It was a modest plot of suburban real estate, not Buckingham Palace or The Cloister Club...but it was my real estate and the thought of someone plundering it for malice while I slumbered a mere dozen feet away was just one more ugly sin.

Then for a moment, as if from nowhere, something Pete Sunday had said in passing went through my mind like the sound of a coin rolling across a wooden floor above my head.

He was talking about suspects, and he said that the way that you could tell a person was lying was if the answer included too many details, like the way Jill answered when I asked if she knew anyone named Esme, when she brought up other popular names for young women. And there was something else, and maybe that didn’t mean anything at all, except perhaps that Jill didn’t care much about me. She didn’t ask why I wanted to know...

13

I promised myself I would wait until after Christmas to contact Pete Sunday again. Even police work must diminish at the holidays, I thought, even bad guys must take some time off. This, although Christmas and Thanksgiving were notorious dates for family massacres.

We spent Christmas Eve at home quietly, just the three of us. The next day, we went to Amelia’s for brunch and an evening gathering with relatives. Stefan delighted in his godson, Gus, for Phoebe and Walker, who were staying with my parents for the holiday, had figured out a way for him to have the honor in absentia. This was the first time we’d seen the baby since he was born. We gathered around the extravagant tree, Stefan eagerly showing my sister pictures of our outside décor.

“Will you do this for me next year?” Amelia asked. “I’ll pay you anything.”

“Consider it done,” Stefan said.

He then gave each of my sisters a scarf he had knitted by hand, and for my mother, he’d made a shawl in bands of rose and gold. He had taken up knitting to calm himself when he felt stressed, at the suggestion of his therapist, and he had taken to it. My mother held the shawl carefully up to the window light, and for a moment, I thought she was going to say something about how this was no work for a man, but when she looked up, her eyes were brilliant with tears.