“I don’t want you to feel rushed. I don’t want to inconvenience you at all. Why don’t you text me the address and I’ll come to you, take a few nice shots? Don’t blow-dry or put on any makeup or fancy clothes. We need the real deal. How ’bout tomorrow, five o’clock?”

That would give her time to tell Stu, and time to cancel if she changed her mind.

“I can do tomorrow.”

“I thought they wanted a view,” Elizabeth commented.

“I love this view!” the dopey orange-skinned woman crowed. Her hair had been styled for the show so that she looked like a bridesmaid.

“That is not a view,” Tupper scoffed. “That’s a parking lot, you idiot.”

“Great double vanity in the master bath,” the woman’s simple-faced husband remarked.

“Why don’t we have a double vanity?” Elizabeth pretended to complain.

“Because you hardly ever brush your teeth,” Tupper remarked, which was true.

Watching HGTV house-hunting shows together had always been one of their favorite rituals. It had been a very long time, and so they’d done it every morning that week. Once again, Tupper made blueberry pancakes, smothered in maple syrup from the two-gallon jug Elizabeth had brought home with her.

“So, the new project,” Tupper continued the conversation they’d begun during the last commercial. The Macaw—at his studio and at Monte—had caught Elizabeth with full black trash bags. “You ransacked my mannequins.”

Elizabeth smiled her rare, Elizabethan smile. He knew she disliked discussing the work. And the truth was, she didn’t have a solid plan for a new project yet. She was home to check in on Tupper and receive the MacArthur.

“You’re not going to explain it to me, are you?”

Tupper knew her well enough not to push for an answer. The couple on HGTV was looking at the second option now, a square brick box of a house on stilts, built on a hill overlooking a swampy bay.

“This view is to die for,” the husband said, blinking his dull eyes in the sunshine.

“Absolutely,” his wife agreed. “Look at that water.”

“It looks like a place where you’d go to die,” Elizabeth said. “It looks like a place where your wife poisons you and dumps you in the weeds.”

“That’s what you’d do,” Tupper said.

“That’s what I’d do,” Elizabeth agreed. “I’d do it in pieces. Like that Staten Island girl they found floating in the harbor.”

“You always do enjoy a treasure hunt,” Tupper said.

Elizabeth had not stopped thinking about the torso of that murdered girl and her still-missing parts. Staging her own murder in their bathtub had been an elaboration of sorts, but that was private, for Tupper’s eyes only. She could do better, more.

A sort of excitement radiated from her. Tupper picked up on it immediately.

“You could do that. A treasure hunt of mannequins.”