Sometimes things come to you, it seems like out of the blue. But your brain’s been working on the problem all along, you realize later, some underpaid-file-clerk portion of your brain, taking notes and writing reports. Maybe it was Boone telling me that Viridian didn’t trust men. Which I already knew, or assumed, knew at least that she resented the power they’d had over her. She’d told me as much. She’d trusted me enough to tell me.

She would have had a plan for the poems. The plan hadn’t allowed for incapacitation.

Or maybe it had.

I got off 101 and took Sir Francis Drake up to Fairfax. It was completely dark by now, and I followed my headlights up the hill to Viridian’s, hoping a deer wouldn’t jump out in front of me, or as often enough happened, three or four deer. The road up to the house was blind dark, as was the house itself, nobody home. Oscar must have been back at my mom’s, trying to come up with more rhymes for Dawn: Lawn. Fawn. Brawn.

I parked the truck in the courtyard and found my heavy-duty flashlight beneath the seat. I played it over the house, startling a bird out of sleep. It squawked and flapped into the woods. I didn’t try the front door, but I went around to the back, betting that Oscar wouldn’t have thought to lock it. He’d go out the front and close up behind himself and think it done.

I was right. I let myself into the dark kitchen, calling “Hello? Hello?” Not expecting an answer, and there was none.

I didn’t want to turn on any more lights than I had to. I let the flashlight lead me through the tidy kitchen. Either Oscar wasn’t doing any cooking these days, or else he was being good about cleaning. Here was the familiar, almost muddy smell of the herbal teas and supplements, the green matcha powder, the canisters and jars of beans and whole grains and other healthy ingredients that had failed to keep her healthy.

I passed on to the office and here I did turn on a light, blinking at the sudden brightness. The room had been gone over and then gone over again, the site of many rummagings and searches. The books were out of order in stacks on the floor and on the desktop, and file folders labeled in Viridian’s small, distinctive script were also set aside in piles. I looked for what seemed like a long time, keeping my ears open in case a car pulled up out front, or worse, some creepy sound came from within the house itself.

When I found it, finally, I saw that I’d mistaken it for something else. I hadn’t expected it to be this large volume bound in dark blue leather with a gold-embossed spine, like something you might give as a gift in the last century, or the one before:

A Defence of Poetry