Still, there were advantages. Lower property taxes, for one. For another, I had a large, sprawling backyard. At the far end of the yard my father had built a pond complete with fountain amid the fir trees. I was wealthy by then—a tip had led me to an enterprising embezzler named Thomas Teachwell, and I quit the force to collect the substantial reward for his capture and the recovery of the loot. I told Dad we could hire men to build the pond. He wouldn’t hear of it. He was that kind of guy. At about the time Dad died, a pair of mallards discovered the pond and took up residence. Soon after, five ducklings appeared. Eventually they all flew south for the winter, yet the following spring a few of them returned and started new nests. They’ve been coming and going ever since. I used to name the ducks, name them after friends, name them after the Dunstons—Bobby, Shelby, Katie, and Victoria—but over time I lost track of who was who.
While I was cutting grass, my neighbor Margot set up a lawn chair on her side of the pond and stretched out, catching the last of the summer’s rays. She was wearing an emerald green one-piece swimsuit that demanded attention. ’Course, Margot dressed in a parka and snow boots would demand attention. She was half a decade older than I was but could pass for ten years younger. Dad had been sweet on her; she was the last woman to kiss him, on the lips, on his deathbed. I had always been grateful to her for that. After I finished with the lawn, I walked a couple of Summit Ales to her chair.
“When do you think the ducks will leave?” she asked.
“What is it? Early September? Probably in a month or so, but with the climate change…”
“Don’t start that again.”
Margot didn’t believe in global warming.
“You look good,” I said.
“True, so true.” She took a sip of beer. “Too bad you never take advantage of it.”
Margot had been pursuing me more or less seriously since I moved in, yet every time I thought how much fun it might be to let her catch me I’d see my father’s face, see “the look” that he had used to keep me in line when I was a kid.
“I’m afraid I’ll just disappoint you like all those husbands of yours,” I said.
She gazed up at me, shielding her eyes from the sun with the flat of her hand.
“I’ve become much better at evaluating men since my third divorce,” she said.
Neither of us believed that for a moment.
I left her after a few minutes and went into my house. I had just finished cleaning up when Bobby called and in a perfectly calm voice asked me to hurry over to his place. I thought he was inviting me to an early dinner.
The Dunstons lived in the house where Bobby grew up, a large, pre–World War II Colonial with a wraparound porch. He bought it from his parents when they retired to their lake home in Wisconsin. At first, Shelby wanted nothing to do with it. She told Bobby she was perfectly comfortable in the small six-room love nest in Highland Park that they had found just after they had been married. To me she confided that she was afraid that it would never be “her home,” that the Dunstons who grew up there would always think of it as “their home” and her as little more than a caretaker. I thought that was a little over the top, until I learned that during the first few months after she and Bobby took possession, in-laws would come and go pretty much as they pleased, never calling ahead, never bothering to knock. Once Shelby returned from shopping to find her brother-in-law watching her TV, eating a sandwich, and complaining that there was no mustard. A sister-in-law took it upon herself to sort out the garden. This went on even after she forced Bobby to collect all of their keys.
Finally Shelby tore up her mother-in-law’s carpet to reveal the hardwood floor beneath, ripped down the wood paneling her father-in-law had installed around the fireplace, tossed out all of the furniture, curtains, and drapes that she had inherited, repainted every room, and replaced the deck in back with a brick patio (actually, Bobby and I did that). Suddenly the Dunston clan was complaining that they didn’t recognize the old homestead and over time began referring to it as “Shelby’s Place.” Even so, she still found it necessary to slap the hands of visitors—mine included—who succumbed to an almost primordial urge to look inside her refrigerator.
I knocked on the front door of Shelby’s Place with my right hand. In my left I was holding a bottle of Piesporter; there was a two-liter bottle of orange pop for the girls tucked beneath my elbow. The door opened abruptly. A man I didn’t know stared out at me. His arm was stretched across the opening from the door to the frame, blocking my path. There was a tenseness about him, part enthusiasm, part anxiety, that I’ve seen in guys about to throw a punch in a crowded bar.
“Who are you?” he said.
“I asked first,” I told him.
He kept staring, his muscles set. He began to make me nervous.
“I’m McKenzie,” I said. “I was invited.”
“McKenzie,” a voice called from inside.
The man dropped his arm and stepped back, allowing me to pass into the house. His expression did not change.
I cautiously stepped across the threshold. There was a short corridor that led to the dining room on the right and the living room on the left. Special Agent Brian Wilson of the Federal Bureau of Investigation stood at the end of the corridor. I had done favors for him in the past. If we weren’t friends, we were at least friendly. He had been to my house, but I had never seen him at Bobby’s. Bobby didn’t like to bring work home with him.
“How are you doing, McKenzie?” Wilson said.