Chapter 1
Chapter One
Now
Hunts Point, Washington
Even killers live somewhere.
I read that once, back when reading things like that was my job, and it never left me. Not the crime itself, which I've forgotten along with so much else, but the line.
It was about somebody's ordinary neighbor, the man who waved over the fence and took in their mail when they traveled. He turned out to have spent his weekends doing something that made a whole street reconsider every friendly thing he'd ever said to them.
People always say the same thing afterward. He seemed so normal. He kept to himself. He was polite. We never would have guessed.
I think about that more than a person should as I ride in the back of a car, watching Hunts Point draw closer on the far side of the lake.
The bridge out of Seattle feels endless, a floating strip of concrete laid across water.
The tires thrum over the joints, and I hold the door handle until we're across and back on solid ground.
The driver watches me do it in the mirror.
He doesn't say anything. I tip well for the not saying anything.
"Nice out here," he says finally, because they always say it. "Quiet."
"It is."
It's more than quiet. It's nine in the morning in the first week of August, and the air hasn't moved since dawn. Lake Washington lies still, hazed white at the far edges where the heat blurs water into sky.
The cedars barely stir. Every house we pass sits back behind its gate and a long clean driveway. The homes are all glass and stone, tucked behind clipped hedges, with sprinklers ticking over lawns nobody is ever standing on.
Who lives inside? Where do they work? What do they do for fun? Do they have fun, or are they too busy keeping up with the Joneses?
But more importantly, how do they pay for such a lifestyle?
These are all the questions I hear from the people who drive me, because I won’t do it anymore.
And I have answers.
I know because I’m one of them.
At least I am now. I wasn’t before.
I’m not sure who I was before.
What I do know is that you could drive the length of Hunts Point Road and believe not one person lives here. That's the point of the place. The money buys the trees, the trees buy the silence, and the silence is what everyone is really paying for.
As we turn onto the peninsula’s road, two men in polos are working a real-estate sign loose from the grass of Eleanor Langford's drive. I only remember it being there a few days. Across the face of it somebody has slapped a red banner.
SOLD.
I twist in my seat to look as we pass. Beyond the sign, the house looks the same, gray shingle and white trim. But the porch is empty now. In good weather, Eleanor used to sit there with a paperback and a glass of something.
That’s when it strikes me.
I haven't seen her out there in a while.
I make a note of that somewhere in the back of my mind. My memory won't hold anything on its own anymore, so I've learned to catch things as they go by.
The car stops across from my gate, beside the covered mailbox bank. I pay and thank him. After he pulls away, I stand on the warm asphalt and let the silence come back down over the street.
One of my neighbors, Frank Werner, is at his gate one door up. He's seen me, which means I'm not getting inside without the news.
"Mallory." He lifts a hand and comes out of his drive at an easy amble. He’s a retired man with nowhere to be and everyone to tell about it.
He's in his sixties, sun-pinked from a week in Phoenix.
His golf shirt is straining at a comfortable belly.
“Did you hear about Eleanor's place? It sold fast."
"I saw the sign come down. Good for her."
"Florida." He says it like a diagnosis. "Always said she'd go somewhere warm one day. Personally, I prefer Arizona.” He pauses as if expecting me to ask about his trip. I don’t, so he continues.
“Well, she went. One day she's out on that porch, next thing you know she's gone, and the real-estate company is getting the place ready to sell.
I think she made a wrong choice. That heat's no good for her heart, if you ask me. But nobody asks me."
"Well," I say. "I hope she's happy there."
I attempt to turn and leave but I only make it one step.
“New fella’s already in, I hear.” Frank looks toward the Langford house with open curiosity. He hasn’t met the newcomer yet. None of us have. “Kept to himself so far. You know how it is at first.”
“I do,” I say, thinking of my own arrival less than two years ago.
Kept to himself.
The old line comes back before I can stop it.
He seemed so normal.
I make myself smile. "I should get my mail and get in, Frank. It's already an oven out here."
“Ah, it's nothing compared to Phoenix. But it’s going to get worse, that’s what they're saying." He's already turning back toward his driveway. "Storms by the weekend. All this heat's got to break somewhere."
The mailbox bank sits directly across from my house, which is the one piece of luck this street has ever given me.
It's a wooden shelter with a sloping metal roof. Beneath it are ten black metal boxes, each marked with a house number. The parcel vans bring anything larger straight to the door. Ordinary mail still waits here.
I open my box and gather the envelopes inside.
I thumb through them. It’s mostly bills and junk.
"Don't forget the Hunt Club social on Thursday!"
Peggy Erickson's voice comes from behind me, clipped and insistent.
I turn and see her white Audi idling at the curb. The Echo Twins, Lil and Yvette, are perched in the rear seats like high-end handbags, their heads bobbing in tandem.
"I'll try," I say, with a polite smile.
Peggy's eyes flick from the mail tucked under my arm to my unbrushed hair. She gives me a frozen smile.
"We're doing Mediterranean this time. Something light."
"Sounds great."
"And wear something colorful, will you? We want to brighten things up."
The Audi rolls away. My smile vanishes the second it disappears around the bend.
The Hunt Club is a hundred and thirteen years old, and Peggy talks about it like she built it with her hands.
I shake my head as I cross the road and go up my drive. Behind me I can hear men grunting as they toss torn sod into the bed of a truck, and past that, thin and high across the still morning, someone's sprinkler. Beyond that, nothing at all.
As I make it to the door, I eye the deliveries stacked on my front step, a small brown city of them. Luna is already at the door on the other side of the glass with her whole back half moving.
I let myself in and give her thirty seconds against my legs before I go back out for the boxes and packages.
Inside, the house is cool and dim. It smells of fresh coffee, with a faint trace of cut wood drifting from the far end where the renovation is.
We sealed that whole wing off behind heavy plastic sheeting six months ago.
The sunroom and little study were supposed to become my office, but the contractor stopped returning David’s calls.
Now, the plastic hangs across the hall, milky and still, and I barely notice it anymore. After a while, anything that never changes goes invisible.
I carry the mail to the kitchen island and go looking for my glasses.
Through the window over the sink, I can see the aviary at the far end of the lawn. It is already loud with birds, yellow and blue behind the mesh, dropping and rising in the shade of the maples.
I'll go down after. I always go down after.
Then I realize I can't find my glasses.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake.”
This isn't new. I have three pairs and I can never lay a hand on any of them.
Screw it.
I snag a box cutter from the drawer. The labels are all facing down or half torn, and if I'm honest, I'm a little impatient.
So I slit them open without reading them.
One is vitamins. Another dog food. And of course the dress I ordered in a weak moment and will send back. Then the last is a large padded envelope, heavier than it looks. I run the blade along the top, reach in, and pull out a thick stack of paper that isn't anything I ordered.
It's newsprint.
There are dozens of pieces, some original clippings gone soft and yellow with age, others black-and-white photocopies with the machine's shadow along one edge. The top one is a column of dense gray type under a headline in a typeface I know from a hundred small regional papers.
I can’t make out the smaller print without my glasses, but one word in the headline is impossible to miss.
MURDER.
I stand very still in the kitchen with the cold coming off the tile through my bare feet.
I turn the large padded envelope over and squint at the mailing label. The print is large and dark enough that even without my glasses I can just make out the name and address.
Henry Westburn. 5216 Hunts Point Road.
Not 5261. 5216. Two digits swapped, the sort of mistake a tired driver makes at the end of a route, my six where his one should be, my one where his six should be.
It's not my house. Damn, it's not even my mail.
So this is him. The new fella Frank was so hungry to meet, the one who took Eleanor's place off her hands.
Twenty minutes ago he was a rumor at a mailbox. Now he has a name and an address a quarter mile up the road.
I should put it down. I know exactly what a decent person does here. She puts it back, tapes it shut, walks it up the road, and apologizes. That’s the end of it.
I don't.
I spread the stack of clippings across the island under the bright light, then go looking for my glasses. This time I find them.
When I come back, I start skimming, my eyes jumping from one detail to the next.
Wealthy couples. Homes on quiet streets. No forced entry. Little sign of struggle. County names I don't recognize, dates stretching back years, article after article.
The more I read, the stranger the feeling gets, because I know this rhythm. I know how these sentences are built, how the reporter withholds, then delivers, how the last line turns and leaves you cold. It’s like hearing a song from another room, one I’m certain I’ve heard before but can’t name.
Somewhere at the sealed-off end of the house, I hear the plastic sheeting stir, then go still.
I can’t stop reading.
One question keeps circling.
Why would the new neighbor have a stack of unsolved murders delivered to his door?