Wendy looked up expectantly, stroking the dog’s ears and smiling her fake smile.

“You can torture me all you like, but I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of quitting,” Drue said, her voice low. As she walked out of the office she made sure to deliberately step on the Hermès blanket with both feet.

“What’s this?” Jonah said, as she wheeled her chair over to his cubicle, her headset resting around her neck.

“Retraining,” Drue said. “Wendy wants me to listen to the way you handle calls, because you’re so awesome at it.”

He nodded. “Listen, Grasshopper, and Mr. Miyagi will share the wisdom of the ages.”

His console lit up.

“Just answer the damn phone,” Drue said.

24

Saturday morning, Drue poured herself a mug of coffee and sat down at the card table in the kitchen. She had a new package of index cards and a box of black felt-tip pens, and some file folders, and felt a surge of excitement. School supplies! At one time, back in elementary school, she’d loved school. Loved the smell of chalk and schoolbooks and the thrill of opening a notebook for the first time, laboriously printing her name in block letters on the inside cover.

She began jotting down what she’d learned so far about the employees at the Gulf Vista and about Jazmin Mayes and her coworkers, starting a new index card for each set of facts. It was an idea she’d picked up from reading the dog-eared paperback Sue Grafton detective novels that had been left behind by Leonard, the cottage’s most recent tenant.

Drue scribbled every detail of her conversations with Lutrisha and Yvonne Howington.

An hour had passed and she’d worked her way through half a packet of cards when she heard insistent knocking at the front door.

“Good morning!” Ben Fentress stood on her doorstep. He held out a cardboard beer box with what looked like some kind of auto part inside. “Did somebody here order a starter for a 1995 Ford Bronco?”

Jonah Kelleher stepped out from behind his coworker, holding up a six-pack of craft beer. “And some emergency beverages?”

“Oh,” Drue said, taken aback.

“You forgot I was coming to work on your car today, didn’t you?” Ben said.

“It kinda slipped my mind, but I’m so glad it didn’t slip yours,” Drue said, tugging at the hem of the shrunken T-shirt she’d thrown on first thing that morning, trying to cover the exposed skin of her abdomen above her gym shorts. She gazed past Ben at Jonah. “What are you doing here?”

Jonah’s face flushed. “Ben asked me to give him a hand.”

Both men wore grease-stained T-shirts and jeans. “We had to take a starter out of a wrecked car at the junkyard. It’s kind of a two-man job,” Ben said.

“Right,” Drue said hastily. “Do you want to come in?”