‘So, when you said I was your first thought…’

‘I meant my only one,’ Biller said. ‘How fast can you get here?’

‘Give me an hour.’

‘You’re a lifesaver,’ he said. ‘If I ever get around to starting that employee of the month award, you’re my number one pick.’

‘Uh huh,’ she said, and hung up.

She went upstairs and took a shower, then dug her dirty brown B&B tunic out of the laundry basket. It smelled like the deli counter that she’d wiped down on her last shift, so she added an extra layer of deodorant.

She ran into Eddie on her way back downstairs. He was putting his shoes on by the front door.

‘Morning, kid,’ she said, tapping him on the backside as she passed. ‘Have fun at school. Learn stuff.’

‘Hi, Mum, bye, Mum.’

He opened the front door and had one foot halfway out when Abby called to him. ‘Hey, Eddie, hold up a sec.’

‘That’s all I’ve got if I want to make the bus.’

She joined him at the front door and looked over his shoulder. It was a clear day, but the lawn was covered in a thick layer of white frost.

‘Have you noticed anything strange about your father lately?’ she asked.

‘Strange? How do you mean?’

It was a good question. She didn’t tell Eddie about the victim calling the house. She didn’t want to creep him out, and she knew that if she did, it would get back to Lori, who was excited enough about the murder already.

‘Nothing specific,’ she said. ‘I just wondered if he’d seemed, I don’t know, off to you.’

‘I don’t know,’ Eddie said. ‘No. I don’t think so. Why?’

‘It’s nothing,’ Abby said. ‘Forget it. Go catch your bus.’

Eddie slung his schoolbag over one shoulder and stuffed his hands into the front pouch of his hoodie. He gave a brief, monk-like bow, then hurried down the front steps and across the lawn, his sneakers crunching on the frost.

Abby drove, her mind feeling a little like chewed meat. She thought about the magazines, the call to the house that lasted four minutes and forty seconds, Ray’s midnight teary in the kids’ bathroom so Abby wouldn’t hear. They were pieces of a larger picture, like dinosaur bones covered with dirt. She was on her knees, shifting sand from the bones with a toothbrush, exposing parts of a beast with no real idea what that beast was, or what it looked like.

Did she want to know?

Her thoughts dead-ended as she came over the crest of Neef Street and spotted Ray’s work truck parked outside an enormous Georgian Revival.

Abby had to get to work, so she considered driving on, but something Bobbi had said in the Belly the night before suddenly seemed strangely significant: you don’t shit where you sleep.