“Well, I knew who he was. It’s Samuel Spender. He’s some environmental guy? He had this association, to protect the creek? You know, fighting the developers?” God. I had fallen into Valley Girl up-speak, ending all my sentences with question marks. Somehow, it made me sound guilty of something.

“And you’re a member of this association?”

“No. He was going around the neighborhood—I live just up there, over the hill, in one of the finished sections of the development—collecting names on a petition to stop houses from being built down around the creek here.”

“Did you sign it?”

“Uh, no, no I didn’t.”

“So you didn’t like what Mr. Spender was doing?”

“No no, it wasn’t that at all. I just, I don’t know, I didn’t really care, I guess. Not at the time. Listen, what do you think happened to him?”

She glanced back at the scene. There were more cops now, a couple of them putting up yellow police tape. “It’s a bit early.”

“He might have tripped,” I said. “On a rock or something, maybe he tripped, hit the back of his head, then rolled over into the water.”

“Maybe.”

“You think someone killed him?” I asked. “Because, you know, I mean, the whole reason we moved out here, well, it was to get away from this kind of thing. I’m sure it was just an accident, because, well—”

Something had caught Officer Greslow’s eye. Two people coming through the woods, one holding a camera.

“Fucking press,” she said. “How’d they find out about this so fast?”

I said nothing.

after officer greslow finished with her questions, she turned me over to a detective who asked me the same things all over again, plus what I did, how long I’d lived in the neighborhood, why I was down by the creek, what I’d had for breakfast. Really. He let me go after about ninety minutes, but not before reaming me out for walking all around the crime scene and possibly obscuring important footprints around where Samuel Spender had gone into the drink. The reporter and photographer from The Metropolitan left the scene before I did, and I suspected they’d be waiting for me out by the road when I came out, but they weren’t.

I called Sarah on my cell. “They’re finally done with me.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“So what happened? How’d the guy die?”