“It was too early for that. Besides, when you get out of work at one A.M. nobody picks you up. If you’ve got car trouble, you just get a ride with one of the other girls.”

“I see,” said the detective, pursing his lips and making a tiny notation on his yellow legal pad. He had a slight lisp, Lucy noticed, and his upper lip was elongated, rather like a rabbit’s. Lucy looked at him closely, thinking what a very serious man he must be. He was such a contrast to Officer Culpepper, who had rolled up his sleeves and was cheerfully washing the breakfast dishes she had left soaking in the sink. Perhaps it was his job that made him serious. A man couldn’t investigate sudden death all the time without being affected by it.

Looking around her homey kitchen, Lucy thought how living in Tinker’s Cove had insulated her, until now, from the random violence and cruelty that was twentieth-century life. Of course, in the fifteen years she and Bill had lived in Tinker’s Cove, things had changed, sometimes drastically. When they’d first moved into the old farmhouse, they had heated entirely with wood, and Lucy, like many others, did all her cooking on the old Glenwood. In those days she often took down the long-handled popcorn popper from its hook on the wall and shook homegrown kernels over the wood fire until they popped. It took a little time, but she never felt rushed in those days. Nowadays she was more likely to put a package of preflavored popcorn in the microwave and zap it. Somehow the long, leisurely afternoons with children and friends had vanished; now Lucy was measuring her life in seconds.

“You didn’t see any footprints in the snow, or any sign of disturbance?” insisted the detective.

Lucy shook her head. “No. The snow was clean and unbroken. There were only my footprints.”

“According to your account last night, the car was locked. Is that right?”

“Absolutely. Once I saw the hose I tried to open the car door. I couldn’t, so I just pulled the hose out of the window and went in to call for help. I don’t know what else I could have done.”

“Oh, you did the right thing, Lucy,” Culpepper interrupted. “It was too late to save him.”

“Did you know the deceased personally?” asked the detective.

“Well, everybody in Tinker’s Cove knew Sam Miller. I wasn’t a close friend, I was never invited to his house or anything. But I certainly knew him to say hello to in the street. Most people did. If you work for Country Cousins, he personally hands you your profit-sharing check, and Country Cousins is the biggest employer around.”

“That’s right,” agreed Culpepper. “Everybody knew him.”

“And envied him,” Lucy added. “That’s what I can’t understand. Why did he kill himself?”