A heavy heart is best lightened by work. Though the sun was only just rising over the tips of the blue mountains across the lake, I parked beside my house and went right out the back. The birds marched out of their coop like they weren’t missing one of their number. I took the grain container from the edge of the porch and poured out a handful, settling among the birds as they stabbed hungrily at my palm with their beaks, spilling grain everywhere. Woman, the mother of the geese and the only pure white bird, stood at the back and eyed me without reducing herself to the indignity of hand-feeding.

In fact, I’d already cleaned out my goose coop and their water trays with a pressure cleaner the day before, because this was an important day, one I had been counting down to.

My daughter Lillian, who was almost three, was coming to visit me in my home for the first time.

My cleaning efforts had not been so much inspired by a desire to impress her as to impress her mother, my ex-wife, Kelly. After my arrest our marriage had dissolved, and she’d since taken up with a man who worked in the fitness industry, like her. Things were serious between them, and had been for some time. I didn’t know if Jett, the boyfriend, really believed the accusation against me, or if he was just a territorial dick, but I did know he was completely against leaving Lillian with me for several nights. The house needed to be clean, orderly, safe, welcoming. That meant fungus-free. I went around the side of the house to grab the pressure cleaner for a second round and stopped dead at the sight of the police car in my driveway.

I stared at the two officers as they exited the vehicle and headed toward me.

They were young patrol officers. A couple of Cairns boys, it looked like. I knew all of the cops in Crimson Lake and Holloways Beach by sight, some of them from working cases in the area as a private investigator with my partner, Amanda. A continued career in the police force had been out of the question after my arrest, but Amanda Pharrell had employed me on two murder investigations and a smattering of the private-eye jobs small towns seem to generate—poisoned family pets, cheating husbands, injury insurance fraud.

The young officers strode down the small incline toward me, and their lifted chins and smirks didn’t give me much confidence that this was a friendly visit. I turned on my heel and started walking back around the side of the house.

“Hold up, Conkaffey!”

I went straight to my phone, which I’d left on the cane lounge on the porch. Celine ran over to the officers and did a tight circle of them, sniffing and barking good-naturedly.

I picked up my phone and typed a quick message to Amanda. Three letters.

SOS.