Tyler. Of course. He used to live across the street. A few years older than Deirdre, back then he’d reminded her of Opie with his freckles, straw-colored hair, and earnestness. She used to watch him ride his bike up and down the block, popping wheelies and spinning around. A few years after that he’d been out there doing tricks on a skateboard. His family had moved away when she was in high school.

“You’re a firefighter?” Deirdre asked.

Tyler shucked a thick work glove and offered his hand. His grip was strong. “Arson investigator. But I work with the police and the fire marshal.” He offered a hand to Henry.

“Hey, Tyler,” Henry said, shaking his hand. “Arson?”

“It’s routine for me to get involved when there’s an unattended fire.”

Routine. Unattended. Those were the words the police had used to explain why Deirdre’s father had to be autopsied. Why a police detective had come to investigate.

“I didn’t realize you guys were still living here,” Tyler said.

“I still live here,” Henry said.

“And my dad lives here—” Deirdre added, then caught herself. “Or at least he did. He died. Yesterday.”

Tyler’s look darkened. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know that.”

“He drowned,” Deirdre said, swallowing the lump in her throat. “I drove up from San Diego to help him get ready to move and when I got here, I found him in the pool, and—” She clamped her mouth shut. She hadn’t intended to say any of that, and now her eyes were stinging. Henry looked pained.

“And now this.” Tyler shook his head. “I’m sorry. Your dad was a great guy.”

A firefighter came up to him from behind and tapped him on the shoulder, drawing Tyler away. They exchanged a few words that Deirdre couldn’t hear. When he returned, Tyler said, “They shouldn’t be too much longer. Couple hours, max.”

Deirdre edged closer to the open garage. Inside, a camera flash went off. Then another. Two men were crouched in the dark interior alongside the blackened hull that had been her father’s car. Next to it, Henry’s bikes were on their sides. “What are they doing?” she asked.

“It looks like that’s where the fire started. They’re documenting the point of ignition. At least no one was hurt.” Tyler eyed Deirdre. “You told one of the first responders that someone was upstairs?”

Henry gave her a surprised look. “You did?”

“I told you. I thought it was you.”

“Well, no one’s up there now,” Tyler said.

Deirdre could smell smoke, even from inside the house, long after the fire hoses had been reeled back and the hook and ladder truck had driven off. The street had been reopened, but a gray pall lingered in the air. Only Tyler was left, packing his equipment away in a fire department van parked on the street.

In the meantime, the mortuary had called. They expected the coroner to release Arthur’s body the next day. What followed was a stream of questions to which Deirdre had no answers. When would they like to schedule a service? Did they want to reserve the Reposing Room? Open or closed coffin?

She promised to have answers for them in the morning, which was when she hoped her mother would be back. All she knew for sure was that her father had wanted to be cremated.

That led to more questions. Should they reserve a spot for Arthur’s cremains in one of their lovely urn gardens? Or perhaps he’d prefer to reside in the columbarium?

The business of death had its own vocabulary, rife with comforting euphemisms, and every choice came with unstated price tags. Price tags came with guilt. Deirdre had no idea whether there was money in the estate for the kind of service to which Arthur would have felt entitled.

Deirdre went outside and stood alone on the lawn in front of the house, watching Tyler jot some final notes and load the van with bags of evidence—material to be analyzed, she assumed. He closed the van door, locked it, and looked over at her.

“Done,” he said. His face looked grave. He opened the passenger door and threw his clipboard on the seat.

“Does it feel weird, being back here?” Deirdre asked.

“Kind of. It’s a shame they did in our old house.” He glanced across the street to where he’d once lived in a modest Spanish colonial with a walled garden. The property had always evoked The Secret Garden for Deirdre, with Tyler its Dickon, a character memorably described in the novel as looking like the god Pan with his rosy cheeks and rough curly hair, a charmer of wild animals and unhappy humans.

New owners had torn down the house Tyler had grown up in and replaced it with a house easily double its size. And in place of Dickon was this tall, gangly, competent human being who looked at her so intently that it felt as if he were x-raying her brain.

“My mom drives by and cries,” Tyler said.

“Welcome to Beverly Hills,” Deirdre said, “where anything that’s just plain old is plain old embarrassing. Where is your family living now?”

“My parents moved to Silver Lake, but it’s changing, too. And I’ve got an apartment in Culver City. Funky neighborhood that’s staying funky for the foreseeable future.”

“I’m guessing new owners will tear down our house, too. And maybe that’s not a bad thing. It’s not the great house that yours was to begin with, and my dad didn’t exactly improve it.”

Tyler held her gaze. “I know this isn’t the best time to say this, but it’s good to see you again. I’ve thought of you often.” He looked at her crutch. “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but what happened?”

“Car accident.”

“I didn’t know. When?”

“Sixty-three. I was fifteen.”

“Sixty-three.” He thought for a moment. “We’d moved away the summer before. Where did it happen?”

“I don’t know exactly. It was late. My father was driving me home from my friend Joelen’s house. I remember rocks and thornbushes.” Thinking about it brought back the smell of creosote and sage. The air had been thick with it as she lay on the ground and later on the stretcher. That and the pain, which everyone said you forgot but she hadn’t. She folded her arms to contain the tremor in them and the tightness in her chest that the memory roused.

She went on. “For a long time I was afraid to find out. Afraid to go back. Then, when I did ask, Dad said he didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know?”

“When I pressed, he said he forgot where it was exactly.”

Tyler scrunched up his face in disbelief. “Maybe he thought he was being kind.”

Maybe. But if he’d thought not knowing would make her stop thinking about it, he’d been wrong. Instead she’d become obsessed.

“Do you remember anything?” Tyler asked. “The terrain? Houses?”

“No houses. They had to carry me out of a thicket of brush and up a steep embankment. Which is weird, because Joelen lived near here on Sunset. Dad said he took a back exit”—to avoid the police—“and must have taken a wrong turn. He ended up getting so disoriented that when the car went off the road, he didn’t know where he was.” Back then she’d bought the story.

Tyler paused, thinking. “No houses. Thick brush. This was twenty years ago?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Maybe there was some undeveloped land back then, but a slope?” He shook his head. “Farther north, maybe.”

“It never made any sense to me, either. When I asked an attorney if I could find the accident report, he told me it was too late. Those records had been destroyed.”

“Really? Maybe he was talking about the paper copies. In the seventies they started transferring data to fiche. But it’s all still there, indexed by date. So if police responded, and you know the date of the accident, it shouldn’t be hard to find.”

“But Sy said—” Deirdre stopped. Of course. Sy was probably trying to protect her, too.

“You’re sure you want to know? Because I can look it up for you if you want.”

Could it be this easy? All she had to do was say yes? Maybe her father had been right, and as a child she’d been better off not knowing. But that was no longer the case. “Would you? I know it sounds melodramatic, but it’s as if a piece of me died and I need to know where it’s buried.”