I returned the casserole dish at ten-fifteen, which felt like personal growth.
Nora Paige lived three houses down in a yellow Victorian that she referred to as "the cottage" with a completely straight face despite the fact that it had four bedrooms, a wraparound porch, and a weather vane shaped like a rooster that she had named Gerald. She knew she had named it. She did not find this embarrassing.
She opened the door before I reached the porch steps, which meant she had been watching from the front window, which meant she already knew about Declan Marsh's visit, which meant the next twenty minutes of my life were already decided.
"Meredith." She looked at the casserole dish. Then at my face. Then at the casserole dish again, like it was evidence. "Come in."
Nora was sixty-one and had the energy of someone running for local office on a platform of knowing everyone's business. Her kitchen smelled like cinnamon and judgment. She had a corkboard on the wall with recipes pinned to it, which sounds normal until you noticed that some of the pins were also holding newspaper clippings. I had pointedly never looked at those clippings.
She put the casserole dish on her counter and filled a plate with something before I had sat down fully.
"Almond cake," she said. "I made it this morning."
"It's ten in the morning."
"Grief needs sugar."
"I'm fine, Nora."
She sat across from me and folded her hands on the table. Nora had a way of folding her hands that felt like a formal opening statement.
"I saw the detective," she said.
"I know."
"Tall. Brown jacket. Parked crooked."
"I didn't notice the parking."
"He was here for forty minutes."
I looked at her.
"I wasn't timing it," she said, in a tone that meant she absolutely was. "Meredith. Three husbands."
"I've been getting that a lot lately."
"People are talking."
"People in Dunhaven talk about the weather like it's a personal attack. I'm not concerned about people."
She was quiet for a moment, which with Nora meant she was loading. I took a piece of almond cake because it was actually very good and I had not eaten breakfast and Declan Marsh being annoying in my kitchen first thing in the morning had burned whatever calories I had stored from the previous day.
"Do you think it's connected?" she asked.
"Nora."
"I'm not accusing you. I'm asking." She tilted her head. "Glen, Paul, Marcus. Three different ways. But all here. All in Dunhaven. All yours."
"They weren't mine. They were my husbands. There's a difference."
She gave me a look that I chose not to examine too closely.
"There's a woman," Nora said, "who moved into the blue house on Arden Street last month. Carla Venn. She came to my book club." A pause weighted with significance. "She asked about you."
"What kind of book club asks about me."
"The kind where we've read the same three books for six years and mostly just talk." Nora pushed the plate closer to me. "She knew about Glen. Asked specific questions. Where it happened. What time of year."
I stopped chewing.
"What did she look like," I said.
"Normal. Brown hair. Kept her coat on the whole meeting, which I thought was strange because Paulette keeps that house at seventy-four degrees minimum." Nora paused. "She had a notebook."
"People have notebooks."
"She was writing things down before anyone said them."
I put the cake down.
This was probably nothing. Dunhaven attracted a certain type of person, the kind who read too many true crime forums and decided that in-person investigation was a hobby. After Paul there had been a man who stood outside my house for three days straight claiming to be writing an article. He turned out to be writing a personal blog with eleven followers, two of which were his mother.
Probably this Carla Venn was something like that.
Probably.
"I'll look into it," I said.
"You'll look into it," Nora repeated, in the voice she used when I said things like I'll return the casserole dish soon.
Fair.
I left twenty minutes later with the rest of the almond cake wrapped in foil because Nora operated on the principle that food solved everything that talking started. Halfway down her porch steps I stopped.
The blue house on Arden Street was visible from here, just barely, through the gap between properties. Two streets over, a slice of blue siding and a black car parked out front that I didn't recognize.
A woman was standing on the porch of the blue house.
Brown hair. Coat on.
She was looking directly at me.
Not the way people look at you when they happen to glance your direction. The way people look at you when they have been looking at you and are not bothered that you've noticed.
I looked back. I was not going to be the one who looked away first, because I was raised by a woman who considered that a personal failure.
Carla Venn, if that's who this was, smiled.
It was a perfectly normal smile. Friendly, even. The kind of smile that should have been reassuring.
It wasn't.
I walked home with my foil-wrapped cake and the specific crawling feeling of someone watching my back. Senator was on my lawn again. For once I was almost glad to see him.
Inside, I put the cake on the counter and stood in the kitchen and did not look at the stove light.
Three husbands. A detective with small handwriting and gas station coffee. A woman in a coat who knew things before they were said. And whatever lived in my walls, in my kettle, in the frequency that pressed behind my eyes on quiet nights.
Dunhaven was a town of four thousand people and one decent bakery and it had apparently decided to make my continued existence into a group project.
My phone buzzed. Unknown number.
I answered it.
Silence. Then, faint, almost under the threshold of hearing, that same eleven seconds of music. The one from the radio. The one I had never been able to identify.
It played through once.
Then a voice, clear and ordinary as anything, said: "Mrs. Calloway. I think you and I have something in common."
The call ended.
I stood there holding my phone.
Outside, Gerald the weather vane turned slowly against a wind that wasn't blowing.