I knew the corner she meant, and since to me “down” meant south, that’s where I was looking. But there was no house that looked reddish in the dim light, so there were three possibilities. Either south wasn’t the right direction, or new houses had been built to make the “two doors down” part incorrect, or Keith had re-sided his house and it wasn’t reddish any longer.

Making a rough and rude noise in the back of my throat, I banged the heel of my hand on my steering wheel and ran through my options. If the weather had been nicer, people would have been out and about doing yard work and I would have stopped, explained who I was, and asked. But in this gloom, there wasn’t a soul to be seen.

I picked up my phone.

“Good evening, Chilson District Library. This is Kelsey.”

“Hey,” I said when she answered. “It’s Minnie. I can’t find—”

“Sorry,” she interrupted, sounding harassed. “Do you mind calling back in a couple of minutes? There’s a ton of people here all of a sudden and—”

“No, go ahead. Talk to you later.” I thumbed my phone off and concluded that the option of driving down the other streets and looking for a red house was the only one that had any chance of success, at least tonight. And I had to find him tonight, because I couldn’t shake the feeling that another murder was coming.

“Red . . . red . . . red . . .” I murmured as I turned around in a dark driveway and drove in the opposite direction. But there wasn’t a house to the north that looked anywhere close to red. Sighing, I turned around again and went east of the intersection. There were almost no houses that way, so I made another turn and went west.

It was then that I remembered that Kelsey lived maybe two miles farther down this road, so to Kelsey, down probably meant . . . and yes, there was a reddish house. Not one of the ranch-style houses that abounded in this part of town, but an older story and a half with a detached garage that might have once been a house for a family who, back in the early 1900s, was trying to make a living by farming.

There were lights on inside so I pulled into the driveway. Before I even got all the way out of the car, a voice called out, “Hello?”

“Is that Keith?” I peered into the direction from which the voice had come. “It’s Minnie. Rafe’s fiancée.”

“Minnie?” Keith came around the corner of the house. He was carrying a leaf rake and wearing jeans, sweatshirt, and an old baseball cap. “What’s up? No, wait, don’t tell me. Rafe is having an electrical emergency and he’s too embarrassed to ask me how to fix it, so he sent you.”