Alice sits in the passenger’s seat, and Sadie pants from the back, her head between us. It took some convincing for Hayes to let Alice come with me, but she managed to put it in educational terms. How often does one have an opportunity to witness a police search? She swayed him, as she usually does, and I’m glad to have the company. With Alice to look after, I’ll be less likely to obsess about the house and think about Jay.

The house looks bigger, more forbidding in the winter, standing among the drifts, snow lining the valleys of the roof. I shiver, remembering its original purpose. A place to rest between hunts, a respite where long-dead hunters could boast to one another and relive the moments of pursuit and kill over glasses of whiskey.

Alice, Sadie, and I follow the detectives to the door, where they stand aside for me to unlock it. I want this over with as quickly and quietly as possible. The last thing I want is for the media to catch wind of it. That I couldn’t bear. And for the first time, I’m angry with Jay. How could he have let this happen to me? He was my rock. The only reason I’d had to hold on to something of a normal happy life. But now . . .

“Mrs. Bradley?” Detective Myers says. “We need you to walk us through the house.”

“Yes. Okay.” We stop in the mudroom, and I automatically remove my boots and hang my jacket on a peg. The house is chilly, but the others follow suit.

“What do those go to?” Detective Myers asks, pointing at the key ring hanging on the wall.

“The spare keys. We keep them there for guests.”

“Which doors do they open?”

“The front door, back door. The door to the deck. And the basement outside doors.”

Detective Myers scribbles in her notebook.

We tread down the hall, and I point to Jay’s den. They go inside the room and look around, then we proceed into the kitchen. After a brief inspection there, we step out into the large great room. The tall windows at the back of the house look over snow-covered mountains, and I momentarily lose myself in their beauty, before turning to the fireplace. It dominates the room and is made of local fieldstone and blackened by decades of use. When Jay first brought me here, there was a large deer head hanging over the mantel. He removed it and a collection of smaller heads from the den and other rooms, at my request, and they’re stored away in the attic.

We wander through the downstairs. The detectives ask a question or two. Alice has a notebook out as well, making notations, of what I have no idea, but that’s Alice.

“There are two bedrooms downstairs,” I say, “and two upstairs.”

“Four in all then?” Detective Myers asks.

“Yes.”