“Did you bring in your briefcase?” I thought mentioning the items she typically carries into the house with her might help jog her memory about the keys.

“I got it,” she said, sitting down on one of the kitchen chairs and taking off her shoes.

“You wanna beer?” I asked.

“If it comes with a foot massage,” Sarah said. I grabbed one from the fridge, twisted off the cap, and handed it to her.

“Massage to follow,” I said. “I got something I gotta do. Back in a minute.”

Sarah didn’t bother to ask what, and took a sip of the beer instead. I slipped out the front door, used her keys to unlock her Camry, and backed out of the drive. I didn’t need to go very far. Just down to the end of Chancery, then a right onto Lilac, just down from the mailbox. Far enough around the corner that the car wouldn’t be visible from our place, even if you went and stood at the end of the driveway. I pulled it up close to the curb, made sure all the windows were up, locked it, and jogged back to the house, passing Spender, Defender of the Salamander, on the way. Sarah was still at the kitchen table when I came in.

“Where’d you go?”

“I bought some printer paper today and left it in the car,” I lied. “And then I saw Earl and got talking to him.”

Sarah nodded. She didn’t know the neighbors as well as I did, and she’d never taken to Earl.

Her mind was still back at the office. “So this guy, the clerk, his wife’s right there when he gets it.”

“The variety store thing. Yeah, awful.”

“Sometimes you’re right.”

“Huh?”

“Moving out here. The last thing I wanted to do was move out of the city, but I’ll admit I’m not looking over my shoulder out here like we did on Crandall. There’s not addicts leaving their needles all over the slides at the playground, girls giving blowjobs in the backs of cars for fifty bucks, no guy waving his dick at you on the corner—”

“I remember him. What was his name?”

“Terry? Something like that? I always just thought of him as Mr. Dickout.”

“I ran into him once at the Italian bakery. He was buying some cannolis. Think there’s a connection?”

“God, cannolis,” Sarah said, taking another swig from the beer bottle. “I looked, on the way home, at the grocery store, for some. They don’t have them out here. No cannolis. It’s so hard to find anything like that. Twinkies, those I can get. You want white bread, I can get that for you.”

“I know,” I said, quietly.