Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
The same unmarked SUV is outside our gate at ten past eight the next morning. I’ve been awake since five waiting for it.
I watch them come up the drive from the landing window. Hanson, in uniform with his hat under his arm, walks beside the man from last night. He's wearing a jacket despite the heat. Tucked under one arm is a folder. He stops halfway up and scans the house.
Anyone else might think he's admiring it. The eaves, the corners, the porch. But I know what he's looking for.
Cameras.
We don't have any.
For a brief moment, our eyes meet.
Then he walks on.
"They're here," I call down.
My voice comes out wrong. David says something from the kitchen I don't catch.
"Mr. and Mrs. Grant. Officer Hanson, Medina PD." He's careful with our names, as if he hadn't stood on our road last night. "This is Detective Rodriguez, King County Sheriff's Office, Criminal Investigations. He's taken over. We're canvassing about last night."
"Of course," David says. "Come in. Please."
Rodriguez shakes David's hand and then mine. He holds mine exactly as long as is normal, no longer. Then he walks into the living room, stands in the middle of it, and looks around.
He isn't rude about it. That's what makes it unbearable. He looks at the room the way I'd look at it, which is the whole problem. Then he finds the sofa, and he waits to be asked.
"Sit, please," I say. "Can I get anybody anything to drink?”
"We're good."
We sit. David takes the arm of my chair rather than the seat beside me, which is a thing he does when he expects a conversation to end fast.
The basics come first. They're easy. Where were we? David was at the hospital until seven, home by half past. I was here. Did we hear anything, see anything, notice a car we didn't know? No, no, and no. I hear myself saying it, and I hear how thin it sounds.
"And your work, Mr. Grant?"
"Attending surgeon. I work at UW Medical Center in Seattle. I'm up for Division Chief, which means I'm at the hospital more than I'm here."
"Promotion?"
"It's not a done deal yet."
Rodriguez writes nothing down. Hanson is the one writing.
"And you, Mrs. Grant?"
"I write," I say.
"Wrote," David says, and then stops himself. It's the same correction he made at dinner with Helen, only this time he hears it too. He glances at me, and the apology is for me, not the detective. "Sorry. She writes."
Rodriguez looks at me and waits.
"Freelance," I say. “Long-form journalism. Mostly from home. It's been a while."
He nods slowly and lets a beat go by.
"So, I'm told you knew the Ericksons well."
"Everyone knew the Ericksons."
"That's not quite what I asked."
He isn't smiling and he isn't unfriendly. He's simply put a small stone down in the middle of the room and he's waiting to see which of us picks it up.
"What do you want to know?" I ask.
Rodriguez flips back through a couple of pages of notes. "Peggy Erickson, former pharmaceutical executive, worked from home most days. Brant, biotech, on the road a lot. We've got plenty to draw on there. But as neighbors. What were they like?"
"Peggy ran the Hunt Club socials," I say. "I've been to a handful. I was at one on Thursday, actually, at their house. It's hard to describe without sounding entitled."
"A club?"
"More of a get-together."
"And what do you do there?"
"It's complicated to explain."
The detective leans forward. "Try."
"It's a place people go to be seen. There's food, there's wine, there's a charity everybody says they're there to help. But really they go to keep up with the Ericksons, or to make sure they don't end up on the wrong side of them."
I hear it land wrong the moment it's out of my mouth.
"That came out badly. Peggy could be difficult. She put her foot in her mouth a lot. But she was generous too, and she didn't deserve whatever happened in that house."
I pause.
"What did happen in that house?" I ask, before he can move on.
Rodriguez lets the silence run.
"Nothing good. But I assumed it would be the talk of Hunts Point by now," he says.
"Not all news travels fast here," David says. "Barring a few individuals, most people tend to pull the curtains and wait for somebody else to say it first."
Rodriguez looks at him a second longer than he needs to. Something passes behind his face that I can't read. Then he's back to me.
"Do you know if the Ericksons had any enemies?" he asks. "Anyone with a grievance. Anything unusual, however small, however stupid it sounds now."
And there I go, back in my mind to that last evening together.
The path down to the dock. The platter coming out of the kitchen and every head turning. Peggy leaving, unhurried, not looking back. The man in the linen jacket, ten seconds behind her, his drink still in hand.
I've been carrying it since Thursday. I’ve not told anyone.
And now a detective is sitting on my sofa asking me for anything unusual. I have a choice. I make it in about two seconds. I don't like how easy those two seconds were.
"Peggy was flirtatious," I say.
David's head turns.
"How so?" Rodriguez asks.
"The crowd was mostly locals, but random men showed up too. Different ones each time." I keep my hands still in my lap. "It wasn't hidden, exactly. Everyone saw and nobody said anything. She liked being the center of attention. She liked being wanted, she would say."
"Did her husband know?"
I shrug. I have no idea.
"Any names? Anyone who stood out?"
"None come to mind. Like I said, outsiders were a regular sight. Not all of them returned." That isn't evasion. I genuinely don't know who they were. "Half the people at those parties I couldn't tell you the names of, and I've been going for almost two years,” I say.
"Almost two years." Rodriguez looks up. "So that's how long you've been here?"
I nod.
"And how long have you been married?"
"Close to two years."
"So what brought you to Hunts Point?"
"David's job." I glance at him. "Isn't that right?"
"Among other things," David says.
"Other things?"
I look at David.
"My wife was in an accident," he says.
"A car crash," I say.
Rodriguez points his pen between us. "And you were her surgeon?"
I smile, and David rests a hand on my knee.
"What can I say," David says. "Love turns up in strange places, at the strangest times."
Hanson makes a face, impressed or startled, I can't tell which.
"And?" Rodriguez says.
"And what?" says David.
Rodriguez looks up from his pad. "You said among other things. What were the other things?"
I get there before David does. "It was a fresh start. For both of us. My memory hasn't been what it was since the crash. David's divorce was only a few years behind him, and the offer in Washington seemed too good to pass up."
He nods. "Washington. So before this, you were...?"
"Oregon," David says.
"Oregon." Rodriguez nods. "Portland's a good city. You get back there much?"
"From time to time."
Rodriguez's eyes move between us, no smile, and then he looks back down at his notes.
"And Mr. Erickson?"
"What about him?"
"How was he as a neighbor? And like his wife, did he have any extracurricular activities he liked to indulge in?"
"Brant was happy," I say, and my voice catches in a way I don't expect. "That's the impression I got, anyway." I glance at David. He has nothing to add.
Nobody says anything.
Rodriguez doesn't write it down. Hanson does.
"And you two?" Rodriguez says.
"Sorry?"
"How's your marriage?"
The question drops into the room without any change in his voice at all. It takes me a full second to understand what he's asked.
"Excuse me?" I say.
"Well, Mr. Grant, you told me you're at the hospital more than you're here. And Mrs. Grant, you work from home." His voice doesn't change. "Like the Ericksons, I'd imagine that puts a strain on a marriage."
"I'm not sure what that has to do with anything," David says.
"The devil's in the details." Rodriguez lets a beat go by. "Two people were killed next door with no forced entry. I'm going to ask everybody on this road a version of that question, and most of them will be offended, and I'm going to ask it anyway."
"This isn't a therapy session, Detective," David says.
It comes out fast, sharper than he means it to. He's on his feet before I've drawn the breath to answer, and the room goes very quiet.
I look up at my husband.
He isn't looking at me. He's staring at Rodriguez, and there's a hardness in him I don't often see.
A thought arrives.
He's angry.
Then I catch the thing underneath it. The thing that doesn't fit.
No, he’s frightened.
And that stays with me longer than it should, because there's no reason for it.
Anger I understand. No one wants a detective sitting in their living room asking whether their marriage is strained.
But fear is different. I file the fear away, the way I file everything now.
I tell myself it's the house, the tape next door, a murder forty feet from where we sleep.
Anyone would be frightened, with that on the other side of the hedge.
"It's fine," I say. "David. It's fine." I turn to Rodriguez. "We're fine. We've been married two years. He works too much and I don't sleep. That's the worst of it."
"Thank you," Rodriguez says, entirely unbothered, and I have the strong sense he's already got whatever it was he came in here for.
He stands.
"One more thing, Mrs. Grant." He picks his folder up off the arm of the sofa. "You used to write about murders like this. Didn't you?”
The heat coming in through the open door only makes the sudden dryness in my mouth worse.
I never told him that. I said freelance. I said long-form journalism. I said it's been a while.
"That was a long time ago," I say.
Rodriguez nods.
At the door, it's Hanson who turns back.
"Oh, one last thing." He's polite about it, almost apologetic. "Your doorbell camera. Ring, or whatever you've got. Could you send us the last few days? We're pulling everything on the road. Anything at all helps. Sometimes it's just a car going by."
He must know we don't have one. Rodriguez scanned the house on the way up the drive. The eaves, the corners, the porch. He was looking for cameras.
But Hanson asks anyway, and he watches David while he does it.
"We don't have one," David says.
Hanson blinks.
"You don't have a doorbell camera?"
"We don't have anything." David gives a small, tight laugh. "We've got a gate and a dog."
"What my husband means," I say, "is that we moved to Hunts Point because everyone told us it was one of the safest places in the state."
I realize in that instant how naive that must have sounded. Next door, a house sits empty behind police tape, proving me wrong.
Hanson looks at Rodriguez. Rodriguez looks at the empty corner above our front door, where a bracket would go, and where there's nothing.
"You should think about installing one,” he says.