Look like you’re supposed to be there. Quentin Parker had taught her that. Look like you’re supposed to be there and no one will ask you what the hell you’re doing. He had always kept a clipboard in his car. No one questions a man with a clipboard, he’d said.

Susan went around to her trunk, where she kept her emergency reporter kit, and got out a flashlight and notebook, which she put in her purse, and an old clipboard. If someone in the church across the street was watching, she would look like she was trying to Rock the Vote, or maybe conducting a survey. And how many corpses do you have inside, sir?

She was wearing black jeans, black lace-up boots, and a black tank top. Add the purple hair and red lipstick and she looked more like she should be working at the MAC counter than conducting door-to-door surveys.

Did people even use clipboards anymore?

Stride confidently. That’s the other thing Parker had taught her. Susan tried to stride confidently, but it was a challenge since it was raining pretty hard and she had to tramp through a lot of dead weeds to get up the overgrown front walk.

The house, up close, was even worse off than it looked from the street. The porch, along with the stairs up to it, leaned slightly to the right, while the house itself seemed to lean slightly to the left. Susan walked around the side through knee-high grass. She put the clipboard under her arm. It was pointless. No one could see her anyway. Behind the back of the house she saw what she was looking for—a piece of plywood lay on the ground in front of a basement window that had been broken. You couldn’t keep people out of abandoned houses. Not in this neighborhood.

Susan got her flashlight out of her purse, flipped it on, and squatted near the window. The broken glass had been knocked out clean, so the window frame was free of shards. The natural light coming through the window illuminated a diffuse rectangle of concrete and broken glass below. Susan poked her head in, bracing herself on the window jamb with one hand, and reached the flashlight in as far as she could. It didn’t reveal much. Pipes. Ducts. Concrete. It looked . . . basementy.

“Hello?” she said into the darkness. “Did someone here order a pizza?”

The only sound she heard was a bus going by at the next intersection. Was it breaking and entering if the window was already broken? Or was it just entering? If she went in and didn’t find anything, she’d go straight to the paper and never tell anyone. Susan couldn’t believe she was actually considering this. And at the same time, she felt a shiver of delight. Six months ago, she was writing human-interest stories about zoo animals. This was a lot more exciting.