Mostly I’m angry at myself. I didn’t go out there to share anything with him. I don’t really know why I went—certainly it wasn’t to tell him about the monster, but those words came out as if they had a life of their own. And in a way I guess that’s exactly what the monster is—a life of its own. I’ve kept hearing it over the last twenty years, small suggestions whispered to me that I’ve ignored, ideas on how to get rid of animals or people that I don’t like.

My wife has been dead four days and in the ground for less than twenty-four hours and I’m losing my mind. I sit outside and let the sun burn my face and eyes before turning away, the bright shadows and shapes moving across my vision. I go through my wallet for the business card I slid in there on Friday, and when I find it I can’t read the number on it and have to wait for a minute for my vision to settle.

“Detective Schroder,” the detective says, answering his phone.

“Hi. It’s, ah, Edward Hunter. I’m, ah, ringing to see—”

“I was just about to call you,” he says.

“Yeah? You have something?” I ask, walking outside with the phone. “You’ve caught the men who killed Jodie?”

“No. Not yet, but trust me, Edward, we’re following up some strong leads,” he says, but he doesn’t even sound like he could convince himself. “You have to be patient.”

“I have been patient.”

“I promise you, it’s still my top priority.”

“In three days it will have been a week,” I point out.

“I understand your frustration,” he says.

“I’m not so sure you do. How much did they get?”

“What?”

“How much money did they take from the bank?”

“I can’t discuss that with you.”

“Jodie was killed because of that money. Give me a break, Detective, I think I have more than a right to know how much my wife’s life was worth.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, because two people died,” I say, and the accountant in me is doing the arithmetic, “so divide that number by two and that’s how much she was worth. I want to know if she died for more or less than the price of a new car, more or less than the price of a house? Of course it depends on the house, on the car, but—”

“Look, Edward, I promise you we’re doing our best. We really are. We have everybody we can spare searching for those men.”

“Searching, not chasing,” I say. “Maybe I should do your job for you,” I say, and the words are out of my mouth before I can stop them, having come from nowhere, certainly not from me, and I realize they’re not my words at all, but somebody else’s. No, not somebody—something.

“What does that mean?” Schroder asks.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I say. “I’m angry, that’s all.”

“I hear you went to visit your father today.”

“What?”

“First time since he got put away. Why’d you do that?”

I slow down and think about his question, aware he’s talking to me now in a different capacity—he’s talking to me the way a cop talks to a suspect. He’s fishing for information. “He rang me. Told me he wanted to see me.”

“And you dropped everything to go.”

“He’s my father. He wanted to share his condolences. He wanted to know what the police were doing to get the men who killed my wife.”

“Is that all?”

“Of course that’s all. My wife got murdered, Detective. What father wouldn’t want to try to console his son?”

“Have you been seeing anybody since the shooting? For help? A counselor, or a psychiatrist?”

“Why would I do that?” One of my neighbors starts up a lawn mower and I head back inside so I can hear Schroder clearly.

“To help you come to terms with what happened.”

“I can come to terms in my own way.”

“I hope that doesn’t involve doing anything stupid.”

“Like what?”

“Like trying to do my job.”

“One of us has to try,” I say, “because it seems to me nothing is getting done.”

“A word of caution, Edward. Leave everything to us. We know what we’re doing.”

“Then prove it.”

I hang up, finish my beer, grab out another one, but don’t open it. I leave it on the kitchen counter and fire up the computer.

I go online and find all the newspaper reports from the last week that dealt with the robbery. There’s enough of them that by the time I print them out I have a stack of paper a centimeter thick. I take them outside and sit in the sun, reading through them. Surveillance from the bank puts the entry of the six men at 1:13 p.m. They were in the bank for less than four minutes, though it sure felt longer. The police were called by several witnesses outside who saw the men enter, as well as people who first heard the shotgun blast, but they were first alerted by a silent alarm. I close my eyes and try to remember as best I can. The men had been in the bank for almost a minute before the bank manager was killed. The newspaper says it took six minutes for the police to arrive at the scene. The men had been gone for two minutes by that point. The newspaper doesn’t say how much money was taken.

The accountant studies the figures. Four minutes. Six minutes. Six men. Two victims. Two fatal gunshots. An unnamed amount of money. The figures swirl around inside my head, I rest them against everything the newspapers say, try forcing them to fit against what I know, against my memories, but nothing sticks out, nothing shifts into such a focus as to tell me where to look next. The numbers mean nothing.

I pick up the sheaf of papers and throw them out into the yard. Most of them stay together, but the ones on the top and bottom slide away, the small breeze picking them up and pinning them into the corners of the yard. The answers are in the wind too, and though Schroder didn’t say it, I know that the bank robbery is already history, the death of my wife and the bank manager pushed aside as the Christchurch Crime Rate keeps rolling on, gathering momentum, leading to what, God only knows.

I end up drinking the beer and falling asleep, not heavily, but enough for about an hour to slip by mostly unnoticed, and when I wake up the lawn mower has stopped and my face is tight, and when I reach up to touch it, it’s tender from sunburn. When I stand up I realize that the few beers I’ve had, combined with the lack of food, have made me light-headed. I phone Nat and ask if they can take care of Sam tonight, and they tell me they can. In fact they sound more than happy to. I talk to Sam for a bit and she tells me she wants to come home and I tell her that she can’t, not today, that Daddy has some things he has to take care of.

“But you promised,” she says.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

She finally accepts things can’t be changed and hands the phone back to Nat, grumpy.

“She’ll be okay,” he says. “You know how kids can be.”

“How’s she doing?”

“You know how it is,” he says, and he’s right. I do know. He means that Sam’s the same since the day we told her about her mum. Part shock and part disbelief and part simply not understanding. I’m the same way. We all are.

“Take care of yourself, Eddie,” he says, and something in the way he says that makes me think that he thinks he won’t be seeing me for a while. It’s the kind of thing you’d say to a friend leaving for jail or war.

I watch the sun peak in the sky. It disappears behind the tip of a giant fir tree next door for ten minutes before coming back into view, and then it slides back down. I drink another beer and then another, then head out front and grab the mail. There’s a letter from my insurance company. Both Jodie and myself have life insurance—but in a letter less than half a page long, our insurance company is holding back any decision to pay out because Jodie was killed in the commission of a crime. Life insurance is specifically there to cover accidents and illness—and does not cover murder, so the letter says, and they apologize for any inconvenience. I wonder why they got onto the case so quick—I hadn’t even contacted them—and I figure they wanted to rush through the bad news before Christmas.