“Tremors—like hands that shake?”

“Hands, head, sometimes.”

“Okay. The pickup’s scheduled for first thing in the morning.” Peach put away his tools and locked up, toying with song lyrics in his head. You’re the cause of my tremors and mood swings, baby would never make it onto anyone’s playlist.

When he got in the truck, a slip of paper fluttered down from the visor—a receipt with a logo of the winking sun and the slogan An Eye for Good Books.

Damn.

He wadded up the receipt and tossed it aside. He was just about to head home when something, another tweaked memory, stopped him. He picked up the receipt and smoothed it over his knee.

During his stint in the military, his daily work had been juggling cause and effect. Paying attention to the sequence of things. Andrew Harper—a man with no obvious health issues—suffered a fall. Afterward, he’d moved to a different part of the building—a tiny downstairs apartment. And then his health started to fail. Why?

For decades, the apartment had been used as a storeroom. Andrew’s father had been a compounding pharmacist. Who knew what kind of concoctions and amalgams had been stored there? And later, Andrew had stored things for his typewriter business—acetone and lubricants. But most recently, according to Natalie, the room had been crammed with books, which had been hastily moved out so Andrew could live on the ground floor.

Peach impulsively turned up Perdita Street and drove to the bookstore. Parking in the loading zone, he went inside, causing the bell to jangle. “Hey,” he said to Cleo, who was at the counter. He didn’t see anyone else in the shop.

“Hey, Peach.” She glanced at the clock over the door. “I was just about to close. What’s up?”

“Is Andrew around?”

Cleo shook her head. “Natalie took him for a doctor’s appointment and then they went to dinner. He’s been sick lately. I’m worried about him.”

“Would it be okay if I checked something in his apartment? It’ll just take a minute.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “You have the door code, right?”

Peach nodded and hurried to the back of the building. He hadn’t been here in a while. The place looked good, probably thanks to Natalie’s pinpoint organization. Andrew’s apartment held the smells of old paper, old ink, old man. A lamp on the nightstand cast a glow. The soft groans and hissing sounds of the radiator filled the room.

Peach switched his phone to flashlight mode and hunkered down, putting his cheek against the floor to see behind the apparatus. “I’ll be goddamned,” he said, eyeing a small iron vial with a slender neck and a bulb at the bottom.

The radiator. The goddamned radiator.

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