Chapter 4

The grocery store in Pondsboro had changed since I was a kid, and mostly for the better. It used to be a Piggly Wiggly. I know people get extremely nostalgic about Piggly Wiggly, but it was basically a gas-station convenience store writ large. The lighting always had that peculiar jittery fluorescent quality that you get in gas stations, and the frozen pizzas should have been banned by the Geneva Convention.

The replacement, Food Lion, is still a midrange Southern grocery store, but it's several steps above the Pig. I loaded up on frozen pizzas that did not count as war crimes, bagged salads, and another couple boxes of wine. If I had to get Mom drunk and giggly to get her to tell me what was going on, that was a sacrifice that my liver was willing to make.

The vulture was back on the mailbox when I got home. I stared at it. It stared back. I wondered if I should offer it a frozen pizza in return for not vomiting on me. Then I wondered if I should get the mail, or if the mail truck would even deliver if there was a vulture on the mailbox. Rain and snow and sleet and hail were one thing, but large scavenger birds was quite another.

"Hi," I said.

The bird did not reply. Mind you, I'm not sure what I would have done if it had. The breeze tugged at its feathers, but it remained as still as a statue.

"I'm… just gonna… go inside, here…" I said, giving it the widest berth I could. It turned its head to watch as I went up the walk to the front door, which I did sideways, in case it began to make vomiting motions.

I had one foot on the doorstep when it half-spread its wings, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. Then it settled, turning away as if it was bored now. How did you get rid of nuisance vultures? They were undoubtedly protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which meant you couldn't kill or harass them, or disturb their nest sites. Would an air horn count as harassment? How about yelling "Shoo!" really loudly, while wearing a hazmat suit against vulture puke?

These are the questions that try women's souls. I went inside.

It was very quiet in the house. I'd forgotten how quiet it was in the country. My apartment in Tucson is smack in the middle of the city and there's always an underlying hum of traffic. I set the grocery bags on the counter and began unloading them, making as much noise as possible with the cupboard doors and the refrigerator drawers, but it only made the quiet feel louder by contrast.

It was just a little bit creepy.

Which was ridiculous, of course. Creepy is for old Gothic mansions and run-down cabins out in the woods, not cookie-cutter houses in the middle of a subdivision. Hell, Lammergeier Lane wasn't even cookie-cutter enough to be Stepford Wives material. If a serial killer tried to break in, he'd be up against Mr. Pressley, and my money was not on the serial killer.

No, it was all perfectly normal. Normal house. Normal everything. Normal colors on the walls, even. Gran Mae would have been pleased by that. She'd always wanted everything to be normal. "Nice and normal" was one of her favorite phrases. When Mom came home from work late and asked how we had been, Gran Mae would say, "Nice and normal!" every time. It didn't matter if Brad had been blasting music through the door until Gran Mae yelled at him to stop that god-awful racket, or if I was crying because I was ten years old and life was a lot, it was always "Nice and normal!" when Gran Mae was watching us.

(I'm pretty sure Mom didn't actually believe this, but Mom was stuck, and all she could do was work two jobs until she had the money to get us out of there. Like many family dynamics, it didn't have to be healthy, it just had to work.)

I left the kitchen and went to the living room. Still too quiet. I could hear the clock on the mantel ticking, and the grinding sound of the air conditioner running upstairs. I opened my laptop but found myself staring at the fish instead, eyes tracing the swirling lines of ink framed by the blandness of the white wall.

The ecru and eggshell was bothering me more than I expected. More than I wanted it to bother me. It wasn't my place to judge the paint. Mom will always bend over backward to accommodate her family, way more than is healthy, and Brad and I have gotten in the habit of trying to be gently supportive of anything she does for herself. If she liked those colors, I was going to be gently supportive if it killed me.

They say you can't go home again, but of course you can. It's just that when you get there, somebody may have repainted and changed the fixtures around.

The clock ticked.

Ecru. Jesus. Mom had never been an ecru type. Of course, she'd never been a Confederate-wedding-over-the-mantelpiece type either. That was all Gran Mae.

Ironically, even Gran Mae hadn't had the photo of Great-Grandaddy Rasputin out on display. Possibly he wasn't nice-and-normal-looking enough.

Another tick.

"Right," I said out loud. "If I'm going to be miserable, at least I'll be productively miserable."

I looked back down at my laptop and set to work on The Project.

Oh god, The Project.

To give you the very quick version, museums and colleges and other institutes that keep insect collections for entomologists are almost always strapped for cash and, more importantly, for space. Whenever they want room for a new exhibit or a new lab or whatever, they look for things to toss out, and sooner or later, they trip over drawers and boxes and bulky cabinets full of bugs on cards and they say, "Isn't this all on the internet now? Why are we keeping it here? Who cares about dead bugs anyway?" (This is why entomologists drink.) Cue dozens of frantic scientists trying to tell them that it's actually really important and some of these are the type of specimen that defines the entire species and they say, "Okay, so find someone to take it."

For years, that someone was Rudd College, a dinky little liberal arts school in Michigan, which, for reasons known only to their donors, had a gigantic entomology department. They probably took in half the orphaned collections in the country.

And then they had a fire.

What the flames didn't get, the sprinklers did. Complete loss. Absolutely irreplaceable specimens, some of which went extinct before we even got around to assigning them a genus. (This is also why entomologists drink.)

But! All was not lost! Rudd College had conscientiously documented each and every specimen that passed through their doors, taking multiple photos of each one. Great! Wonderful! We could salvage something!

Then somebody actually looked at the collection, and it was on about a hundred little unlabeled data cards and the file names were all DC1247.JPG and DC9495.JPG and so on and so forth for thousands of photos. So if I wanted to go look up, say, the type specimen for Vostox apicedentatus, the toothed earwig, I would have to trawl through all these photos until I actually saw it, and hope that its label was still attached and legible in the photo, and also reckon with the fact that it would probably have been labeled Spongovotox apicedentatus because taxonomy is a harsh mistress. (This is why biologists of every stripe drink.)

Dr. Wilcox was bound and determined that these photos be useful again, so whenever we caught up on our current projects, she'd tell us to go work on The Project. Pull up a photo, stare at it, check the ID label, check to make sure it was actually correctly ID'd, change the file name to the species, put in a note that said what collection we thought it was from, if we knew. Pull up another photo, rinse, repeat.

It is exactly as thrilling as it sounds. But I was on furlough and unemployment doesn't cover a lot and Dr. Wilcox was willing to fudge the budget a bit and pay me under the table to work on The Project.

(Also, the toothed earwig doesn't actually have teeth. The male's got one little pointy bit on his forceps. That's the only way to tell them from other earwig species. [This is yet another reason why entomologists drink.] Anyway, they live entirely inside rotting cacti, so you are unlikely to run afoul of one unless you spend a lot of time kicking over dead barrel cacti, in which case you probably deserve the occasional earwigging. That's a technical term. Trust me, I'm a scientist.)

I spent probably two hours pulling up photos and changing file names. Some of the photos would require a specialist—don't ask me to do ants, ants are hard—and one had a label that was, shall we say, a triumph of optimism over reality. I figured two hours was enough to earn my pittance for the day, stood up, stretched, and decided to go wander around the garden for a bit.

The sliding glass door from the living room let out onto a small deck. There was an oval of lawn in the center of the yard, and the rest was taken up by roses. If it had changed since my grandmother's day, I couldn't see it. The roses were still thick and lush, hugging the wooden fence and running riot across the small white shed in the corner. A climbing rose had spread into the cedar tree in the back corner and I could see a spray of pale yellow roses dangling thirty feet above the ground.

I was struck again by the same feeling I'd had yesterday when I woke up, that I had somehow stepped back in time. The garden looked exactly as it had when Gran Mae was alive. We hadn't done much to change that, admittedly—a few large containers with tomatoes, the obligatory potted basil. Now even those were gone. Perhaps that wasn't that strange. Mom had never been much of a gardener, and certainly she had never been one for garden gnomes or anything like that. (Gran Mae would have had apoplexy if a garden gnome appeared among her roses. Cement garden statuary was not classy.)

I brushed my fingertips against a pink rose by the deck railing, inhaling the scent when the memory appeared in my head, clear as day, of my grandmother cutting one and nipping the thorns off the stem with a pair of pink-handled pliers. She wore light green gardening gloves and the sun shone through her white hair like a halo. She tucked the pink rose behind my ear and smiled. "You could be so pretty at your coming out."

Gran Mae believed strongly in coming out and debutante balls. I couldn't have been much more than eight or nine at the time, but I was a child of a different era entirely, so I had a vague notion that Gran Mae thought I was a lesbian. I hadn't given it a lot of thought one way or the other. I didn't think I was a lesbian, but then again, the boys in my class were gross, so being a lesbian might be the sensible option. (Fortunately for all involved, I asked Mom about it, not Gran Mae, and when Mom had finished laughing herself sick, she explained that no, Gran Mae meant an entirely different kind of coming out, and I didn't have to decide on boys or girls or both or neither any time soon.)

It was warm and humid and just as silent in the backyard as it had been in the house. I couldn't hear any birds or katydids or frogs. The air didn't have that oppressive feel of an oncoming storm, but it felt… I don't know, flat, like a soda that had been left out too long and lost all the carbonation.

I stepped down off the deck. I heard a car passing, and either it was very far away, or sound really was muffled back here. But it wasn't until I wandered up to the roses against the fence that I finally put my finger on what was bothering me.

There were no insects in the garden.

Yes, it's impossible. I know it's impossible. I am telling you this, knowing that it was impossible. The impossibility is the point. There were no honeybees rolling around in the golden sepals of the single rose blossoms, no flower longhorn beetles dusted in pollen, no aphids coating the stems. There were no hoverflies, no fat bumblebees or blundering carpenter bees. No buzz, no cricket chirp, no hum or wings. There were no insects, period.

I started checking everywhere. I examined the undersides of leaves, I separated petals looking for crab spiders lying in ambush, I scuffed the leaf litter under the rosebushes looking for stray millipedes. Nothing.

What the hell kind of spray was Mom using on these roses? DDT? Mom belongs to the generation that believes if it's organic, it's probably safe, but you can pack a lot of evil into organic chemistry. And if it wasn't Mom, was it the mysterious Phil, who cut the grass and raked the leaves?

I was gonna have a word with whoever it was. This was an entomological Superfund site.

"There used to be bugs," I muttered, standing in the middle of the garden. "I remember them." Gran Mae showing me ladybugs when I was small. A praying mantis balanced on a stem. A wheel bug, with its prehistoric-looking fin and tiny head, packing a bite that would send you screaming. I had been outside with a field guide and a camera regularly from sophomore year on, making up spreadsheets of every insect I could find on Lammergeier Lane. (Possibly this tells you something about the kind of teenager I was. No, I did not go to prom. I did, however, photograph the only funereal duskywing ever recorded in the county, so there.)

Now there was nothing. I could not have checked one box of those long-ago spreadsheets. The roses exhaled their perfume into the humid afternoon air, and the only living thing around to smell it was yours truly.

"There used to be…" I said again, frustrated and alarmed, and went back inside to text my mother to ask what she was spraying.

Of course my phone didn't work. Right. No signal. It assured me that it was definitely talking to the house Wi-Fi, provided I didn't ask it to do anything like actually use said Wi-Fi. My laptop confirmed that the Wi-Fi did indeed exist, even if it was slow. I grumbled and went out front.

The vulture was gone, thankfully. I wandered up and down the road, holding my phone in the air, trying to get a bar of signal. I'm sure Mr. Pressley loved that. ("That's her, Officer! She was meandering! Meandering in the first degree!")

Finally, halfway down the road, I got a bar of signal, and then my phone beeped as texts piled up. Mom, saying she'd gotten to the hotel. Mom, asking if I was okay. Mom, asking if I was okay again. Mom, telling me to call her when I got the message. Mom, remembering that my phone wasn't working.

I called. She picked up immediately. "I can barely hear you, honey. Are you outside?"

"It's the signal," I said, hearing static building on the line. "I might cut out. I'm fine."

"Oh good." Did she sound more worried than usual? I couldn't tell, between the bad connection and anxiety being Mom's middle name. "Did you—zzzt—groceries?"

"Yeah, I'm stocked up." I resisted the urge to yell into the phone, since that wouldn't help. "Mom, I have a question!"

"Yes?"

"What are you spraying on the roses?"

"What?"

"The roses! In the garden! What spray are you using on them?"

"I don't—zzt—thing."

"Really?" I was pretty sure she was telling the truth. Mom knew about my feelings on insecticides, but she wouldn't lie to my face just to avoid conflict. That left the mysterious Phil. "Gotcha."

"Can't—zzt! zzt!—row night. Will you be—zzt garble zzt hssshhhh!"

"You're breaking up, Mom. Text me, and I'll try to check in."

"Zzzt! Love you!"

I hung up. A minute later, my phone buzzed with a text. Mom saying she loved me again, she was sorry she wasn't home, and if there was any problem at all, I could come and stay at the hotel with her. In fact, I could come and stay even if I didn't have a problem. I rubbed my face wearily. This is why Mom is great at her job, but it's a little overwhelming to be one of her kids. I texted back that I was completely fine and was probably going to turn in early because I was still tired from driving. This diverted her concerns into a different, easier to handle channel, and I agreed that yes, it had been a long drive and I would get some sleep, yes, and then mercifully was able to type, "Talk to you tomorrow!"

It was late afternoon. I leaned against my car. I could hear a frog calling somewhere nearby, and a couple of katydids beginning their repetitive zeee-dik! zeee-dik! sounds. (Oblong-winged katydids, in case you're wondering. Get enough of them together and it sounds like the shrubs are full of maracas.)

There were bugs out here. That was a relief. It wasn't some kind of massive pesticide drift from a farm or something. (I had been skeptical, since we don't have big farms anywhere in the immediate area, but that stuff can travel.)

I wanted to call Brad and talk to him about Mom, but I'd need much better signal. I suspected that it was going to be a long phone call, and discussing whether your relatives are acting oddly is hard enough without constant static interruptions. So in the end I just texted him that I'd gotten in safely and I'd talk to him tomorrow, and went back inside to break into the boxed wine.

It was too quiet all evening. I ate cold pizza and drank too much wine. The box said that I should pair it with chimichurri sauce and salsa dancing. The box was going to get British murder shows and like it. Tonight was Inspector Lowell Mysteries, which features a gruff DI solving crimes with his sarcastic assistant and his lovable Scottie dog, Magnus. I have seen every episode at least twice, but fortunately there are nearly a hundred episodes and I'm bad with faces, so I had about a 50 percent chance of remembering who killed who on any given one.

"Don't trust that guy," I told Inspector Lowell. "He's got an alibi. People with alibis in the first half of the show are always suspicious."

Even with the TV on, it was still too quiet. When I had to pause the show to go get more wine, I felt like I was standing in a mausoleum.

I missed my roommate's cat. Salem is a demanding jerk, but having a cat around means that there are never any unexplained noises. If something crashes or thumps or goes bump in the night, you think, It's that damn cat again, and don't worry about it. Not that anything was crashing or thumping, but the house had that sort of fraught silence that magnified any noise that did occur. The ice maker in the fridge came on with its horrible grinding noise while my back was turned and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

"This is ridiculous," I muttered, when I had recovered from the ice maker's attempt to give me a heart attack. I grew up in this house, for Christ's sake. I couldn't really be thrown this badly off-kilter by a paint job and a fucked-up old painting, could I?

And Mom losing all that weight. And the way she seems more anxious than usual—although she might just be getting older, that happens to everybody. And… dammit, no, there's nothing wrong, why am I acting like this?

I went and checked the locks on all the doors. We never used to lock the doors, but it was reflex after living in the city. The sliding glass door was unlocked. I locked it. Then I unlocked it, and locked it again, just to be sure. I went back to the wine and the murders.

I was right about the guy with the alibi, who had given his wife sleeping pills so that he could go out and strangle the vicar. (I am still not entirely sure what vicars are, since we don't have them over here. I think they're like cozy priests? As far as I can tell, they primarily exist in order to solve murders or be murdered on British crime shows.) I was wrong on the next one, where the person who looked guilty was cleared and then had the temerity to turn around and actually be guilty. How dare he?

By nine thirty, I was ready to call it a night. "I'm a wild woman," I told Inspector Lowell. I drained the last of my wine and put the glass in the sink, then went to bed.

Nothing tapped at my window or clawed at my door. There were no mysterious footsteps in the attic or voices in the hall. I pulled the covers over my head to keep away monsters and listened to the silence until I fell asleep.