he was thinking. I was sure it was nothing positive, which is okay. But was I boring him or saying something he didn’t like? I remember telling my husband that even if I was clever or beautiful, it wouldn’t have mattered to Mr. Delaney. Nothing would have.”

“How did your husband respond?”

“That’s what was so odd. He told me, ‘I find myself avoiding him, too! Not that there’s anything wrong with him … Except maybe there is.’”

Wednesday came around again, and it was my turn for show-and-tell at the group’s lunch. I held up the English translation of Ahmed Mourad’s thriller, Vertigo. Its jacket was predictably dizzying but also sophisticated. It was drawn from a low, cinematic angle. Blood from a Francis Bacon decapitated corpse was echoed in the typography. A few members of the lunch group offered such appreciative Mmms and Oohs that I quickly did the disclaimer business: I had zero to do with bringing that novel to the English-speaking world (and by the way, the novel had no connection to the Hitchcock movie).

“I picked this book because it’s a good illustration of the differences between English- and Arabic-language book-jacket design,” I began. “Now, considering that I work in publishing, you know I’d never say a picture is worth a thousand words. But it is worth something. And later, I’d be interested to hear what you think the book covers have to say about how different cultures view the same story.” Actually, I wouldn’t be interested, but asking for input was probably number three on the group’s unwritten rules of etiquette. Every presenter could go home thinking: Wow, all those comments. I get them so involved.

That day, I’d planned to set a trap: hit the visual during my show-and-tell. Usually I’d talk about a particular book or different agents’ reactions to the same work of fiction or speak about a genre, anything from romance to graphic novels. But that day, I thought maybe an eyeful of heartrending or violent book art could evoke some response from packaging-sensitive Pete Delaney that a mouthful of words couldn’t. Worth a shot. I saw myself asking him casually: So Pete, what do you think of this package? Whatever his answer, it would be revealing.

Okay, so maybe it was an emaciated little fantasy, but I was enjoying it, especially since it ended with me triumphant: He disclosed the truth without knowing it. At the least, I’d have the chance to observe him looking at artwork—some of it violent or at least icky. And who knew what clues I’d find in his reaction? Damnably clever of you, as my mom would say, mimicking some BBC via PBS detective.

Except maybe it wasn’t so clever of me this time, because Pete wasn’t at the lunch. When we had all arrived at the table, Iris told us not to hold Pete’s usual seat because he was in Kansas City. He’d emailed her the day before that he wouldn’t get back until late afternoon.

Still, my show had to go on, so I held up Vertigo. Hmm: I noticed a couple of queasy expressions. Then, Phoebe Melowicz shrilled Eeew, and added, “Caaaw-reee! We’re in the middle of lunch.”

Oops. Even though the illustration was stylized, I had to admit it probably wasn’t a picture to accompany quiche aux légumes on Long Island.

“Sorry.” I put the book facedown on the table. “It is disturbing. Crime fiction is a way for writers to challenge the powers that be. It talks about injustice. Don’t forget. This is set in Egypt. In recent years, what with Mubarak, Morsi, el-Sisi, violence by the state …” I mumbled on for a few minutes.

Years of working on terrorism cases had almost paralyzed my gag reflex. It was like when my dad worked homicide and the detectives passed gruesome crime scene photos across the pizza box. It’s not that you don’t get appalled by the awful things people do to people. It’s not that you’re untouched by death and pain. You just stop getting shocked. However the brain worked, it trained itself to go straight from sickening observation directly into analytic mode, skipping emotion—or maybe just stomping it down.

After a few more moments, most of the group wound up engaged in my discussion. Fortunately and unfortunately, they segued into a predictable, relatively uninformed discussion of whither the Middle East. (Not Darby, the photo retoucher. He got busy examining all the books in the tote bag I’d brought. He had a magnifying light on his cell phone and was totally immersed in the details of the jackets.) Meanwhile, Marcalynn began praising Netanyahu. Maybe I was snappish when I said, “We’re talking Arabic books here,” which caused Lucy the data miner to mutter: “A plague on all their houses.” I corrected her: “A plague o’ both your houses!” Iris, who seemed to sense I was overly irritated at the misquote, cut me off to remind the group of our no-politics rule and how excellent it was that the group had gotten through the 2016 election unscathed. Then John Grillo asked if I’d go halfsies on a crème caramel with him, as we sometimes did, and I said sure.

The following morning on my way to the Italian deli, I kept hearing a moan from my car. Low and husky: erotic in a guy, distressing in the rear axle of a Subaru. So I abandoned my goal of fresh mozzarella and drove to the Subaru dealership. I negotiated a loaner car, one of those gray sedans that mean-spirited corporations give salespeople.

The sky that morning was grayer than the loaner. Backlit by an unseen sun, it sucked the color from the already murky pavement and cast a shadow over the storefronts and medical buildings of Northern Boulevard. The air felt thick. I wished I could be anyplace else.

Anyplace else except home, that is, because the next item on my to-do list was finally writing my DON’T RECOMMEND report on a collection of seven short stories. They were all set in a souk in Tangier during one week: a great concept, except the stories were more like vignettes. A widow looks for a serving tagine and as she bargains, recognizes that the seller used to live in the town she came from. That was it. A meticulous description of the tagines, of a remembered lamb dish: no plot, no resolution except the Arabic equivalent of: Say hi to the folks for me.

So I wasn’t in any rush. Yet another DON’T RECOMMEND could wait till after lunch. I drove back to Main Street in Shorehaven with a vague idea of checking out a spy novel or a mystery. I was tired of screens. I pulled into the library’s parking lot and took out my phone to get a note with a list of “you’ve got to read it” books, but I got to the picture of Josh on my home screen. We’d gone fly-fishing in Idaho and I caught him with two days of beard and (slightly) messy hair: East Coast legal guy as rugged western dude. I smiled at him. It was from when we’d had more than intermittent fun.

Most couples with a fourteen-year-old kid have familiar relationships that range anywhere from loving to near death. What I’d noticed living among them is they had no new stories for each other, only reruns. Josh and I were still in that “surprise” stage where—presto!—untold anecdotes still popped up, hidden qualities might burst out. Like Josh going to the bottom drawer of his desk in chambers, pulling out a harmonica, and serenading me with “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Me telling him how I’d tripped a woman trying to run out of her apartment so she could escape an interview. Her arm broke and I felt zero guilt about her screams, though I spent a couple of weeks feeling guilty that I was heartless enough not to feel anything.

These occasional revelations were a definite plus. They added zing. Which I needed because night after night of listening to Josh at dinner could be less than transfixing.

Sure, he’d been out in the world, but he wasn’t worldly in any bon vivant way. His was very smart. Cerebral, even. And considerate, responsible. But sparkling? Only his eyes.

Dinner could be a heavy meal if Josh chose the subject. His idea of fun table conversation was How was your day? over the arugula salad and cross-examining Eliza on what she learned about friendship and isolation in Of Mice and Men. He’d ask me about Palestinian writers living in Jordan through the grilled chicken and roasted corn, and give us his day in court until sorbet and cookies were downed.

Other people didn’t find him dull. At any gathering, he was congenial company. Or at least his looks and manners conveyed charm. But at home, he seemed to feel that if he didn’t guide the conversation, it could go anywhere. I saw his mouth inch into an upside-down U when Eliza and I became enthusiastic about the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica. He definitely didn’t buy my “They’re really about the nature of consciousness” explanation or Eliza’s “They were monotheists, probably, and the humans believed in gods!” It could have been his upbringing; in his family, the F-word was frivolity.

I put down my phone. My hands, on their own volition, sought the steering wheel; I couldn’t reach for the door handle and get out, go into the library. Instead, I took out my phone and googled “copper beech”—as in the high-priced tree Iris had spotted on Pete’s lawn. After scrolling through enough images to establish an I-Thou, I drove to the Greensward, the street Iris had mentioned her client lived on, around the corner from Pete. From there, I then made a few rights and lefts. At last, on a three-block-long street called Amberley Road, there was a house with a copper beech tree shading the front lawn. I stopped.

What had I learned at Quantico about stakeouts? I couldn’t remember anything useful other than common sense: Don’t park directly across the street from the subject. Not that I was staking out the place. I was just parking diagonally across the street and a couple of houses back. Well, why not? Casa Delaney was a really nice house, on the small side but dignified, set back from the sidewalk on a rise of lawn. It was two stories high, made of some white material that wasn’t stucco, brick, or shingle. However, on the roof, two window things protruded, as if 9 Amberley Road were undergoing some form of asexual reproduction that could ultimately mature into a full third floor.

From the sidewalk, five brick steps led up to a straight brick path that was perpendicular to the front door. On either side of those entry steps was an iron railing flanked by thigh-high evergreen bushes with buzz cuts. Even in the day’s gloom, the house seemed bright and cared for. The copper beech stood on a pristine lawn. It looked as if it could be as high priced as Iris described it. Purple leaves nearly obscured widespread branches. The gray trunk was so understated it seemed designed like architecture. On the front of the driveway, two black garbage cans and an orange recycling pail were precisely lined up, equidistant from one another.

Scrunching down in the driver’s seat just in case (though I felt safe in the anonymity of the loaner car), I took a picture, then pulled away and parked around the corner. There, I texted the shot to Wynne and wrote: Impt: tell me abt ts house. $$? In gd taste? Anything notable abt it? I hoped she wasn’t with a client because then she turned off her phone completely.

I gave her a few minutes and blessedly, heard the choo-choo text tone on my phone. WTF? Colonial revival style DK $$ depends on acreage &hood lks well-kept gd taste tho too symmet & safe no notable Garage added later Waiting for funeral to start client’s mom he hated her but will inherit Yay TTYL

Wynne’s response left me discontented, though I didn’t know what she could have told me about Pete’s house to make me shout hosanna. I guess what I was yearning for was collaboration. A partner. But abbreviated input from a style queen (who had strong opinions on everything) would have to do, plus she concurred with my judgment. Since Pete was a packaging designer, I expected he had a reasonable grasp of aesthetics: and in fact, there was no mailbox shaped like a golden retriever.

The buzz-cut bushes and groomed lawn could be expensive to keep up and raised unanswered questions about his finances, but maybe he did the maintenance himself. I drove around the block again and parked across the street and a fair distance back. I could watch his house through the windshield.

Nothing much was happening, which I suppose was to be expected at ten thirty on a Tuesday morning. A car pulled out of one driveway and a North Shore Flooring and Carpet truck backed into another. A woman in jeggings racewalked with a tiny, black sheared poodle running to keep up with her; the poor thing looked like a cockroach on a leash. Then a local sanitation truck, the same company that worked my neighborhood, turned the corner and started on Pete’s side of the street, blocking my view of his house.

Part of me was thinking what a total waste this was. Even with my window opened, the loaner was getting hot; added to that it smelled slightly sweet, as if it had been sprayed with some new, odor-absorbing product that had its own smell. I understood staking out took patience and discipline. I remembered my dad saying that after about a half hour, when you have nothing more to say to your partner, it was like going into a Zen state. Now and then your consciousness tapped you on the shoulder to enumerate Mets pitchers who had been on the injured list that season. He added that he’d kind of liked it and that when his mind was someplace else or nowhere, he was at his most alert.

Some movement caught my attention. The sanitation truck stopped at Pete’s house. The driver, short but broad, jumped down from his high seat and hurried to the curb. He wore a blue bandana around his neck, and I wondered whether it was for fashion or for lifting up as a filter over his nose.

Which was just when I saw Pete Delaney come around from the far side of his house carrying a big pruner, a kind of Edward Scissorhands thing. (I hadn’t seen the movie, but the pictures of it creeped me out when I was a kid and I’d avoided anything with Johnny Depp for years.) I started chewing on my knuckles, which may have blocked about a third of my face. Not that I was trying to hide. Just nerves.

Then Pete sauntered over to the garbage truck, and my heart began to beat so hard I could have been a soldier about to go into battle—which was somewhat pathetic considering that what I was facing was a sanitation guy lifting off the lid of the first can and Pete going over to say hello. All looked perfectly amiable: the guy dumping, nodding, moving on to the second can, saying something, Pete responding.

The sanitation guy pressed a button to turn on the rotary that shoveled in the trash, then drove on to the next house, giving Pete a final wave. Pete waved back. He was wearing those chamois gardening gloves, except they were a little large and made his hands look like Mickey Mouse’s.

I would have moved on if the giant blades of his pruner hadn’t suddenly started snapping the air. Pete was warming up as he surveyed the bushes on either side of the steps to his house. Except they were perfectly even. Still, he snipped from the right side, then backed up to check out the symmetry. So I waited and waited some more. Finally, after five minutes of what seemed obsessive-compulsive twig clipping, he wandered around the side of the house.

Whether it was my bureau training or my dad’s “Detective Dan Is on the Case” shoptalk at dinner, I knew not to leave once Pete was out of sight. Instead, I waited for seventeen minutes—fifteen being too predictable. Finally, when an attention-getting red Escalade cruised down the street, I pulled out in my gray loaner and drove past the house and copper beech.

Did I realize how unbalanced my behavior would have appeared to any rational observer? Sure, plus I felt elated when, after a series of meaningless left, right, left turns, I spotted the sanitation truck.

When the driver stopped, I pulled in front of his truck and trotted over as he was dumping a can of trash. I used the benevolent but not suspiciously friendly smile I used with witnesses and said hi.

Fortunately, he was a good-natured sort, with a weathered and pockmarked face along with a couple of bottom teeth missing, the kind of person who’s had a tough life but doesn’t want to tell you about it. “Hi. How are you?” the guy asked. He had a Latino accent.

“Fine thanks. You?”

“Good.”

“Didn’t I see you on Amberley Road about ten, fifteen minutes ago?” I asked. “Talking to a guy cutting his bushes?”

“Yeah. His place, it’s very neat.”

“The reason I came over to see you is my husband and I are thinking of moving to that street. I was just wondering how often your pickups are?”

“Tuesdays, Saturdays.”

“That sounds good,” I said, while he looked into the depths of someone’s orange recycling pail and saw a single can of Dr. Brown’s Diet Cream Soda. He exhaled wearily.

“Nice people on Amberley?” He gave a single nod that indicated: Definitely. “The guy with the perfect bushes?” I asked lightly.

“Yeah. Nice.” He lowered his voice. “Good tip at Christmas.”

“That makes him wonderful.”

“Yeah. He’s fussy though. That’s probably the right word. Always comes out to say hello, but always watches me. Maybe the last guy who worked my route left a mess, and Mr.—I forget his name—don’t like messes.” He pushed out a breath that came close to a snort. “Like I do?”

“You think he’d learn by this time that you know how to do your job.”

“Yeah, but he’s not bad,” the guy said. He even offered a smile. “Works at home. Not much happening, I guess.” I thanked him, wishing that someone nice like him worked my street instead of the guy I always thought of as Sullen Dennis. Then I drove away in the loaner car.

A couple of minutes later I pulled into the parking lot of a dry cleaner because I needed to think. Why would Pete watch his trash being collected so closely? It could be about neatness. He might just as likely be checking to make sure all his stuff was not only dumped but also pulled into the innards of the truck. He’d had some white garbage bags, the tied kind you use in a kitchen. The other bags were black. So I had no way of knowing if he shredded his personal papers or had anything incriminating—from used syringes to chemicals to aging counterfeit stock certificates. Which drove home the point that despite my fixation, I had no concept of what Pete could be guilty of.

The next day, Wednesday, was the lunch—what I’d gone from thinking of as a dreaded commitment to now seeing as the most exciting event of the week. Just before I left the house, I glimpsed myself in the downstairs bathroom mirror and realized I’d gone uncharacteristically neutral. A taupe T-shirt, taupe-and-black cotton scarf, and black jeans. My makeup was minimal; my eyes, normally blue enough to rank number two in most guys’ Corie’s Top Ten Assets list, were faded to a shade between the palest blue and white. Also, I’d put on that lip-color gloss that brightened every woman’s complexion except mine. My face looked like a yearbook shot at some Catholic girls’ school that didn’t allow makeup.

I arrived at La Cuisine Délicieuse and immediately became rattled because it struck me that I had zero recollection of having driven there. Zero. The bureau had been big on mindfulness, though they called it something more butch back then: staying in the alert zone. Shortly before I left the job, we had to watch a video about what happens when an agent isn’t in the zone. Someone missed a piece of fabric on a branch of a bush because she got distracted by a tweeting bird, which struck me as sexist since no male agent would ever be fingered for being stirred by a skylark. Another genius, while executing a search warrant, failed to open the third of five drawers in a file cabinet because he was disrupted by a great manly sneeze; he went from drawer two directly to drawer four.

I had surpassed the group’s unwritten acceptable unpunctuality rule of four minutes. Scurrying into the restaurant, I saw everyone else seated—Pete in his usual chair. I wound up between Darby Penn, the photo retoucher, and Iris.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said to the group and got that brief hum of phrases like no problem. In a bow to the month of May, the restaurant’s air-conditioning was off, though it was seventy-six degrees outside. Immediately, the humid, motionless air enveloped me. The restaurant also smelled fishy, probably from the previous day’s special, bouillabaisse.

For the first time, I realized how uncomfortable the chairs there were: plastic versions of the woven rattan French kind, easily movable, so that a Parisian having a café filtre could effortlessly move from one scintillating conversation to another.

Not only was I stuck where I was, but one of the rear legs on my chair had lost its rubber tip; it was shorter than the other three. Every time I shifted, the chair seemed to overreact—so it was hard to stay mindful. Every jerk seemed a major interruption of my chat with Darby. He had once worked at People magazine, and after I asked him how much retouching had been done on the handsomest men pics, I wobbled a bit wildly and didn’t hear his answer.

I was reduced to sweat-dribble-in-cleavage state. I moved closer to the table and sat back. An instant later, the chair lurched. Suddenly I was heading backward, madly flapping my arms to prevent embarrassment and a skull fracture. Darby and Iris simultaneously grabbed the back of the chair and helped right it. When I was upright again, I thanked them a bit too profusely. “I’m fine!” I announced at least three times. The members of the group smiled at me with the reassuring warmth of people who don’t regard sangfroid as a cardinal virtue.

But seconds later, when the waiter came over to take our orders, my mouth got so dry and my throat so tight that first I gulped, then got out “Caesar salad,” in a too-loud froggy voice. I couldn’t decide if Pete tilted his head for a second to look at me oddly just as Iris was asking, “You okay?”

“Absolutely,” I said, taking a mindful sip of water, a small sip, swallowing carefully so I wouldn’t start coughing. God knows I’d been in far tenser situations—a couple of life-threatening situations actually—and hadn’t been anywhere near so rattled.

I glanced at the little plate of foil-wrapped pats of butter on our table, but my eye immediately caught Iris Kubel breaking off a piece of her roll. As usual, her hands were perfectly manicured, without even a teeny chip in the nail polish. Their pale skin, dotted with freckles, seemed like that of a fragile aristocrat rather than someone who schlepped fifty-pound bags of compost. Then my other eye took in Darby’s hand. He was African American, a couple of shades darker than Josh. I knew he used computers almost exclusively in his work these days, but I could picture him in his early years at the magazine, his lean, long-fingered light brown hand holding steady the thinnest brush to delete some flaw in a photo.

I peered around the table as Marcalynn Schechter opened her computer with a flourish so we could be delighted by her presentation on how she created a speech for her latest client, a state assemblyman from Suffolk County. She had the Alice-in-Wonderland hair that Fox News females, no matter what their ethnicity, seemed to have. There was a winning cheerleader smile, complete with dimples, to go with her flippy blonde style. Though she looked chatty, she didn’t say a lot either to the group or one-on-one, except at show-and-tell. Marcalynn’s need to communicate seemed to be satisfied mostly through the speeches she crafted for her clients. Admittedly, there were the ever-changing but politically consistent bumper stickers on her dark red Honda Odyssey whose messages she slipped into conversation, but mostly she was quiet.

As Marcalynn clicked a few too many times trying to retrieve her PowerPoint document, Iris Kubel leaned toward pasty-faced Pete and said, “I forgot to ask. How did your trip go? Indiana, right?”

“Same as always. Left last Thursday afternoon for a Friday morning meeting. Just a quick trip to show my designs for a new packaging line.”

“Oh, work related,” John Grillo piped up. “I assumed it was just to see your mother.”

“Both. I combine PrimoTech with visiting her.” Marcalynn held up her index finger to indicate Just another moment. Pete realized he had to fill the silence: “Power strips, the thing for plugs. They added a couple of USB ports. They’re in South Bend. I rented a car at the airport, then drove to Fort Wayne. That’s where the nursing home is.”

“How’s she doing?” John asked.

“Kind of sad. She can remember I’m Pete but not that I’m her son. I stayed at my brother Brad’s, so I saw her the next day, too.”

Finally Marcalynn triumphed. She came to a page that read: “What is there to say about the capital budget?” with clip art of a woman, arms out in a Huh? Unfortunately, her next click did nothing, leaving the clip art lady still asking, Huh?

Lucy, the data miner, asked Pete: “What does Brad do?” He peered at her closely for just a second too long, then answered: “He’s a painter. A house painter.” That could have been it, but maybe because Lucy was still looking at him, he added: “Brad’s got a really good eye for color.”

Brad might be a color genius. Both brothers might have inherited artistic talent or visual acuity. On the other hand, Pete could be doing what the pros do: offering down-to-earth details to humanize a nonexistent person: Brad. What the bureau called creating a legend. The FBI subscribed to that method by concocting detailed cover stories for undercover agents and protected witnesses and came up with crazy uncle Norman in Chillicothe or not being able to find a split pea soup as good as mom used to make.

Of course Wynne would mutter: Maybe Brad is real. And happens to be a house painter. Maybe.

I wondered about PrimoTech. Presumably, it had a conference room or just a large office where several people could meet. Pete wouldn’t be demonstrating a power strip wrapper on a picnic blanket out in the sun.

So how come the backs of his hands were so tanned? A rich tan, not a Midwest-in-May tan. Something was wrong about that. His hands looked so much healthier than his pallid face. Why? I couldn’t swear to it, but I was 95 percent positive his hands hadn’t been so burnished at the previous week’s meeting. Surely, I would have picked that up.

Even though it was becoming more and more plausible that there was something a bit off about Pete, I reconsidered my fixation. He was a guy who went outside. He was obviously interested enough in landscaping to buy tools for it (plus a big-bucks tree). So the back of his hands would tan. Big deal. Except then a quiver ran up my arms: He’d been wearing chamois gardening gloves the day before. If anything, his hands should have been paler than his face.

Marcalynn was digressing, that much I could tell, saying that her assemblyman had to walk a fine line between being pro education and anti local school tax hikes. His photo came up, generic assemblyman, benevolent smile, loosened tie, in a classroom surrounded by adorable elementary school kids, primarily white, as he was.

Snap out of it, I ordered myself. Listen to Marcalynn, because she was saying something I hadn’t heard before—that a picture like the one she was showing was useless because it was now so commonplace in our culture. Stay mindful. She was talking about the tough work of pushing voters out of their partisanship and moving them away from campaign cliché torpor and social media mania.

Later, when I got home, I made myself go upstairs to outline my report on the book of short stories. Fine. My tension eased a little, even though I didn’t like writing negative coverage. I calmed down even more when Eliza got home back from her friend Chloë’s house and Josh arrived for dinner. He had been reading a law journal article about Virginia, which once had the death penalty for sodomy. So we talked about what it must have been like for gay people in the eighteenth century. It was a refreshing conversation of substance and actually interesting.

Later, he and I decided no TV. We read quietly and companionably in the room I called the den and that Dawn had called the library, probably because it had a brass table lamp.

But after excellent lovemaking, in the quiet of the night, I turned my back on Josh to better concentrate on what really mattered to me: ashen-faced Pete Delaney and his suntanned hands.