Tom must have been sitting on his computer when my note arrived, because less than two minutes later I was notified of a new message. It read, “Dnt fck wth me.” How a guy with these kinds of typing and people skills ended up as an editor with a name like Darling was beyond me.

I called up a chapter I’d been working on, but couldn’t concentrate. I brought up a Star Wars computer game and tried to destroy the Death Star, but even the images of intergalactic explosions couldn’t erase Samuel Spender, as I’d last seen him, from my mind.

So I turned away from the computer, looked at a shoebox full of receipts and tax statements, and tried to occupy my mind with financial matters. Soon I’d have to gather all my tax stuff together and try to figure out my annual return. Rather than hire an accountant to figure out all the possible deductions, I usually tried to do it myself, relying on bits and pieces of information gleaned from talking to others who worked from home, like Trixie.

She was a better person to talk to than most. She’d sat at the kitchen table and told me about her business as an accountant. She suggested that maybe it was time to stop getting free advice, much of it unreliable, and go to an expert. I could turn everything in the shoebox over to her, and she would find more deductions than I ever could. I decided right then and there to bring my shoebox over to Trixie. The truth was, I wanted to tell someone about what had happened, about finding my first body. I was, to put it mildly, a bit wired.

I decided to call her first.

I got out the phone book, then couldn’t remember her last name. I wasn’t sure I’d ever known her last name. For that matter, what was Earl’s last name? I’m not good with names, first or last. You send me into a party, introduce me to a dozen people, and I won’t retain so much as an initial.

I thought maybe if I looked up accountants in the yellow pages, when I came across Trixie’s last name it would jump out at me. There were three full pages of them, and I ran my finger down one column after another, scanning, looking for a name that would make me go “Yes!”

Nothing.

I repeated the exercise, this time looking for an accountant whose office was on our street. No luck there, either.

So maybe Trixie didn’t list herself in the yellow pages. Maybe it was a word-of-mouth thing. Or maybe clients were referred to her. The bottom line was, I wasn’t going to be able to phone her at the moment.