neck that he was now trying to hide with the collar of his shirt. He remembered her doing it, a desperate swipe as he squeezed her throat, catching him just as he twisted out of reach. He knew there’d be no fighting tonight. This was going to be a gentle, warm, drawn-out evening. He was smiling to himself as he heard a pair of feet slowly shuffling toward the other side of the door.
She was everything he had envisioned. Small, bent-backed, peering at him through reading glasses that gave her large and bewildered eyes. She turned on a stern frown as he had expected she would, clutching her fluffy dressing gown around her.
“Yes?” was all she offered. An old woman mildly peeved at having to answer the door at such an hour.
“I’m so sorry to bother you,” Regan said. “My name is Sean Geyser. I’m with the Australian Electric Company.”
“We’re quite happy with our service.” Eloise Jansen took the door in hand. “And what an inconvenient hour to be—”
“I’m not selling anything.” Regan put his hands up. “I’m here because your neighbors across the street have been experiencing some unexpected power surges. I wondered if I could come in and check your system. We just want to make sure everyone is safe.”
“Power surges?” Mrs. Jansen glanced into the hallway behind her, hands fluttering with tension. “Oh, dear. Of course. Come in. Are we in danger? Should we turn the power off?”
“Oh, no, no, you’re perfectly safe,” Regan lied. He crossed the threshold and closed and locked the door behind him.
In the living room, collapsed into an ancient recliner covered with a crocheted afghan, sat an old man, his hands on the armrests. Regan stood in the doorway, looking around the room as Mrs. Jansen went to the old man and poked him, which only resulted in louder snores.
“Gary? Gary? It’s the power man. The power man’s here.”
Regan rather liked thinking of himself as “the power man.” He strolled to the wall beside the huge, pine-veneer television set and looked at a collection of photographs hanging there. About fifty frames of different sizes and shapes had been arranged in a sort of cloud shape, each perfectly positioned at the same distance from the next, a smattering of faces in every conceivable circumstance. There were small, cheery-cheeked toddlers feeding ducks at sunlit ponds and early school-age girls lounging on a rug, playing with dolls, whispering in one another’s ears. Childhood secrets. There were teenagers reluctantly posing for their photographs, holding certificates awkwardly by their corners. Gary, finally roused from his living-room slumber, had shuffled to Regan’s side, a pair of thick glasses almost identical to his wife’s now perched on his nose.
“What is it? The electrics?”
Regan nodded, hardly willing to go much further with the ruse. The power man was in the house now. He dropped all pretense, pointed to the picture wall while the elderly couple stood waiting for instructions.
“Tell me about this,” he said.
“We haven’t got time for chatter,” Gary grumbled, gesturing to the clock, which read 11 p.m. “It’s the middle of the bloody night!”
“Those are the lovely children we’ve taken into our home over the years.” Eloise stepped forward, embarrassed by her husband’s gruffness in the face of an official visitor. “We could never have children of our own, so we fostered. That was many years ago.” She gave a small chuckle. “We’re too old now, aren’t we, Gary?”
Gary shuffled off to the kitchen, muttering to himself. Regan perused the pictures until he found the one he was looking for. He’d almost missed her, she looked so much like an angry teenage boy. Harriet was sitting on a brick wall, her arms crossed, glaring up at the camera as though she’d only just noticed she was being snapped and was about to launch into a tirade of protest. Red flannelette shirt, wild, short-cropped black hair. Regan took the photograph off the wall and held it in the dim light. A plain black plastic frame, no frills. Perfect. Eloise Jansen was frowning at his having removed the picture, and her frown deepened when he spoke.
“Tell me about this girl, Mrs. Jansen,” Regan said.
“I don’t mean to be impolite,” Eloise said, “but it is rather late for a visitor. Should we perhaps get on to the business of the electrics? My husband gets rather tired in the evenings. He’s eighty-four, you know.”
She tried to take the picture frame from him. Regan held on, and when she insisted, he tugged the