Elaine answered the door dressed in jeans and a black woollen turtleneck sweater. She said hello and then sneezed. ‘Gesundheit,’ I said. She thanked me. I handed her the bouquet. I told her that I’d picked it up for her. She said she loved lilies. She seemed genuinely surprised and touched. This was my first time entering the Andrewses’ home. It seemed bigger on the inside than it did from the outside — much bigger, in fact. I followed her into the kitchen where she was drinking a cup of steaming tea. She offered me one and I accepted. She asked me if I take sugar or milk or lemon and I said lemon would be good, for there was a lemon out on a cutting board. We drank tea in silence and that was fine by me. For a minute, I even started to read the newspaper sitting on the kitchen table. A developer wanted to build on an ancient Cree burial site. Elaine started to speak and told me about phone calls she’d been receiving; when she picked up, the person on the other end wouldn’t say anything, simply waited, waited for her to get frustrated and hang up, but she said she wouldn’t hang up, that she’d give the person on the other end a piece of her mind, telling them that they’re sick fucks to fuck with a woman whose husband’s just been murdered, bloodily murdered with a knife to the chest, and that if they weren’t such goddamn cowards they’d speak up, say their piece, then leave her alone. I asked her how many of these phone calls she’d received and she said seven. Seven over the past eight hours. I asked her if she’d told the police and she said, ‘Fuck the police.’ We sat sipping from steaming mugs of tea and I thought about the phone calls and the murder and wondered if they were related: it sounds counterintuitive, but she was a beautiful woman, I thought, one who might perhaps attract these kinds of callers. I asked her if she’d ever received calls like that in past and she said yes but not so many in one day, in the past they were spread out, spread out over days, weeks, months, she said. I asked her if the calls started after she married Gerald. And she told me she’d been getting the calls since moving into the house I was standing in, the house Gerald was recently murdered in, and then I asked if I could see where she found the body.
The living room was smaller than I’d expected, which was strange, since the house’s interior I’d imagined to be much smaller from the outside but in general was much larger save the living room. The room was impeccably decorated, however, with a small elegant vase on a small side table and a painting on the northeast wall, a painting almost solidly dark, though there looked like there might be a town and a jetty, perhaps, seen from the water, from the estuary, on a dark and foggy night, though I wasn’t sure what it was supposed to be. The couch had been removed. Its impression remained in the carpet. There was a coffee table, with no couch. There was the side table, too. Nothing was on either table — save the vase on the side table — but that was because the police took everything, Elaine said, and I asked her what’d been on the table and she said an ashtray and some magazines and books and so on. ‘I don’t know specifically,’ she said. There was a large window looking out onto their backyard, though it didn’t appear to have been tampered with. Elaine said that it was shut, too, last night, the night of Gerald’s murder. I stared out the window, onto the Andrewses’ well-maintained backyard, thinking about the case and, more specifically, thinking about Elaine, who stood beside me, looking out the window, and I caught her looking at my reflection in the window when I looked up and at hers. She looked back out onto the yard. The sun was setting and the bushes and lawn looked dark and green in the setting sun. I yawned, unintentionally, and registered hunger. I hadn’t eaten in a long time. Possibly days, I thought. The remaining leaves on the trees flapped in the wind but through the thick window we couldn’t hear either the flapping of the leaves or the howling of the wind, if in fact the wind was howling, which it probably wasn’t, for the leaves flapped gently, from the looks of it, from the living room, where not twenty-four hours ago Gerald Andrews had been stabbed to death. I looked over at Elaine’s reflection again and again caught her looking at mine in the windowpane. I wondered what she was thinking. I hoped she was thinking, I like him. That seemed doubtful, however, despite the connection we were forming; no, she was probably wondering what I was thinking, whether I was currently solving the case, while staring out onto the lawn, lost in thoughts, thoughts re the case, while she stared at my reflection, wondering what I was thinking, thinking about the case, perhaps, or thinking about her; it was quite possible that she was wondering what I made of her, while I stared out the window, onto their nice backyard, sizing her up in my head, while she watched me do so. I think she thinks I suspect her, I thought. When she was looking at me, the first and second time, when she was looking at my reflection, the first and second time I caught her, both times, she averted her eyes quickly, perhaps nervously, though it was hard to tell, I thought. I’d hoped she was looking at me because she was attracted to me and couldn’t take her eyes off me, though it was more than likely she was wondering what I made of the case. Re that, however, I didn’t make much. I didn’t know who killed Gerald and I had a few suspicions, but I was developing ideas slowly, piece by piece, all the while, of course, willing to dismiss my ideas, let them fade away completely if, for example, some more compelling ideas came along, though that wasn’t happening, and everything on offer, for the most part, was unconvincing, as far as I could tell. No. There wasn’t much to go on.