“Where am I going?” she asked Hazel.

“My house.”

Cathy Wiest gave her doctor a searching look. He said it was up to her.

“You’ll take Mrs. Wiest out to my house in Pember Lake and stay with her, please, Detective Constable Wingate?”

“Absolutely.”

“Cathy, this is the key,” she said, decoupling one-half of her keychain from the other. “My mother is there. You remember Mayor Micallef?”

“Yes.”

“That’s who it is, only she’s even more difficult now. Just go on in with James and there’s a guestroom on the second floor. Take a bath if you like, and try to rest. James’ll wake you every couple of hours if you fall asleep to make sure you’re okay.”

“All right,” said Cathy, and now that everything had been arranged and there was nothing else to do, the energy drained from her body and the remaining colour vanished from her face.

“And do I have permission to enter your house?” Hazel asked her.

“Oh. Yes, of course.”

Dr. Morton left to process her discharge and Cathy got gingerly out of the bed. Wingate left again to give her some privacy while she dressed.

Hazel helped her get changed. “What did he do?” Cathy mumbled, as if to herself, and Hazel held the woman by the arm to allow her to get into her pants.

“We don’t know anything yet, Cathy. Nothing. But we’re going to work it out. I promise you.” She got Cathy her shoes. “If I could get a sketch artist into the detachment in the next fifteen minutes or so …”

“I don’t know how much I remember …”

“Do you want to try? Before James takes you to my place?”

She raised her eyes to Hazel. “Okay.”

She got Cathy’s keys and put her into the car with Wingate. She told him to put Melanie on the sketch artist and get him in quickly to get a rendering of the girl. Then she drove out to the Wiest house and parked on the street in front of it. Its windows were completely dark except for a glow emanating through the windows on either side of the front door. It sat, a dark silhouette under the half-moon, on its patch of land and seemed totally devoid of life.

Hazel tested both the front and back doors and they were locked. One of Cathy’s keys worked in the back door, and Hazel went in quietly and listened. It sounded like the house was empty. She flipped a switch and the kitchen came to light.

The table was littered with tissues beside a vase of flowers. Hazel closed the outer door and stepped into the house. A bulb buzzed overhead in the otherwise silent room. The darkly coloured flowers – tulips – were closed tightly for the night. There were similar vases on tables throughout the main floor, a total of eight in all. So after she’d swabbed down the house, Cathy Wiest had decided to anoint and fumigate it. She must had every tulip in Westmuir County.

The kitchen was otherwise clean and there was nothing out of place on the rest of the main floor. The inexpensively furnished living room yielded nothing of interest. Their television must have been twenty years old: it had a power knob that you had to pull out and a dial with the UHF channels marked on it. This was a man who could easily have hooked up his own pirate cable or satellite but never had. The fireplace was more up-to-date than the electronics in the house. All of it spoke of a marriage where conversation was more important than sitcoms or sports: these were people who found each other interesting, for whom being distracted together was not nearly as desirable as simply being together. Hazel began to feel a note of grief creep into her thoughts as she continued to look around. To judge by the state of the house, and everything people said about Henry, this had been a happy place. It would never be one again.

She went to the bottom of the stairs quietly and turned on the light. The drawer from the hall table was pulled out and its contents scattered on the floor. She saw the bank packet leaning against the moulding beside the dining room entrance. There was still cash in it: she counted it out. Three thousand. Someone had taken twenty-five hundred and left the rest behind? So maybe it wasn’t about money. Or maybe that was all the girl was owed by him. For what? Drugs? A sexual service? How wild was Henry Wiest? And who was this girl who took only half the money?

Now Hazel realized there was a sound here, hard to place – it was coming from behind one of the doors upstairs. She pushed the cash down into a pocket and climbed the stairs with her gun drawn. The noise was coming from behind a door in the hallway to her right. She stopped and controlled her breathing, holding tight to the newel post. It sounded like someone was flipping paper. But anyone who was in this house had already heard her walking through it, and that meant they intended to finish their business no matter what danger it put them in. Which meant, also, that they were going to be prepared to defend themselves. There was a metallic sound from behind the door: someone fiddling with a lock or sliding hanging file folders along their railings. She crept toward the closed door, gritting her teeth, then stood to the side of it, her heart squeezing anxiously. “Police!” she called, her firearm up close beside her cheek. “Open this door and come out hands in front! If you have a weapon, throw it out into the hallway before you!”

The sounds continued, more frantically now. She didn’t know if there was a window in the room, but she suspected there was, and it occurred to her that it might be smarter to rush out of the house and wait on the lawn for whomever it was to jump down. But to judge from the sounds within, confusion reigned behind the door and Hazel judged that her moment had arrived. She turned her hip and kicked the door in. It smashed against the wall inside the darkened room and she heard a high-pitched cry and the sound of paper being torn. She stood in the doorway with her gun out in front of her. “Don’t move! I will shoot!”

Now there was silence, and she could smell the scent of ammonia. She kept her gun out in front of herself, reached to the side of the door, along the wall, and flipped the light switch. A cloud of white feathers was settling on the floor in front of her. Standing on a pedestal at a height of four feet was a dumbstruck white cockatoo in a cage. It was huddling in the farthest corner looking like it was having a heart attack, its yellow comb plastered down tight to its skull. Hazel stood down and holstered her weapon. “Good god,” she said, and the bird’s black eyes leapt in its head in terrified misery. It spread its wings: a slow, helpless movement, and then closed them up against its body in an effort to get as small as possible. The paper at the bottom of its cage was torn into ragged strips.

“It’s okay,” said Hazel, breathing deliberately, slowing her heartbeat down. She began looking around the room with more focus now and saw that it had been turned upside down. Books and paper were scattered everywhere. “Just a little misunderstanding. I won’t harm you, birdie.” The creature opened its beak in a wide, tremulous movement, as if to squawk, but no sound came out. There was a puddle on the floor at the base of the pedestal and she noticed the bird had upended its little tin cup of water that normally hung from the bars. She approached the cage and gently unlatched the little door, speaking softly to the mutely squawking bird the whole time. She took the tin cup out, closed the cage, and retreated into the hall.

The bathroom was through the master bedroom, which was empty and silent with bare bedside tables beside the perfectly made bed. A couple of the drawers were standing open. She looked inside them briefly, but if anything was missing from them, she couldn’t tell. She filled the bird’s water from the sink. It was the least she could do. She stood and looked at herself in the mirror. Her pupils were tiny, and Hazel stood for a moment studying herself. Was her face thinner now than it had been before the summer? One of the side effects of Percocet addiction is edema and she’d gotten used to the sight of loose flesh in her cheeks and along her chinline. Now it was gone. It had been three and a half months since she’d had a painkiller and now she could see her face again. A simple physiological change, but it hit her like a revelation. Even more than the cessation of withdrawal symptoms and the return of normal, bearable pain, this spoke to her complete escape from addiction. She was looking in the mirror and seeing her actual self again.