“The funny thing is, I didn’t even like the asshole,” she said, aware of my turn of mind. “I knew Jamal was using me. I knew he was a player. Would’ve been fine if he hadn’t knocked me up same time he was fucking Felice. The day I let a man disrespect me—I don’t care how big his dick is. He got what he deserved.”

“Is that a confession?”

For the first time, she showed me her tobacco-stained smile. “I have no idea what you mean.”

I started to roll up the window, then stopped.

“The baby you had with Jamal—was it a boy or a girl?”

The smile vanished. “There was no baby.”

The residents of Pill Hill were toying with me. I had zero doubts that Lynda Lynch had ordered her “granddaughter” to come after me. They were incriminating this Vic Bazinet for reasons I didn’t yet understand.

Was it because they hated cops in general and game wardens in particular? And punking me was a low-cost way of getting kicks on a drab December afternoon? Or were their motives more sinister?

One thing I knew for certain was that Tina hated Felice. You don’t fake that kind of contempt.

She hadn’t radiated personal warmth toward me either. None of the Dillons had. Of all of them, Tori had been the most vicious. Her story about having an embittered friend on Maquoit Island might or might not be true. But there was no question that her animus toward me felt intensely personal.

“Don’t get caught up there alone after dark.”

A vision flashed through my memory of a septic truck passing me on the hill. I doubted I would find Bazinet at his trailer. Maybe that was why Tina had chased me down. They were worried about me leaving if my interviewee wasn’t home from work.

I drove around the loop, looking for the green pumper. People who have trouble with the law tend not to use house numbers or put their names on their mailboxes. They don’t want to make it easy for the police to find them.

The Bazinets’ house was clearly numbered. And, as Tina had said, there was a Corolla parked out front.

I stopped a hundred feet up the street and took its measure through my binoculars.

In the minds of most middle- and upper-class people, trailer parks are places of generalized squalor. The prefab buildings are indistinguishable. The yards are littered with junked appliances and derelict autos.

Sometimes the stereotype holds true. I have driven through redneck slums, loud with barking dogs and crying babies.

But I have also visited mobile home developments that are as wholesome as an English country village.

Pill Hill seemed to run to both extremes.

Burch’s double-wide had been over-the-top in its architectural invention. Its yard was an outdoor showroom for every motorized toy a man-child could want. Everything about it was extravagant.