What Hyde said is almost true. Allegedly Chanel Gilbert fell off a ladder while changing lightbulbs in the entryway chandelier. It sounds like a bad joke but it’s anything but funny to see her once slender body in the early stages of putrefaction, bloated with areas of her skin slipping. She survived her head injuries long enough to have bruising and swelling, her eyes slitted and bulging like a bullfrog’s, her brown hair a sticky bloody mass that reminds me of a rusting Brillo pad. I estimate that after she sustained her injuries, she was lying on the floor unconscious and bleeding as her brain swelled, compressing her upper spinal cord and eventually shutting down her heart and lungs.

The cops aren’t suspicious of her death, not sincerely no matter what they discuss or claim. What they really are is voyeuristic. In their own unseemly way they’re enjoying the drama and it’s one of their favorites. Blame the victim. It must be her fault. She did something to cause her own untimely death, a death that was stupid. I’ve heard that word several times too and I’m not at all happy when people close their minds to other possibilities. I’m not convinced this is an accident. There are too many oddities and inconsistencies. If she died at some point late last night or early this morning as the cops suspect then why is decomposition this advanced? As I attempt to figure out time of death what keeps coming to mind is a Marino turn of phrase.

Cluster fuck. That’s what this is and my intuition is picking up on something else. I sense a presence inside this house. A presence beyond the cops. Beyond the dead woman. Beyond the housekeeper who showed up at quarter of eight this morning and made a shocking discovery that ruined her day to put it tritely. I sense something that unsettles me and I have no empirical explanation for it and don’t intend to say a word.

I usually don’t share my so-called gut feelings, my intuitive flashes, not with cops, not even with Marino. I’m not expected to have any impression that isn’t provable. In fact it’s worse than that if you’re me. I’m not supposed to have feelings and at the same time I’m accused of not having them. In other words a catch-22. In other words I can’t win. But that’s nothing new. I’m used to it.

“Ma’am?” An unfamiliar man’s voice but I don’t look up as I stand in the foyer, covered in white Tyvek from head to toe, my phone in my bare hands, the body of the dead woman several feet away near the upright ladder.