“If you don’t mind, I’ll take the first shower,” she said. “That way I can start dinner while you clean up.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “I’ll just sit out here and drip.”

Rita smiled. “I’ll get you a beer,” she said. A moment later she handed me one and then went in and closed the door. I sat on the step and sipped my beer. The last few days had gone by in a savage blur, and I had been so entirely upended from my normal life that I actually enjoyed the moment of peaceful contemplation, calmly sitting there and drinking a beer while somewhere in the city Chutsky was shedding spare parts. Life whirled on around me with its sundry slashings, strangulations, and dismemberings, but in Dexter’s Domain it was Miller Time. I raised the can in a toast to Sergeant Doakes.

Somewhere in the house I heard a commotion. There was shouting and a little bit of squealing, as if Rita had just discovered the Beatles in her bathroom. Then the front door slammed open and Rita grabbed me around the neck in a stranglehold. I dropped my beer and gasped for air. “What? What did I do?” I said. I saw Astor and Cody watching from just inside the door. “I’m terribly sorry, and I’ll never do it again,” I added, but Rita kept squeezing.

“Oh, Dexter,” she said, and now she was crying. Astor smiled at me and clasped her hands together under her chin. Cody just watched, nodding a little bit. “Oh, Dexter,” Rita said again.

“Please,” I said, struggling desperately to get some air, “I promise it was an accident and I didn’t mean it. What did I do?” Rita finally relented and loosened her death grip.

“Oh, Dexter,” she said one more time, and she put her hands on my face and looked at me with a blinding smile and a faceful of tears. “Oh, YOU!” she said, although to be honest it didn’t seem very much like me at the moment. “I’m sorry, it was an accident,” she said, snuffling now. “I hope you didn’t have anything really special planned.”

“Rita. Please. What is going on?”

Her smile got bigger and bigger. “Oh, Dexter. I really-it was just- Astor needed to use the toilet, and when she picked up your clothes, it just fell out onto the floor and- Oh, Dexter, it’s so beautiful!” She had now said Oh Dexter so many times that I began to feel Irish, but I still had no idea what was going on.

Until Rita lifted up her hand in front of her. Her left hand. Now with a large diamond ring sparkling on her ring finger.

Chutsky’s ring.

“Oh, Dexter,” she said again, and then buried her face in my shoulder. “Yes yes YES! Oh, you’ve made me so happy!”

“All right,” Cody said softly.

And after that, what can you say except congratulations?

The rest of the evening passed in a blur of disbelief and Miller Lite. I knew very well that hovering somewhere out in space was a perfect, calm, logical series of words that I could put together and say to Rita to make her understand that I had not actually proposed to her, and we would all have a good laugh and say good night. But the harder I searched for that magical elusive sentence, the faster it ran away from me. And I found myself reasoning that perhaps one more beer would unlock the doors of perception, and after several cans Rita went up to the corner store and returned with a bottle of champagne. We drank the champagne and everyone seemed so very happy, and one thing led to another and somehow I ended up in Rita’s bed once again, witness to some exceedingly unlikely and undignified events.

And once again I found myself wondering, as I drifted off to stunned and unbelieving sleep: How do these terrible things always happen to me?

Waking up after a night like that is never very pleasant. Waking up in the middle of the night and thinking, Oh God-Deborah! is even worse. You may think I was guilty or uneasy about neglecting someone who depended on me, in which case you would be very wrong. As I have said, I don’t really feel emotions. I can, however, experience fear, and the idea of Deborah’s potential rage pulled the trigger. I hurried into my clothes and managed to slip out to my car without waking anyone. Sergeant Doakes was no longer in his position across the street. It was nice to know that even Doakes needed to sleep sometime. Or perhaps he had thought that someone who just got engaged deserved a little privacy. Knowing him as I did, however, this didn’t seem likely. It was far more likely that he had been elected pope and had to fly off to the Vatican.

I drove home quickly, and checked my answering machine. There was one automated message urging me to buy a new set of tires before it was too late, which seemed ominous enough, but no message from Debs. I made coffee and waited for the thump of the morning paper against my door. There was a sense of unreality to the morning that was not entirely caused by the aftereffects of the champagne. Engaged, was I? Well well. I wished that I could scold myself and demand to know what I thought I had been doing. But the truth was that, unfortunately, I hadn’t been doing anything wrong; I was entirely clothed in virtue and diligence. And I had done nothing that could be called spectacularly stupid-far from it. I had been proceeding with life in a noble and even exemplary manner, minding my own business and trying to help my sister recover her boyfriend, exercising, eating plenty of green vegetables, and not even slicing up other monsters. And somehow all this pure and decent behavior had snuck around behind me and bitten me on the ass. Never a good deed goes unpunished, as Harry used to say.

And what could I do about it now? Surely Rita would come to her senses. I mean, really: ME? Who could possibly want to marry ME?! There had to be better alternatives, like becoming a nun, or joining the Peace Corps. This was Dexter we were talking about. In a city the size of Miami, couldn’t she find somebody who was at least human? And what was her rush to get married again anyway? It hadn’t worked out terribly well for her the first time, but she was apparently willing to plunge right back into it again. Were women really this desperate to get married?

Of course there were the children to think about. Conventional wisdom would say they needed a father, and there was something to that, because where would I have been without Harry? And Astor and Cody had looked so happy. Even if I made Rita see that a comical mistake had happened, would the kids ever understand?

I was on my second cup of coffee when the paper came. I glanced through the main sections, relieved to find that terrible things were still happening almost everywhere. At least the rest of the world hadn’t gone crazy.

By seven o’clock I thought it would be safe to call Deborah on her cell phone. There was no answer; I left a message, and fifteen minutes later she called back. “Good morning, Sis,” I said, and I marveled at the way I managed to sound cheerful. “Did you get some sleep?”

“A little,” she grumbled. “I woke up around four yesterday. I traced the package to a place in Hialeah. I drove around the area most of the night looking for the white van.”

“If he dropped the package way up in Hialeah, he probably drove in from Key West to do it,” I said.

“I know that, goddamn it,” she snapped. “But what the hell else am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But doesn’t the guy from Washington get here today?”

“We don’t know anything about him,” she said. “Just because Kyle is good, doesn’t mean this guy will be.”

She apparently didn’t remember that Kyle had not shown himself to be particularly good, at least in public. He’d done nothing at all, in fact, except get himself captured and have his finger nipped off. But it didn’t seem politic for me to comment on how good he was, so I simply said, “Well, we have to assume the new guy knows something about this that we don’t know.”