was a stepladder beside the tree and a person in hooded white coveralls on top of it, leaning sideways at a precarious angle to point a camera into the hole. The door in the back wall stood open—I hadn’t seen it opened in years—on the laneway: stone apartment-block wall, the other uniformed cop in the same official pose, glimpse of a white van. People moved in and out, between the laneway and the tree and the white canvas gazebo, with its festive pointed roof, that had materialized beside the strawberry bed. Bright blue latex gloves, hard plastic black case like a tool kit open in the grass, gray sky. Snap of wind in the crime-scene tape and the canvas.
“All that stuff about the key to the garden door,” Susanna said in a low voice, at my shoulder. “That wasn’t because they need more copies. That was him finding out whether anyone else could get into the garden, or whether it’s just us.”
“There was another one,” Leon said. “I remember it.”
“Me too,” I said. “Didn’t it use to be on a hook beside the door?”
Susanna glanced behind us at Zach and Sallie, whom Melissa and Hugo had somehow convinced to help slice mushrooms; Zach was making karate-chop noises as he slammed the knife down, and Sallie was giggling. “Someone took it, one summer. Wasn’t it Dec, when he stayed here?”
“Dec didn’t need to sneak in the back. He came in the front door. What about that friend of yours, the weird blonde who kept showing up in the middle of the night? The cutter?”
“Faye wasn’t weird. She had shit going on. And she didn’t have a key. She’d text me and I’d let her in.”
“What happens,” Leon said. He was watching a small sturdy woman with graying hair and combats stumping out of the tent to join the conference beneath the tree (the state pathologist? the forensic archaeologist? I had only a hazy idea of what either of those should look like, or for that matter what they did). “What happens if they find some evidence that the person was killed? What do they do then?”
“Just going by experience,” I said, “they’ll show up a couple of times when we least want to see them, they’ll ask a shit-ton of questions about how it might be our fault that someone dumped a skull in our tree, and then they’ll disappear and leave us to pick up the pieces.”
The vicious edge to my voice startled me. I hadn’t realized, till that moment, just how intensely I loathed having Rafferty and his pals there. It startled Leon and Susanna, too: their faces turning sharply towards me, uncertain silence. My hands were shaking again. I shoved them into my pockets and kept looking out at the garden.
“Well,” Leon said, after a moment, “I don’t know about you, but I’ve got no problem with them disappearing. The sooner the better.”
“At least they’re being polite about the whole thing,” Susanna said. “If we were all on the dole and crammed into a council house . . .”
“They’ve been out there for ages,” Melissa said, at the sink, hands full of lettuce. “We should see if they want tea.”
“No,” all three of us said in unison.
“Fuck them,” Leon said.
“They probably have thermoses,” I said. “Or something.”
“Maybe we should offer them some pasta,” Tom said.
“No.”
“One of the downsides of being young,” Hugo told us all, apparently apropos of nothing, “is that you worry too much. Really, you do. It’s all going to be fine.” He laid a hand on Sallie’s curls, smiling at us. “Worse things happen at sea, as they say. Now, where shall we eat?”
We ate in the dining room—the thought of crime-scene dinner theater, as Leon put it, was well over everyone’s weirdness limit. The glossy old mahogany table was almost never used except for Christmas dinner, and I had to wipe off a film of dust. Susanna had closed the shutters on the garden and the overhead light was weak, leaving the room a smeared, confusing yellow. Nobody said very much; even Zach was subdued, picking through his pasta and pushing the mushrooms to one side without bitching about them. Sallie was yawning.
“We should go, after this,” Susanna said, glancing at Tom. “Will you guys be OK?”
“We’ll be fine,” Hugo said. “And I’m sure they’ll be packing up for the night soon enough, too. It’s you I’m worried about, leaving. Is that reporter woman still there?”