She wasn’t sure how to answer, and so she hadn’t. It wasn’t a question anyway. What would a refusal to accept his personal moratorium mean? Divorce? Who divorced someone for a temporary suspension in marital relations? Soon the stress of the town would be a thing of the past, and then they could revive that aspect of their lives, she told herself, wanting to believe it. They had fallen asleep nestled like spoons. It wasn’t sex, but it was something. But it wasn’t sex.

She reviewed the choreography for “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly” in her head. She and the three kids in the show had been taught the steps during rehearsal tonight. The song was a corny one, no doubt considered risqué when the show opened on Broadway in the mid-1940s. “I feel a little silly, singing it. My country accent is supposed to be over the top,” she said in an over-the-top country accent.

Ted made a noise that seemed to indicate that he was listening, but Allison suspected he hadn’t heard a word. He had marked the spots on the map where the trees had been damaged around town, a total of twenty-three now. Granted, most of them were the size of brooms, but they were still trees.

Who was doing it? She made a list of possibilities. Nick, okay, he was definitely a suspect, having cut down so many trees on his properties; but there were a lot of other possibilities, people who were just fed up with things and needed a release. There was a lot to be fed up with these days. The idea that someone would want to exert control over something, even something as weird as the trees, was not unreasonable. Could it be Lucy? Could the bulletin board and the trees and everything else be part of a scheme to drum up business for the café? Maybe she wanted to expand it. Turn it into a chain. Or maybe it was that crazy new principal at the elementary school. Or Ted himself. Maybe he was trying to frame Nick. The idea was ridiculous—but he was probably at least WP Tree Poet. She’d liked the Khalil Gibran quotation the town had woken up to today, Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.

“What?” Ted said, feeling her eyes on him.

“Looking for patterns, Monsieur Poirot?”

He turned the map sideways and squinted. “Don’t seem to be any.”

He was absolutely obsessed. Was she wrong to ask him about them? Did that make her an enabler?