I stayed at the blue house for two hours.
This is the kind of decision that sounds worse in retrospect than it felt in the moment, which is true of most of my decisions if I'm being honest about my track record.
Carla made more tea. Not coffee, tea, from a box of chamomile that she had clearly not bought for herself because she made a face at it while the bag was steeping. I didn't ask why she had it. Some questions open doors you're not prepared to walk through at three in the afternoon on a Thursday.
She walked me through the corkboard.
Tobias Reyn's wife was named Della. She had moved to Portugal after Gloucester and stopped responding to Carla's emails fourteen months ago. The last email Della sent had three sentences and no punctuation and the third sentence was it isn't what you think it is and then nothing after that.
Before Tobias there was a man in a small Oregon town called Prentiss Bay whose wife had been widowed twice and reported, in a statement to local police that was filed and apparently never read by anyone with critical thinking skills, that her kitchen radio had begun playing music she described as "from somewhere that isn't here." The case was classified accidental. The wife, a woman named Bev Alcott, had died two years later. Natural causes. She was forty-one.
"Natural causes at forty-one," I said.
"Her autopsy noted her heart had essentially stopped mid-beat. No blockage. No underlying condition. Just." Carla snapped her fingers. "Off."
"That's not natural causes."
"The coroner in Prentiss Bay was sixty-seven years old and had never autopsied anything more complicated than a farming accident." She tapped the photograph of Bev Alcott, a heavyset woman with short hair and a practical face, standing in front of a house with wind chimes on the porch. "I think she tried to leave. I think she packed a bag and I think whatever had been with her decided that was not acceptable."
The room went very still.
Not quiet. Still. The specific quality of stillness that isn't the absence of sound but the presence of attention.
Carla noticed it too. She stopped talking and looked at the ceiling, then at the corners of the room, then at the throw blanket on the couch, which had not moved again but was not exactly sitting the way blankets sit.
"It's here right now," she said.
"Probably." I wrapped both hands around my mug. "It follows me. I don't know how far. Apparently at least two streets."
"Has it ever hurt you?"
"No."
"Has it ever threatened you."
"It flickers lights. Moves things. Plays music at three in the morning from a radio that isn't on." I thought about the blanket. The kettle. The forty minutes in the hallway. "It hasn't touched me."
"But it touched your husbands."
The word touched landed wrong. Not inaccurate, just wrong, the way a word can be technically correct and still miss the shape of the thing.
"I don't know what it did to them," I said. "I wasn't there."
Carla looked at me with the careful expression of someone deciding whether to say the thing they actually thought.
She said it. "Are you sure you want to know?"
Before I could answer her front door opened.
Not knocked. Opened.
We both stood up, which in retrospect was not a useful response to anything but felt necessary. The door swung in slowly and then Declan Marsh was standing in the frame, jacket slightly damp from the coastal wind, gas station cup gone and replaced with nothing, which made his hands look like they didn't know what to do with themselves.
He looked at me.
He looked at Carla.
He looked at the corkboard behind her.
His jaw did something complicated.
"Ms. Venn," he said.
"Detective Marsh," Carla said, in the tone of two people who have spoken before and did not enjoy it.
I looked between them. "You know each other."
"We've met," Carla said.
"She contacted my department eight months ago," Declan said at the same time.
They both stopped.
"She told us," Declan continued, slower now, "that the Calloway deaths were connected to a pattern of similar incidents across the northeast. She had a binder." He said binder the way people say exhibit A. "My lieutenant thanked her for her time."
"Your lieutenant has the investigative instincts of a decorative gourd," Carla said pleasantly.
Declan looked at the corkboard again. Then at me. "You've been here for two hours."
"You've been watching the house," I said.
"I've been watching you."
The way he said it wasn't threatening. It also wasn't entirely professional. It landed somewhere in the middle that I chose to file under not my problem right now and move on.
"Then you know I walked here," I said. "On a public street. To have tea with a neighbor."
"She moved in a month ago. You met her today."
"I'm friendly."
Carla made a sound that was almost a laugh. Declan did not find it funny, which I found a little funny.
"There's something on my corkboard with your name on it, Detective," Carla said. "You're welcome to look at it."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he walked to the corkboard.
I watched his face. He was good at controlling it but not perfect, and the thing that cracked through when he found whatever Carla had pinned about him was not surprise. It was something older than surprise. The expression of a person seeing confirmation of something they had been hoping was wrong.
He stood there for a while without speaking.
The throw blanket shifted again.
Declan turned around very slowly and looked at the couch.
"What was that," he said.
"Draft," I said.
He looked at the windows. Both shut. He looked at me. I looked back at him with the expression of a woman who was very calm about drafts.
"Meredith." He said my first name for the first time and it came out different than I expected. Not soft. Just unguarded. Like he'd forgotten to put the professional distance in front of it. "What is happening in this town."
It was the most honest thing he'd said since the gas station cup and the borrowed coaster and the too-small handwriting.
I picked up my mug even though it was empty.
"I genuinely don't know," I said. Which was true.
I was starting to have ideas though.
Outside, somewhere close, Senator barked once.
Declan Marsh pulled out his notepad.