10. Rattlesnakes .3

“Be good boys,” I said. The words were out before I knew I was going to say them.

Zane and Canavan came out ten minutes later, Canavan still videotaping as Zane worked through a loaded keyring, trying various ones until he got one to fit the front door.

“House was totally open,” he said to me. “Windows and all. I locked the back and the patio doors from the inside. Must have been a trusting soul.”

Well, I thought, she had her kids with her, and maybe they were the only things she really cared about.

After some more hunting on the deceased woman’s keyring, Zane locked the garage. By then Canavan had turned off the video camera. The three of us walked back to the road. The cops pulled their masks down around their necks. I had forgotten mine again; I hadn’t been expecting to meet anyone.

“Ito works for you, doesn’t he?” Zane asked. “Japanese-American guy from the Village?”

I said he did.

“Also for Mrs. Bell?”

“No, just me. She had Plant World for the grounds. I sometimes saw their trucks. Maybe twice a week.”

“But no caretaker? No one to fix a clogged drain or patch the roof?”

“Not that I know of. Mr. Ito might.”

Zane scratched his chin. “She must have been handy. Some women are. Just because you think your kids are still alive forty years later doesn’t mean you can’t replace a washer or a windowpane.”

“Not handy enough to oil the wheel on that squeaky stroller,” Canavan said.

“Maybe she liked it,” I said. “Or…”

“Or nothing,” Canavan said, and laughed. “Nobody likes a squeaky wheel. Don’t they say that’s the one that gets the grease?”

Zane didn’t reply. I didn’t, either, but I thought maybe the kids had liked it. Maybe it had even lulled them off to sleep after a big day of playing and swimming. Squeak… pause… squeak… pause… squeak…

The ambulance and two of the police cars were gone when we got back to where I’d found her body. Before departing, the other cops had strung yellow DO NOT CROSS tape from palms on either side of the driveway. We ducked under it. I asked Officer Zane what was going to happen with the house, and who was going to take care of her final expenses.

He said he had no idea. “She probably had a will. Somebody’ll have to go through the place and find it, plus her phone and any other paperwork. Her children and husband are dead, but there must be relatives somewhere. Until we get this straightened out, you could lend us a hand, Mr. Trenton. You and Ito keep an eye on the house, would you mind doing that? This could take awhile. Partly it’s the paperwork, but mostly it’s because we’ve only got three detectives. Two are on vacation and one’s sick.”

“Covid,” Canavan said. “Tris had got it bad, I’m hearing.”

“I can do that,” I said. “I guess you want to make sure nobody finds out the place is empty and takes advantage.”

“That’s it. Although hyenas who rob a deceased person’s house usually do it because they read the obituary, and who’s going to write an obituary for Mrs. Bell? She was alone.”

“Why don’t I put her name and what I know about her on Facebook?”

“Okay, good. And we’ll get it on the news.”

“What about Super Gramp?” Canavan said. “Could he go through the house? Look for a will and maybe an address book?”

“You know what, that’s a good idea,” Zane said.

“Who’s Super Gramp?” I asked.

“Andy Pelley,” Zane said. “Semi-retired. Refuses to go all the way to full retired. He helps out when we need a hand.”

“Charter member of the 10-42 Club,” Canavan said. He snickered, which earned him a frown from Zane.

“What’s that?”

“Cops who can’t quite bring themselves to pull the pin,” Zane said. “But Pelley’s good police, got a lot of experience, and he’s fishing buddies with one of the local judges. I bet he could get a Writ of Exigent Circumstances, or whatever it’s called.”

“So I wouldn’t have to actually go inside the house—”

“Nope, nope, you can’t,” Zane said. “That’ll be Pelley’s job, if he agrees to do it. But thanks for calling it in. And for keeping the fucking buzzards off her. They messed her up, but it could have been a lot worse. Sorry your morning walk got ruined.”

“Shit happens. I think Confucius said that.”

Canavan looked puzzled, but Zane laughed. “Ask Mr. Ito if he knows anything about Mrs. Bell’s relatives when you see him.”

“I will.”

I watched them get into their cruiser and waved as they went around the next bend. Then I walked back home. I thought about Donna. I thought about Tad, our lost boy, who would now—if not for a plugged needle valve—be in his forties and starting to go gray. I thought about Allie Bell, who made good oatmeal cookies and who said I know they aren’t there. And yet sometimes they are.

I thought about the double pram parked in the dark garage, next to the Chevy Cruze with its no-nonsense blackwall tires. I thought about saying be good boys… even though the pram was empty.

It wasn’t fair. True of the Bell twins, true of my son, true of my twice-married wife. The world is full of rattlesnakes. Sometimes you step on them and they don’t bite. Sometimes you step over them and they bite anyway.

By the time I got back to the house, I was hungry. No, ravenous. I scrambled up four eggs and toasted another English muffin. Donna would have said my hunger was healthy, life-affirming, a spit in the eye of death, but maybe I was just hungry. Finding a dead woman at the head of her driveway and waving away the buzzards who wanted to eat her must have burned a lot of calories. I couldn’t get her ruined face out of my mind, but I ate everything on my plate anyway, and this time held it down.

Because the day was pleasant instead of oppressively hot (“Hotter than dog-snot” was how Mr. Ito liked to put it), I decided to walk after all… but not down to the swing gate, which would mean passing the spot where I’d found Allie. I took Greg’s boardwalk to the beach instead. The first part of it was hemmed in by palmettos and junk palms, which turned it into a green tunnel. The raccoons seemed to like that part, and I was careful to avoid the little clumps of their scat. There was a gazebo at the end of the boardwalk. After that the trees fell away to a wide sweep of beach grass and dune reeds. The sound of the waves was mild and soothing. Gulls and terns circled, loafing on the Gulf breeze. There were other birds, too—big ’uns and little ’uns. Greg was an amateur ornithologist and would have known them all. I did not.

I looked south where there were great tangles of underbrush. A few palms poked above them, but they looked tattered and unhealthy, probably because the trash growth was sucking up most of the nutrient-rich groundwater. It was there that Jake and Joe must have come to grief. I could see the Bell boardwalk, and if they had only taken that instead of trying to play jungle explorers they would also be in their forties, maybe pushing their own youngsters in that old stroller. If onlies are also rattlesnakes, I think. They are full of poison.

I left the gazebo behind and headed north along the beach, which was wide and wet and shining in the sun. There would be a lot less beach that afternoon, and almost none by evening, when the tide was high. Mr. Ito said it didn’t used to be that way; he said it was global warming, and by the time Eddie was his age, the beach would be gone.

It was a pleasant walk with the Gulf on my left and the dunes on my right. Greg Ackerman’s was the last house on the Key; north of his property, county land took over and the tangled undergrowth reappeared, growing so close to the beach that I occasionally had to brush away palmetto branches and step over big clumps of beach naupaka. Then the foliage ended and the beach widened into a lopsided triangle deep in shells. Here and there I spotted shark’s teeth, some as big as my index finger. I picked a few up and put them in my pocket, thinking I’d give them to Donna. Then I remembered, oh snap, that my wife was dead.

Bitten again, I thought.

The triangle was lopsided because Daylight Pass had cut off the beach. Water ran against the tide from Calypso Bay, first fighting the mild Gulf waves and swirling in a whirlpool before joining them. It was a hurricane that opened Daylight, which had been closed ninety years before. So I’d read in A Pictorial History of the South Keys, which had been on Greg’s coffee table when I took up residence. Across the way was a floating patch of greenery, all that remained of Duma Key, which had been inundated in the same hurricane that opened the pass.

I lost interest in picking up shark’s teeth—remembering your wife is dead will do that, I guess—so just put my hands in my pockets and looked at the shell beach where Rattlesnake Key ended. It was to this dead end that the hunting party had driven the infestation of snakes. A group of lawyers is an eloquence; a group of rattlesnakes is a rhumba. I didn’t know how I knew that, but I did. The mind isn’t just a venomous reptile that sometimes bites itself; it’s also an enthusiastic garbage picker. Freddy Cannon released his 45s on the Swan label, which bore the message DON’T DROP OUT. James Garfield’s middle name was Abram. Those are also things I know but don’t know how I know.

I stood there with the breeze rippling my shirt and the birds circling overhead and the green mop of foliage that marks what’s left of Duma Key rising and falling with the waves, as if it were breathing. How had they driven the snakes here? That was a thing I didn’t know. And once they got them here, how had they killed those that didn’t try to escape by swimming away? I didn’t know that, either.

I heard a squeak from behind me. Then another. The sweat on the nape of my neck turned cold. I didn’t want to turn my head because I was sure I’d see that double stroller with the dead twins inside it, swollen from snakebites. But because I had nowhere to go (like the rattlers), and didn’t believe in ghosts, I did. There were a couple of gulls standing there—white heads, black bodies, beady eyes asking what the hell I was doing trespassing on their spot.

Because I was scared, I threw a couple of shark’s teeth at them. They weren’t as big as the shells I’d thrown at the buzzards, but they did the job. The gulls flew off, squawking indignantly.

Squawking.

What I’d heard behind me had been squeaking—like the wheel that needs some grease. I told myself that was bullshit and could almost believe it. The breeze brought the smell of something that might have been kerosene or gasoline. It didn’t surprise me; Florida politicians, from the governor right down to the city and town councils, are more interested in business than they are in preserving the Gulf Coast’s fragile ecosystem. They abuse it and eventually they will lose it.

I looked for the telltale rainbow of gas or oil on the surface, or turning at the edges of that constant whirlpool, and saw nothing. Breathed deep and smelled nothing. Went back home… which was how I was now thinking of Greg Ackerman’s house.

I don’t know if remarriages work, as a rule. If there are statistics, I haven’t seen them. Ours did. Was it because of the long gap? Those years when we didn’t see each other, then fell out of touch completely? The shock of reconnection? That might have been part of it. Or was it because the terrible wound of our son’s death had had time to heal? Maybe, but I wonder if couples ever get over a thing like that.

Speaking just for myself, I thought of Tad less often, but when I did, the hurt was nearly as strong as ever. One day at the office I remembered how I used to read him the Monster Words before bedtime—a catechism that was intended to banish his fear of the dark—and had to sit down on a toilet in the office bathroom and cry. That wasn’t a year or two or even ten after it happened; that was when I was in my fifties. Now I’m in my seventies, and I still don’t look at pictures of him, although there was a time when I stored many on my phone. Donna said she did, but only on what would have been his birthday—a kind of ritual. But she was always stronger than I was. She was a soldier.

I think most first marriages are about romance. I’m sure there are exceptions, people who marry for money or to improve their station in life some other way, but the majority are powered by the giddy, gliding feeling pop songs are written about. “The Wind Beneath My Wings” is a good example, both because of the feeling it evokes and because of the corollary the song doesn’t go into: eventually the wind dies. Then you have to flap those wings if you don’t want to crash land. Some couples find a tougher love that endures after the romance thins away. Some couples discover that tougher love just isn’t in their repertoire. Instead of discussing money, they argue about it. Suspicion replaces trust. Secrets blossom in the shadows.

And some marriages break up because a child dies. Allie Bell’s didn’t, but might have if her husband hadn’t died not long after. No coronary for me, only panic attacks. I kept a paper bag in my briefcase and huffed into it when they came on. Eventually they stopped.

When Donna and I remarried there was an older love, kinder and more reserved. There were none of the money arguments that bedevil many young couples who are just starting out; I had done well in the ad biz, and Donna was the superintendent of one of the biggest school districts in southern Maine. On the evening I saw her in that bar, she was in Providence for a New England conference of school administrators. Her yearly salary wasn’t as big as mine, but it was generous. We both had 401k’s. Our financial needs were met.

The sex was satisfactory, although without a lot of fireworks (except maybe for that first time after our long—ha-ha—layoff). She had her house, I had mine, and that was how we lived. The commute wasn’t a big problem. It turned out that we’d been living just seventy miles apart for all those in-between years. We weren’t together all the time, and that was okay. We didn’t need to be. When we were, it was like being with a good friend that you just happened to sleep with. We worked at the relationship in a way that couples just starting out don’t need to do, because they have that wind beneath their wings. Older couples, especially those with a terrible darkness in their past that they need to avoid, have to flap. That’s what we did.

Donna took early retirement, and in 2010 we became a one-house couple: mine, in Newburyport. It was her decision. At first I thought it was because she wanted more together time, and I was right about that. Just not why she felt more together time had become necessary. We spent a week getting her settled, then she asked one sunshiny October Saturday if I’d walk with her by the rock wall that divides my property from the Merrimack River. We held hands and kicked through the leaves, listening to the crackle and smelling that sweet cinnamon odor they get before they go limp and start to decay. It was a beautiful afternoon with big fat clouds sailing across a blue sky. I said it looked like she had lost weight. She said that was true. She said it was because she had cancer.

I was afraid that thinking about the buzzards tearing into Allie would keep me awake, so I went poking through Greg’s double-sized medicine cabinet (always a bit of a hypochondriac, my friend) and found an Ambien prescription with four left in the bottle. According to the label, this particular helping of sleep medicine had expired in May of 2018, but I thought what the hell and took a couple. Maybe they worked, maybe it was just the placebo effect, but I slept all night, and with no dreams.

I woke refreshed at seven the next morning and decided to make my regular walk, feeling I couldn’t avoid the spot where Allie died for the rest of my stay. I put on shorts and sneakers and went downstairs to start the Keurig. Greg’s driveway opens into a large courtyard on the side of the house. A window at the foot of the stairs looks out on this courtyard. I got two steps from the bottom of the stairs and froze, staring.

The stroller was out there.

I couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t quite take it in. I felt it had to be a trick of the shadows, only in that early morning light there were no shadows… except, that is, for the one thrown by the stroller. It was there. It was real. More than the object itself, the shadow proved it. Shadows don’t exist unless there’s something to make them.

After my initial brain-freeze, I was afraid. Someone, some mean person, had come here and left that stroller to freak me out. It worked. I was freaked out. I couldn’t think who would have done such a thing, certainly not Officers Zane or Canavan. Mr. Ito had probably heard of Mrs. Bell’s death—news travels fast in small communities—but he wasn’t the practical joker type, and his son spent most of the time in Internet dreamland. There were no usual suspects, and in a way that didn’t matter. What mattered was that someone had come to my house in what the pulp novelists call the dead of night.

Had I locked up? In my initial shock and fright (at first I wasn’t even angry), I couldn’t remember. I’m not sure I could have remembered my late wife’s middle name just then, had I been asked. I rushed to the front door: locked. I went to the one that gave on the pool and the patio: locked. I went to the back door, which opens into the garage, and that one was locked, too. So at least no one had actually been inside, doing a midnight creep. It should have been a relief but it wasn’t.

One of the copsmust have left that thing, I thought. Zane locked the garage and took the keys.

There was logic there, but I just didn’t believe it. Zane had seemed solid, dependable, far from dumb. Also, was a key to the garage really necessary? Probably not. The lock on the side door looked like the kind you could pop with a coathanger or credit card.

I went out to look at the stroller. I thought there might be a note of the sort that would be left behind in a creepy Grade C suspense movie: You’re next and Go back where you came from both came to mind.

There was no note. There was something worse. Yellow shorts on one seat, red shorts on the other. Not the same ones as yesterday. And shirts draped across the backs, also not the same. I didn’t want to touch those shirts and didn’t have to in order to read what was on them: TWEEDLEDUM and TWEEDLEDEE. Twin shirts for sure, but the twins who had worn these were long dead.

What to do with the goddam stroller was the question, and a good one. Now that the reality of it being there was setting in, my first shock, closely followed by fear, was being replaced by curiosity and anger: what a shit way to start the morning. I had my cell phone in the pocket of my shorts. I called the County Sheriff’s Department and asked for Officer P. Zane. The receptionist put me on hold, then came back and said Officer Zane was off-duty until the following Monday. I knew better than to ask for a cop’s personal number, so instead asked the dispatcher to please tell him Victor Trenton had called, and would he please call back?

“I’ll see what I can do,” the woman said, a non-response that did nothing to ameliorate my shitty morning.

“You do that,” I said, and ended the call.

Mr. Ito would also not be in until the following Monday, and I wasn’t expecting any other company, but I had no intention of letting that stroller sit in the courtyard. I decided to push it back to Mrs. Bell’s and return it to the garage. It was on my usual walk, after all, and I might be able to tell if some practical joker/mean person had forced the garage door. First, though, I took a couple of photos of the perambulator in situ, to show Zane. Assuming he was interested, that was. He might be less than happy that I’d moved the stroller from the courtyard where I found it, but was it evidence of a crime? Had Allie Bell been beaten to death with a perambulator, perforce? No. I was just returning it to where we’d put it.

I pushed it up the road under the simmering morning sun. Maybe the residual effects of the Ambien were still in my system, because once the fear had been dispelled by the pram’s prosaic ordinariness (even the shorts and shirts were prosaic, the sort of clothing available in any Walmart or Amazon), I fell into a kind of daze. I suppose if I’d been in bed, or even lying on the sofa, I would have drifted off into sleep. But because I was walking on Rattlesnake Road, I just let my mind float on its own current.

Squeaky wheel or no squeaky wheel (I really should oil it, I thought), the stroller was easy to push, especially without any four-year-old boys to weigh it down. I did it with my left hand. With my right I touched the shirts hanging over the backs of the seats—first one, then the other. I didn’t realize what I was doing until later.

I thought of the boys crossing the road and then fighting their way toward the beach through the undergrowth. Not angry about it, not using their little-boy cusswords if they got whapped in the face by a backswinging frond or when a jutting branch scraped an arm. Not angry, not impatient, not wishing they’d taken the boardwalk. They were deep in a shared fantasy—jungle explorers wearing newspaper hats their father had made them out of the Tribune’s Sunday color funnies. Somewhere ahead there might be a treasure chest left behind by pirates, or a gigantic ape like King Kong, a movie they had seen on Tampa Matinee at four o’clock, sitting crosslegged before the TV until their mom commandeered it for the Nightly News with Tom Brokaw.

They hear the rattling, low at first but getting louder and closer as they push heroically onward. At first they ignore it, then make the fatal mistake of dismissing it. Joe thinks it might be bees and they could find honey. Jake asks him how many times his brother would like to get stung and tells him not to be stupid. They are after treasure. Honey is not treasure. The rattling sound is coming from the left and the right. No problem! The way to the beach is straight ahead. They can already hear the waves and they will paddle their feet before digging in the sand for gold (and building a castle if the treasure hunt yields no results). They want to wade in the water because it’s hot, a hot day like the one my little boy had to deal with. He had no water in which to paddle his feet, he was trapped in a hot car with his mommy because there was a monster outside. The monster wouldn’t leave and the car wouldn’t go.

They don’t see the dip because it’s masked by a tangle of bushes. Those bushes also hide a den of snakes—a rhumba of rattlers—that lives in its shade. Jake and Joe, side by side, could go around this overgrown clump of greenery, but that’s not how brave explorers roll. Brave explorers go straight ahead, hacking away the greenery with invisible machetes.

That’s what they do, and because they’re walking side by side, they plunge into the dip together. And into the snakes. There are dozens of them. Some are still young—snakelets—and although they can bite, they cannot (contrary to popular belief) inject poison. But their bites are still painful, and most of the rattlers are adults in full protection mode. They shoot their diamond-shaped heads forward and sink their fangs deep.

The boys cry out—ow and don’t and what and that hurts.

They are bitten multiple times on the ankles and calves. Joe goes to one knee. A snake strikes his thigh and wraps its body around his knee like a tourniquet. Jake struggles out of the brush-filled dip wearing snakes like ankle bracelets. That rattling sound fills the world. He tries to pull Joe to his feet and a snake sinks its fangs into the meat of his small palm as quick as winking. Joe is on his belly now, with snakes crawling all over him. He tries to protect his face, at least, and can’t. He’s bitten on his neck and cheeks, and when he turns his head in a futile effort to get away, on his nose and mouth. His face begins to swell.

Jake turns and begins to blunder back to the road and the Bell house on the other side, still wearing snakes around his ankles. One falls off. The other begins to twine its way up toward the leg of the boy’s shorts, a rattlesnake barber pole. Why does he run, when the two of them have always done everything together? Is it because he knows his twin brother is already beyond help? No. Because he’s in a blind panic? No—not even blind panic could cause him to abandon Joe. It’s because he wants to get Daddy if he’s still home, Mommy if Daddy isn’t. It’s not panic, it’s a rescue mission. Jake pulls the snake off his leg and has a moment to see its beady assessing eyes before it buries its fangs in his wrist. He flings it away and tries to run but he can’t run, the poison is coursing through him now, making his heart beat erratically, making it hard to breathe.

Joe is no longer screaming.

Jake’s vision doubles, then triples. He can no longer even walk, so he tries to crawl. His hands are swelling up like cartoon gloves. He tries to say his brother’s name and can’t because his throat—

What brought me out of this vision was the clack and whine of the swing gate going up. The stroller I was pushing had broken the photoelectric beam that operates it. In my zombie state I’d walked far past Allie’s driveway. I saw my right hand was still going back and forth, touching first one shirt (TWEEDLEDEE) and then the other (TWEEDLEDUM). I pulled it back as if it were touching something hot. The day was still relatively cool, but my face was wet with sweat and my tee-shirt was dark with it. I had only been walking (at least I thought so; couldn’t remember for sure), but I was breathing fast, as if at the end of a two-hundred-yard dash.

I pulled the stroller back and the swing gate went down. I asked myself what had just happened, but thought I knew. The other members of my team at the agency would have laughed—except maybe for Cathy Wilkin, who had an imagination that stretched further than taglines for toilet bowl cleaner—but I had no other way to explain it. I had seen movies and at least one TV documentary where so-called clairvoyants were called in by the police to help locate the bodies of people who were presumed dead. As bloodhounds are given an article of clothing to get the scent they’re supposed to follow, the psychics were given articles that were deemed important to the person they were supposed to locate. Mostly the results had been bullshit, but in a few cases it had worked. Or seemed to.

It was the shirts. Touching the shirts. And the part about Tad? Those were my own memories intruding on whatever vibe I’d been getting from those shirts. My son finding his way into my strange state of seeing wasn’t surprising. He had died at about the same age as the Bell twins, and at close to the same time. Triplets instead of twins. Tragedy calling to tragedy.

As I turned the stroller and started back, the vividness of my vision started to fade. I began to question the idea that I’d had an authentic psychic experience. It wasn’t as though I didn’t know what happened to the Bell twins, after all; maybe my mind had just added some details, like the concealed dip they’d fallen into. It might not have happened that way at all. Plus, there was no denying that I’d been in an extremely suggestible state because of the pram showing up as it had.

That I couldn’t explain.

I ducked under the yellow tape and pushed the stroller up the curving driveway to the Bell house. Squeak, squeak, squeak. The garage’s side door was standing open, swinging lazily back and forth in a light breeze. There were no splinters above or beneath the lock plate, and none on the door itself. It could have been loided with a credit card, but it hadn’t been forced.

I studied the doorknobs, both outside and inside. There was a keyhole in the middle of the outside knob, which Officer Zane had used to lock the door. You didn’t need a key to lock the inside. There was a button in the middle of that knob and all you had to do was push it.

The solution is simple, I thought. It was the twins. It was Jacob and Joseph. They just turned the inside knob. The button would pop out and the door would open. Easy as winking. Then they pushed the stroller down to my place, Jake on one side and Joe on the other.

Sure. And if you believed that, you’d believe we won in Vietnam, the moon landing was faked, the horror-stricken parents at Sandy Hook were crisis actors, and 9/11 was an inside job.

And yet the garage door was open.

And the stroller had turned up at my house, a quarter of a mile away.

My phone rang. I jumped. It was Officer P. Zane. The receptionist at the Sheriff’s Department had come through after all.

“Hello, Mr. Trenton, what can I do you for?” He sounded more relaxed today, and much more Southern. Probably because it was his day off and he was in civilian mode.

“I’m at the Bell house,” I said, and told him why. I hardly need to add that I left out the part about my vision of the boys falling into the camouflaged snakepit.

There was a moment of silence when I finished. Then he said, “Go ahead and put that stroller back in the garage, why don’t you?” He sounded unsurprised and not very concerned. Of course he hadn’t had a vision of snakes crawling all over Joe Bell as he shrieked. “Somebody played a practical joke on you. Teenagers most likely, sneaking up Rattlesnake Road to see where the crazy lady died. She kind of had that reputation in Palm Village.”

“You really think that’s what it was?”

“What else could it be?”

Ghosts, I thought. Ghost children. But I wasn’t going to say it. I didn’t even like thinking it. “Maybe you’re right. They must have popped the lock with a credit card or driver’s license, though. There’s no sign of damage.”

“Sure. Nothing to popping a lock like that.”

“Easy as winking.”

He chuckled. “Got that right. Just put the stroller back and close the door. Deceased lady’s keys are at the substation. Andy Pelley will pick em up. You remember who I’m talking about?”

“Sure. Super Gramp.”

He laughed. “Right, but don’t call him that to his face. Anyway, he got his judge friend to sign that Exigent Circumstances widget so he can go in and do a search for next of kin and local contacts. Andy’s a sharp old bird. If anyone’s been in there, he’ll know. We at least have to find someone who’ll take responsibility for the lady’s remains.”

Remains, I thought, watching the door swing back and forth in the breeze. What a word. “I guess she can’t just stay in the morgue, can she?”

“We don’t even have one. She’s at the Perdomo Funeral Home on the Tamiami. Listen, since you’re there and the garage is open, would you mind going inside and see if the lady’s car got vandalized in any way? Punctured tires, broken windows, cracked windshield? Because we’d have to take that a little more serious.”

“Happy to. Sorry to interrupt you on your day off.”

“Don’t you worry. I’ve had my breakfast and now I’m just sitting out back and reading the paper. Call me if anything’s wrong with the car. If there is, I’ll inform Andy. And Mr. Trenton?”

“Why don’t you make it Vic?”

“Okay, Vic. If you feel like the kids who took that stroller down to Mr. Ackerman’s house might do it again—the sort of kids who pull shit like that ain’t what you’d call creative—you can roll it back and put it in your garage.”

“I think I’ll leave it here.”