When I got home Sunday evening, I called Molly Boyle, but she was not home. I went to bed early, then was awakened by the phone ringing inside the sound of rain. It was Dana Magelli, an old friend at NOPD. "Did you and Clete Purcel question a kid by the name of Holly Blankenship, a runaway from Iowa?" he asked.

"Yesterday?"

"Right. Her pimp says y'all talked to her at a McDonald's."

"She didn't use that last name," I said.

"She's not using any name now," Dana said.

"What?"

"Her body was dumped in a trash pit out by Chalmette in the early a.m. The guy who strangled her used a coat hanger. You working on the Baton Rouge serial killer case?"

"Yeah, but that's not why we were in town," I said, trying to shake the image of a hapless, overweight girl murdered and thrown away like yesterday's coffee grinds.

"You there?" Dana said.

"I was trying to get a lead on a guy I had to shoot. His name was Bob Cobb."

"Yeah, I know all about that. Funny the girl ends up dead right after she talks to you. Must be just coincidence, huh? Why would anyone kill a girl because she talked to a cop? Her pimp gave you permission, didn't he?" he said.

Early Monday morning I was in Helen's office. "There was semen in the girl?" she said.

"That's what Dana said," I replied.

"So let's see what their lab says. In the meantime, there's no connection between her homicide and you being in New Orleans, none at least that we can see. You reading me on this?"

"No," I said.

"We're buried in open cases. Our backlog looks like the national debt. Don't stir up things with NOPD. If they want your help, they'll call. That translates into mind your own business."

She stared at me steadily, biting at a hangnail, waiting to see if her words had taken effect.

"The girl got it on with Bad Texas Bob, a guy who contracted to kill me. The girl talks to me, then she's dead. What's the point in saying there's no connection?"

Helen removed a tiny piece of skin from her tongue and dropped it in the wastebasket.

I went home for lunch. My next-door neighbor was Miss Ellen Deschamps. She was eighty-two years old, a graduate of a girls' finishing school in Mississippi, and she lived in the two-story, oak-shaded frame house she had been born in. Miss Ellen had never married, and every afternoon at three served tea on her upstairs veranda for herself and her older sister or friends who were invited by written invitation.

Miss Ellen was devoted to gardening and feeding stray cats. Each spring her flower beds and window boxes were bursting with color; her oaks were surrounded by caladiums that looked individually hand-painted. Cats sat or slept on every stone and wood surface in her yard. But Miss Ellen had another obsession as well. She monitored every aspect of life on East Main and wrote polite notes on expensive stationery to her neighbors when they didn't cut their lawns, take in their empty trash cans in timely fashion, trim their hedges, or paint their houses with colors she considered tasteful.

With Miss Ellen on the job, which was twenty-four hours a day, we didn't have to worry about a Neighborhood Crime Watch program.

When I pulled into the drive, she was weeding a flower bed in the lee of her house. She got to her feet and called out to me: "Mr. Robicheaux, so glad I saw you. Did you find out who that man was?"

"Pardon?" I said.

She walked through the bamboo that separated our property. She wore cotton gloves, a denim dress with huge pockets for garden tools, and rubber boots patinaed with mud. A half dozen cats, including Snuggs, trailed along behind her. "The man looking in your windows Friday night. I called the police about him. They didn't tell you?" she said.

"No, they didn't," I replied.

"Well, he surely didn't have any business in your yard. Besides, it was raining to beat the band. So why would he have been by your window if he wasn't a Peeping Tom?"

"What did this fellow look like, Miss Ellen?"

"I don't really know. He was wearing a raincoat, one with a hood."

"Was he white?"

"I wouldn't know that, either. Are you going to have your cat fixed?"

"Probably not."

"You should. His romantic inclinations seem to have no bounds," she said.

I wondered if there was a second meaning in her statement.

Inside, I called the city police department and talked to the dispatcher. He told me a patrol car had been sent to my address at 11:16 Friday night, but no one had been in the yard, and the responding officer saw no point in waking me up. "Dave, Miss Ellen said the Peeping Tom was in her yard, yours, and maybe two or t'ree yards on the other side of you," the dispatcher said. "We would have had to wake up the whole block. You know how many calls we get from that lady every week?"

I went outside and walked through the side yard by my bedroom windows. The flower bed was planted with hydrangeas and camellias, and the mixture of black dirt, coffee grinds, and compost mixed with horse manure that I used in my gardens was still soggy from Friday night's downpour. Underneath the windowsill were the deeply etched prints of a man's work boots. The blinds were just as they had been Friday night – two inches short of the sill, a perfect viewing slot for a voyeur to have watched Molly Boyle and me in the throes of our passion.

After work I drove down Old Jeanerette Road to Molly's agency and caught her at the end of her workday, carrying a shovel, hoe, and steel rake over her shoulder toward the barn, a machete hanging from her other hand. "How was New Orleans?" she said.

"The same," I said, not mentioning the death of the runaway girl from Iowa. Inside the barn, I watched her put away her tools, first wiping each of them clean, hanging them from nails on the walls. "Molly, would anyone have reason to follow you around?" I asked.

"Why would anyone want to follow me around?"

"The neighbor thought someone might have been in my yard Friday night," I replied. "But my neighbor is a little eccentric sometimes."

Molly smiled, as though the subject were of little consequence, then began sharpening her machete on the emery wheel, orange and blue stars dancing on her jeans. She wiped the blade on an oily rag, then hung the machete on a wood peg.

"You keep your tools sharp," I said.

"My father taught me that. He had simple admonitions: 'Feed your animals before you feed yourself… Take care of your tools and they'll take care of you…' Put your shotgun through the fence, then crawl after it.' My favorite was 'Never trust a white person black people don't like.' "

"Come to the house," I said.

"I can't."

"I know a motel on the other side of Morgan City. It's on the water, off the highway. Not many people go there. There's a restaurant where we can have dinner."

I could see the conflict in her face. "Come on, Molly," I said, my voice almost plaintive.

We were there in under a half hour. Not only there, but in the shower stall, the hot water beating down on our heads, her legs clenched around my thighs, her fingers splayed on my back, her mouth wide with a cry that she fought to suppress but could not.

Then we were on the bed and she came a second time, her stomach and thighs rolling under me, her mouth wet against my cheek. Her hair and skin smelled like the ocean, or the smell a wave full of seaweed gives off when it bursts on hot sand. Then somewhere down below a coral shelf a mermaid winked a blue eye at me and invited me to come and rest inside a pink cave where she lived. The sound went out of the room, and when I opened my eyes the shadows of the overhead wood fan were flicking across Molly's face, like clock hands out of control.