Page 10 of Again with Feeling

The address that belonged to Vivienne’s father, Arlen Lundgren, was next door. It looked like a twin to Richard’s, which made sense considering the tract-housing style of the neighborhood, and it appeared to be similarly well kept. The only difference was that someone had hung hideous curtains in Arlen’s windows—some sort of eye-wrenching print of mauve-colored roses—and a few bare, brittle rosebushes huddled next to the stoop. There was no sign that anyone was home at either residence; with the curtains closed, the houses looked still and lifeless.

I unlocked my phone and examined the photo that Vivienne’s lawyer had sent me. It had the saturated colors that I associated with quick, cheap photos from another era, and it showed a close-up of a young man. He had a kind of attractiveness that was a combination of strong features and youth that didn’t quite translate into handsomeness—a high brow, prominent nose, and heavy jaw that, combined with hair the color of wheat, gave him a distinctly Norse look. Even in the close-up, it was easy to tell that he was well built and vital. A thousand years ago, he would have made one heck of a Viking. He was pushing one hand through his hair, as though the photo were a candid one, and he’d been caught unaware, and on that wrist he wore a bracelet that consisted of a fine gold chain and what I guessed was a small saint medallion.

“He doesn’t look like he’d be easy to overpower,” Bobby said.

I shook my head.

“We can rule out a gun or a blow to the head,” Bobby continued. “The medical examiner would have seen some kind of evidence if that’s how it happened.”

“Which leaves some kind of drug to incapacitate him.” I sighed. “And in books, poison is a woman’s weapon.”

“Good thing this isn’t a book,” Bobby said with that slanting smile again.

I got out of the Jeep, but instead of heading to the front door of the house that had belonged, at one point, to Richard Lundgren, I headed toward the backyard. A few windows were set into the side of the house, and these were curtained as well. The back of the house had a few more, and finally I got a glimpse of bare, dark glass—no curtains, but I couldn’t make out anything inside the house without walking up and pressing my nose to the window, which I wasn’t quite ready to do. A rusting gas grill on wheels, plastic patio furniture that looked brittle and washed out from UV exposure, and a few planters that held nothing but weeds were the only suggestion that someone used this space. As with the front of the house, the landscaping—if you could call it that—was really nothing more than mercilessly short grass.

Bobby stood, hands on hips, and looked out at the slough. I followed his gaze. The water began maybe forty yards from the patio, with rushes and sedge bristling at the waterline. A thin scum of algae covered the water, which appeared to be stagnant—if the water was flowing or had a current, I couldn’t tell. It wasn’t a wide body of water, maybe another thirty or forty yards, and I doubted it was deep. I guess it had been deep enough, I thought with a sick feeling. But the sloughwaslong. I couldn’t see the end of it in either direction. A broken length of barricade tape floated on the water, which I took to mean that the local police were no longer even pretending to try to preserve the scene.

“Maybe someone killed him somewhere else and brought him up here in a kayak,” I said, taking another, longer look up the slough.

Bobby shook his head. “Too complicated.” He swung his gaze back to the house.

I knew what he was thinking. “Forty yards isn’t nothing, but someone could have dragged him from the house to the slough. Even a much smaller woman.”

Bobby nodded, but he said, “But she would have been exposed the whole time. If anyone had looked out the window, they would have seen her.”

We both turned to consider the house next door. A man stood there, and he was holding a shotgun. My first, confused thought was: How long has he been there? I hadn’t heard him, and to judge by Bobby’s sudden stillness, neither had he. Then my brain began to take in the details of his appearance. He was old—not just older, butold, in his eighties, maybe even older. He had a surprising amount of white hair left, and the color of it made me think of Ivory soap. He wore a brown, waffle-weave bathrobe, and he had on some kind of rubber clogs that looked like knock-off Crocs. Gun, my brain told me again. I tried to make sense of how he’d gotten the drop on us—he couldn’t have come out of the house, or we would have heard the ancient storm door. But there was a detached garage next to the house, as well as a freestanding building that I took to be a workshop or a storage shed, and he could have come from either of those. It was hard to focus, though; my brain kept saying, Gun.

The man said, “Who the fudge are you?”

(He didn’t say fudge.)

And then he brought the gun up toward us.

Chapter 4

Staring at the shotgun pointed my direction, I made a snap decision: I was going to tackle Bobby.

It wasn’t a rational thought. It wasn’t a logical conclusion. It’s hard to even call it a plan, since it was something that seemed to happen at the cellular level. Someone was aiming a weapon at us, and my body tensed, seemingly of its own accord, as I readied myself. There wasn’t any sort of intermediate process.

“Sir—” Deputy Bobby said, in his best deputy voice.

“Daddy!”

The storm door clattered open, and a woman lowered herself down the steps in a flustered hustle that was impeded by the fact that she had to hold on to the rail with both hands and take each step one at a time. My first impression was of middle-aged dumpiness—the short, frizzy hair that had been fried blond; the extra weight; the varicose veins. But then I realized that wasn’t quite right, because even though middle age came to everyone, this woman had overlaid hers with a veneer of gas station chic. Instead of a dressing gown or a robe, she wore a plasticky kimono with a dragon on its back. Her nails were a fire-engine red, visible even at a distance. And when the breeze shifted, the fetor of the slough was replaced by something I could only imagine she calledscent.

“Daddy,” she said again, as she lowered herself to the patio behind the house next door. “Put that down! You’re going to get someone killed!”

The old man didn’t even look at her.

“Put it away!” She pushed on the shotgun’s barrel until it lowered, and then she planted herself in front of him, balled up her fists, and set them on her hips. “What in the world’s gotten into you?” But she didn’t wait for a reply. She turned around. Apparently we didn’t deserve the fists-on-hips treatment, because one of her hands drifted up to clutch the kimono shut at the neck, while the other patted the air around her hair (not the hair itself, I was careful to note, which I was beginning to suspect wassupposedto look that way). “I’m sorry. Daddy’s always been protective of his little girl.”

Then she giggled.

Bobby, bless his heart, was staring.

“She’s batting her eyelashes at you,” I whispered.

“You two must have had the fright of your lives.” The saccharine tone switched when she snapped, “Go back inside, Daddy!”

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