We Know

Aside from a different shade of paint, a goose mailbox, and the Realtor sign hammered in the front lawn, Frank's house looked the same. I parked up the street, walked back, and stood staring at the house from across the way. I thought of a rucksack stuffed with a hundred eighty grand and Frank's tattoo and how he'd hugged me that one time and called us a family. I thought, Please don't be a lie.

I slipped through the side gate and circled the house, peering inside. Some of the furniture was still there, and a few boxes, but whoever had been living there was mostly moved out. The old porch swing remained. I placed a hand on the peeling wood but couldn't bring myself to sit. Then I confronted the back door I'd stumbled through that night to find Frank. I wondered if this was the feeling that killers got when they returned to the scene of the crime to roll in the dirt of their misdeeds.

The door was locked, but the pivot latch on the kitchen's sash window was tired and pulled open readily with an upward jostling of the pane. I stepped inside, easing the window shut behind me.

I walked into the living room and sat in a slipcovered armchair, setting my feet before the spot where I'd held Frank while he died. I stared at the rag rug for a while. I'd driven by the house when I'd first moved back, and one or two other times when I really missed him, when I wanted to breathe the air he'd breathed, walk the streets he'd walked. These walls held my favorite memories. And, of course, some others, too.

I slid off the chair onto my knees and turned back the rug, revealing the bleached stain in the floorboards. It had yellowed over the years. It smelled of dust and rot. I wondered if the last owners had been oblivious to the blood spilled here.

I smoothed the rug back into place and walked silently into the kitchen. The old alarm keypad, still cracked from Callie's fist, was no longer hooked up to anything. Padding up the hall, I saw that my old bedroom had been converted into a sewing room. For a time I stood beneath that high rectangle of window and stared up at the smog-smeared night sky.

Comfort. Security.

Caruthers's words came back to me from yesterday afternoon: A single bad decision can open a world of lamentable consequences.

I asked myself the same questions I'd been mulling over half my life. What if I'd just let the phone ring that night? What if I hadn't climbed into the back of that sedan?

My footsteps seemed amplified in the small house. Same Medeco locks on the back door. I looked into the master bedroom, which was nothing like I remembered it. No sweaters cramming the top shelf of the closet. No scattering of partly read books on the nightstand. No stack of sketch pads on the bureau, cloudy with charcoal. I went back out and faced the front door. The same. The window dressings had changed, and I wondered if the security catches Frank had installed were still there. I pulled back the curtain, and fright hit me so fast and hard that I crouched in paralyzed shock.

A short way up the shadowy street, a car was pulled to the curb in front of my truck. A figure stood at my driver's-side window. He either sensed movement from the house or was looking for it, and the dark oval of his head wobbled slightly as it rotated. He was looking at me.

I jerked my hand back, letting the curtain fall closed, my breath sucking in with a screech. An engine turned over.

And then something unexpected happened. My reaction shifted, away from fear, to a flick-it urge for confrontation, no matter the stakes. Seventeen years ago I'd exited this house on trembling legs, but now I found myself charging the front door, spoiling for a fight. By the time I was off the porch, the car was already around the corner, the whine of its acceleration rising in pitch but fading with distance. When I reached my truck, there was nothing but crickets and the machine-gun strafing of a high-power sprinkler. A spasm of energy spun me in a full circle, but I spotted no one anywhere.

My mouth dry from the scare, I hurried back, closed and locked the door, and left the way I'd come in. At my truck, I pulled a flashlight from the glove box, slid beneath, and examined the undercarriage, as Liffman had taught me. The gas tank also showed no signs of tampering.

When I climbed into the truck and set my hands on the steering wheel, they were still shaking. I squeezed the wheel, doing my best to still them. When I looked up, I noticed a slip of paper tucked under the windshield wiper. Like a valet stub. But I hadn't valeted, not in months.

I climbed out and tugged it from under the rubber blade. A film-processing slip from a photo place on Ventura Boulevard. A single roll. Ready for pickup today at noon. The order number and pickup time were preprinted, the name and phone number spaces left blank. The only human mark was the black circle around Thursday. The film had probably been dropped in an overnight box rather than brought to a counter.