“Granted. I’m just surprised. Is there some respectful way to say you’re gorgeous?”

I brushed that last aside. “I do have a boyfriend. Since you ask. Sort of. It’s complicated.”

“Huh. Well, there’s somebody I guess you could call my girlfriend, but it’s complicated, too.”

We looked at each other solemnly for a minute and then we both started laughing, and that broke some tension that had been between us all along. When we were done eating, we went out to the walkway and looked over the harbor, the water and the reflected lights and the magic, illuminated city across the bay, the million-dollar view free to anyone who wished to see it. I let him kiss me, since we’d both laid down our weapons and nothing would come of it. Then we said good night and I got in the truck and headed north.

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.