Jay pulled the door closed and tossed a satisfied glance Frank’s way. “No screaming there, as you can see.”

Downstairs Frank heard the beginnings of the rainfall. His heart still beat hard, but he’d seen Jay’s wife with his own eyes, and there was clearly no screaming match going on in this house. If there’d been one earlier, the storm had passed, and anyway, it wasn’t a crime to fight with your spouse, as long as things stayed on this side of physicality.

Jay reached his hand out to shake Frank’s. “I appreciate you checking anyway. You men in blue always have my full respect, keeping an eye on everything for us. And good for Frieda for being careful, though I think she’s just imagining those crazy foxes.”

Jay walked him as far as the front corner of the house, then waved. “Gotta go cover my boat before the rain takes the paint off. Stay safe out there.”

“Yeah, you too.” Frank held a hand up to shield his face from the shower as he walked back to his squad car parked on the street.

He didn’t hear anything—no words, no tap on the glass—but something pulled his gaze back to the house, and there, in one of the dormer windows upstairs, was Jay’s wife. She’d turned on a lamp and wrapped the blanket around herself. Her face was somber, deliberate, as if she was trying to communicate something to him with her eyes.

He paused, testing the quiver of alarm that rippled through him. Just as he was about to walk back to the house, a scream ripped through the night. His hand went to his gun as he jerked his head to the left, toward the stand of woods. The scream came again, then another one, the two of them overlapping each other.

The foxes. He exhaled hard, fear draining out of his legs and off his shoulders, making him weak.

When he glanced back up at the house, the window was empty, the light off.

It took a few minutes for the present to chase away the past. Frank blinked a couple times, and the image of the freshly painted boat slunk away, to be replaced by the one before him on the computer screen, this one awash with age and river detritus. He blinked again, then pulled a piece of paper and a pen from his desk drawer and jotted down the phone number listed beneath the photos.

Six

While most of Violet’s volunteers enjoyed their work with birds, many of them complained about the monotony of logging their post-survey data into the Audubon portal. Violet never saw much value in complaining, and anyway, she always felt there was something soothing to the process of entering data. It was only simple words and numbers, no emotions, memories, or regrets involved.

Violet was absorbed in her task, adding in her notes on bird species, counts, and concerns, when the director opened the door and rushed inside with her characteristic flurry. Naomi’s long black hair still fluttered behind her even after she’d come to a stop, her hand on her chest.