The houses here all ran up against the greenbelt, a thick strip of woods that buffered the houses from the interstate. There were several homeless villages tucked away inside it, and it wasn’t uncommon for Nora to answer calls about people digging in trash cans or sleeping on stoops or breaking into cars. But Jack was nothing like the image she had in her head of the man she was looking for. She found him in the woods kneeling next to a stump as if in prayer. He wore canvas pants and a flannel shirt beneath a down vest and carried a backpack with him. He was muddied up but looked more like a weekend camper than someone living in a tent.

“Hello?” she said.

“Oh.” He started at the sound of her voice and then flashed a smile and waved a hand. A hand that held a knife that gleamed silver. “Hi. What’s up?”

She put a hand on the butt of her pistol, still uncertain what kind of person she was dealing with. He was handsome in a scruffy kind of way, but most of her attention was focused on the blade. “I’m here checking up on you.”

He seemed genuinely confused. Classic white guy. No fear at the sight of an approaching cop. “About what?”

“About you creeping around in people’s yards with a knife. You’re making folks nervous.”

“Oh. Right. Sorry. I’ve been trying to stick to the woods, but I thought I spotted some oysters in a lawn a few plots back.”

“Oysters?”

“Oysters are mushrooms. I’m collecting mushrooms. This greenbelt is a treasure trove!”

“You some kind of druggie?”

“What? No. I’m some kind of scientist.”

He invited her over to study a porcini the size of an elephant ear. And before they parted ways half an hour later, he had harvested it and convinced her to let him prepare her a mushroom and risotto dinner. “Perfectly paired with red wine. It’ll be the best thing your tongue ever tastes.”

“I find that hard to believe,” she said.

“I like to make big promises.”

“Hmm.”

She couldn’t believe she’d said yes. She couldn’t believe she enjoyed herself. Just as she couldn’t believe, in the months to follow, that she took him shooting in a gravel pit or he took her hiking in the Cascades. He lived in Spokane, where he was working on his doctorate, but he drove back and forth to the Sound constantly. “For research,” he said and then bobbed his eyebrows to imply he might have something other than fungi on his mind.