Page 14

"It's a request I'm making with a badge on."

"I'm not going to yell."

"That's worse."

"Yes," I say. "That's the idea."

Something almost happens at the corner of his mouth. Then he's turning to the steps. He doesn't use the boards. He moves along the edge of the porch, testing each plank with the side of his boot. He doesn't touch the rail. He stops by the front door, bends, and looks at the folded square of paper wedged into the crack where the door meets the frame.

I read it half an hour ago. The Sheriff told me not to touch anything, which I thought was unfair, since reading isn't touching.

He doesn't take it out. He pulls his phone from his belt, photographs it, and then reads the block capitals that someone pressed hard into the paper with a thick black marker.

TAKE THE OFFER BEFORE THIS GETS EXPENSIVE.

He reads it twice. A muscle works in his jaw. He turns and looks at the barn, where the big double doors stand across the yard in the sun. The single word on them is as tall as he is, dripping red from the ends of every letter where the paint ran.

SELL.

"Okay," he says, mostly to himself. "Okay."

"It's been a very effective morning," I say. My voice comes out thin, so I stop talking.

He goes through the house room by room. I go behind him, because he told me to wait in the cruiser and I told him I wouldn't. He doesn't argue. He walks slowly with one hand near his belt, checking behind doors, opening the pantry, crouching to look under the couch. In the hall he glances at the pan on the stair and says, "That's a lot of pan."

I follow him through the dining room, past the table covered in Nell's mail, into the kitchen, where the blue gingham curtains are still drawn across the window over the sink.

He stops at the back door.

It's an old door, wood, with a brass latch and a deadbolt painted over so many times it hardly turns. The frame beside the latch is bright with fresh scratches, pale gouges in the paint where something flat and hard has been forced in and levered. A curl of green paint hangs from the wood like a split fingernail.

"They tried this one first," he says quietly.

I look at it. "The deadbolt held."

"It did."

"It hasn't turned in thirty years."

"Then it was painted shut, and that's why." He crouches and runs one finger a quarter inch above the marks, not touching. "Somebody wanted to come in. Maybe just to look around, maybe to scare you. I can't tell yet." He looks up. "You were upstairs."

"I was asleep." My hand finds the edge of the counter. "I didn't hear it."

"You heard the glass."

"That was later. They'd finished the back door by then." I hear myself say it in the voice I use at work, the calm, even one. "Well. That's a lot of effort for a barn."

"Carolina."

"I'm being thorough."

"You're gripping the counter."

I look down. My knuckles are white against the cracked blue tile. I let go, one finger at a time. My hand is shaking.

He stands up from the door. In the narrow kitchen he's close enough that I can smell him: cedar and soap and cold air. His hair is still damp at the collar. He's showered. He showered and shaved the edges of his beard and put on a uniform that fits across his shoulders better than any uniform has a right to.

I'm standing in the room I learned to make toast in, one floor below the room where he dragged my sweater over my head last night, trying to remember why I'm angry at him.