“Tori Warshawski! You have one hell of a nerve coming around here now, two days late. Your sympathy doesn’t mean shit to me. You found him, that’s what that cop told me. And you didn’t think you owed me even a phone call? I found your husband, Sandra, go order a coffin, because you’re a widow now?”

Her anger sounded forced, as though she were trying to whip herself into feeling something, anything, and anger were the only emotion she could come up with when she couldn’t muster grief. I almost started justifying myself—my night in the swamp, my day in the hospital—but I swallowed it all.

“You’re right. I should have called you right away. If you let me in, I’ll tell you what I know.” I pushed forward, not waiting for her to decide if she could stand for me to be in her house, and she backed up automatically, the way people do.

“He was with that English whore, wasn’t he?” she said when we were in her entryway. “Is she dead, too?”

“No. Very badly injured, too much to talk and tell the cops who attacked them.”

“Yeah, dry your eyes while I start playing ‘My Heart Cries for You’ on the violin.” To my dismay, she rubbed the tip of her middle finger against the top of her index finger, the way we did as kids when we were being sarcastic—a flea playing “My Heart Cries for You” on the world’s smallest violin, we used to say.

“How’s April holding up?” I asked.

“Oh, she was Daddy’s little angel, she can’t believe he’s dead, can’t believe he was with this English reporter, even though all the kids at school knew about it and told her.”

“Bron thought he’d be able to find money for her defibrillator. Do you know if he’d come up with anything?”

“Bron and his ideas.” She contorted her face into a horrible sneer. “He probably thought he could steal a load of TVs from By-Smart. If he ever had a good idea above his waistline, I never heard about it. There’s only one thing that could help and that’s if he died working for the company.”

Her bitterness was so hard to listen to that it took me a minute to understand what she meant. “Oh. So you could collect his workers’ comp indemnity. He didn’t have life insurance?”

“Ten thousand dollars. By the time I’ve buried him, there’ll be about seven left.” Tears spurted from her eyes. “Oh, damn him, what am I going to do without him? He cheated on me every five seconds, but what am I going to do? I can’t keep the house, I can’t look after April, damn him, damn him, damn him.”