Gabe said those things in the first few months of working with Mel. Lately, he had seemed to avoid talking about Mel at all. Which made me think he knew.

Mel had told me Gabe never gave a hint of suspicion about our affair. They continued working as a team, covering drug deals and homicides, which frequently overlapped. Perhaps Gabe could not believe that his friend and partner would sleep with his wife. Perhaps Gabe was better at hiding his emotions than I knew. Perhaps I was imagining Gabe’s suspicion as a result of my own guilt. Perhaps Mel was shielding me from the truth.

I THOUGHT ABOUT ALL THIS AND MORE, sitting at the kitchen table after Walter left. When I grew bored with my known thoughts, I took another look at the list on the refrigerator door and realized that, when Walter Freeman was chewing the ice cubes, he had a perfect view of my list of fourteen things I knew for sure. Walter didn’t have to be very bright to figure out that the list represented my attempt to unravel the mystery about Gabe’s death and the role of poor Wayne Honeysett in it. And he didn’t need the eyes of an owl to discover that I considered him a creep, although this wouldn’t qualify as earth-shattering news to him.

It was the last item on the list that I kept reading over and over. Mel was the only one who was beginning to agree that Gabe might not have killed himself, so he was the only one I could trust. I would talk to Mel as soon as I answered the pounding on my back door, which I opened without checking to see who it was.

17.

This time he was almost calm, which made him threatening. He wore the same tattered clothes and his hair was just as matted, but he didn’t rage like the first time, and although his eyes were red-rimmed and rheumy, they did not bounce like Ping-Pong balls dropping down a flight of stairs. They were fixed on me. The voice may have been calmer, but the script was unchanged. “Where’s Grizz?” he said. I tried to push the door closed, but he pushed back against me. “I gotta see Grizz,” he said. “Where’s he at?”

I screamed, hoping somebody on the street or the beach would hear, but he was already inside the room and pushing the door closed behind him. I thought of the butcher knives on the rack near the stove, but when I tried to picture myself grabbing one and turning to thrust it into his chest, the picture changed to me losing a wrestling match and finding the knife in his hands instead. I kept backing toward the kitchen anyway, hoping that I would block his view of the knives until I found both my voice and the cordless phone.

“Get out of my house!” I shouted at him. “The police were just here. They’re coming back—”

“Tell me where Grizz is,” he said.

“I don’t know who the hell you’re talking about! Just get out, get out!” My hand found the cordless telephone, but my fingers were shaking too much to dial. My feet were as reliable as ever, and I turned and ran down the hall to the front door. I unlocked and opened the door before he could reach me and stumbled blessedly into the sunshine. Traffic was busy on Beach Boulevard and on the highway bridges, and a family was strolling past on the other side of the road. Instead of flagging down any of them, I dialed 911 and screamed at the operator, who answered with a maddeningly calm voice. I told her a strange man had burst into my house and I wanted the police here, damn it, to throw his ass into jail.

She took my address and kept me on the line, and as I spoke to her I walked to the side of the house where I could see him on the boardwalk, heading toward Tuffy’s. He looked confident and relaxed, and the sight of him made me both angry and brave, roughly in that order. “He’s on the boardwalk,” I said, “heading south.” Walking into the garden and up to the boardwalk level, I kept him in my sight and gave her a complete description of him—about five foot ten, maybe 175 pounds, around thirty years old, unshaven, straight sandy-coloured hair, greasy denim shirt, equally greasy overalls cut into shorts, worn grey Adidas sneakers, no socks.

He was perhaps a hundred feet ahead of me, strolling among the usual summer traffic on the strip—the in-line skaters, the skateboarders, the joggers, the boppers, the old folks, and two people in motorized wheelchairs. “Do not approach him,” the 911 operator advised me, just as I heard sirens out on Beach Boulevard, first one, then another.

I told her the police had arrived and I ran back through the garden to meet the cruiser as it pulled into the driveway. “He’s on the boardwalk,” I said to the cop as he emerged from the car, “going that way. Did you get the description?”

“We got it,” the officer said, and pulled at the microphone fastened to his shoulder belt. “Check the boardwalk from the first cross street south of here,” he said. “I’m coming down from here. Frank, you there?” I saw a third cruiser arrive, and the first cop began trotting through our garden to the boardwalk. I watched three more officers, two from the second car that had stopped at the first cross street, and the third at the next street down, hustle toward the shoreline, heads up, their hands on their weapons, models of law enforcement efficiency. Each street extended up to the boardwalk. All four officers were in communication with each other, and all had their guns ready. There was no way the man who so desperately needed Grizz would escape.

“COULDN’T FIND HIM.” It was almost an hour later. The first officer to arrive was standing at my garden door, writing something in his notepad.

I thought he was kidding me. “You’re kidding me,” I said.

“I never kid,” he said.

“He was no more than a hundred feet down the beach. I gave you everything but a DNA sample. How the hell could you miss him?”

The cop’s pencil froze, but one eyebrow didn’t. It climbed up his forehead when he looked at me, and he made sure I got the message before he spoke. “You’re Gabe Marshall’s wife.”

“Widow.”

He nodded. “Heard about you.”

“You heard what about me? What the hell does that mean?”

He resumed writing, then tore the sheet from his notepad and handed it to me. “You have another problem, you call us.” He pointed at the sheet of paper. “That’s my name, my badge, and the report number.” He turned to leave.

“Tell me what you’ve heard about me, damn it!” I shouted.

Over his shoulder he told me to have a nice day.

“THEY’RE NOT BLOODHOUNDS, JOSIE.”

We were parked under the highway bridges, near the canal and facing the bay. Traffic roared above us on the bridges at sixty, seventy miles an hour. It was after dinner. Autumn was being held back by the sun. The breeze was no longer off the lake. It had matured into a wind from the north, drier and cooler. A chill wind. A September wind.

Two men were pulling a boat from the water and onto a trailer. In the distance, steam blossomed white above the steel company. The cormorants were returning in silent squadrons. I sat with my hands in my lap, wanting to be wrapped up by someone, anyone.

I shook my head. “I could have found that guy walking backwards and wearing a blindfold.”

“He might have ducked into one of the houses down the way.”

“Wouldn’t they check that?” I said. “Isn’t that what you do, knock on doors and say, ‘Excuse me, but is there a deranged man around here, aside from your husband, of course, or did one arrive recently asking to borrow a cup of sugar?’ I had the feeling these guys spent their time discussing donuts and the Blue Jays.”

“They’ll be watching for him—”

“I really can’t take this, Mel.” My little girl voice arrived, unbidden. “I’m still missing Gabe, I’m trying to get over that poor Honeysett man, his daughters think Gabe was a thief, I come home to find Walter Freeman in my garden shed, I answer—”