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last week when I was jogging on the path around the lagoon, and I hardly recognized her. Stringy hair, almost all gray. No makeup and a ratty housedress. She looked like something out of a Ruth Rendell novel.”
    “Surely not typical of your neighbors,” Laurel observed.
    Annie felt called upon to defend the sartorial splendor of the residents rimming Scarlet King Lagoon, and, before she knew it, she was deep into a good old-fashioned gossip about her neighbors.
    “Lord, no. Now look. To the left of the Atwater house.” Annie pointed across the lagoon at a blaze of lights. Enormous baseball-park lights topped poles at six points in the backyard, throwing the entire lawn into clear, sharp relief. “That’s where the Burgers live. Billye Burger goes to the kind of shops where you have to have an appointment! She wears Bill Blass originals. Billye always looks like she just got out of the beauty shop and dropped by Cartier on the way home. And her husband is the kind of Texas Rich you read about in D. R. Meredith’s
Murder by Impulse
and
The Sheriffand the Branding Iron
. He’s the reason it’s so hard to get into the compound. I mean, I don’t like to call it a compound, but that’s what it is. You know how wild everything is, the undergrowth pruned just enough to keep it from killing the trees. Vines and ferns and shrubs everywhere. You’d have to have a machete to hack your way to any of these houses, except by road or along the lagoon path. The gate’s to keep out strangers. Buck Burger was a criminal lawyer who made enough enemies to make Al Capone nervous. And enough money to have a home here and another in Dallas and I think one in Aspen.”
    Laurel gazed with interest at the starkly illuminated landscape. “That’s the yard with the watchman.”
    “Watchman?”
    “Yes. Rather a large man. And
not
charming. I encountered him when I took a walk this afternoon.”
    A watchman. Why did the Burgers have a watchman? Annie had lived in the Scarlet King compound for a whole week and been unaware of this interesting fact about her neighbors.
    “I didn’t see Mr. Burger,” Laurel added.
    “You didn’t miss much.” Annie brushed away an invisible cloud of no-see-ums and thought irritably that enough was enough with the screwy weather. They shouldn’t have to put up with gnats in February! “He’s loud, vulgar, overbearing, and thinks he’s God’s gift to women.”
    “Vulgar,” Laurel repeated. “No, no.”
    “Oh yes he is,” Annie insisted.
    “I’m sure,” Laurel said brightly, leaving Annie confused. “Such variety. That next house?” she asked. Her tone indicated disbelief.
    Annie grinned. “The architect must have grown up in a modern tract house and been reacting against it ever since. Have you ever
seen
more gingerbread?”
    “Only dear Hansel and Gretel,” Laurel said cheerfully.
    “The oddest part is that the owner isn’t a Mother Earth nut or an old lady. It belongs to a dentist, George Graham, a
GQ
yuppie.”
    “Not
a dentist, thank heaven.”
    Annie ignored this comment. Laurel really wasn’t making sense tonight.
    “A yuppie,” she said firmly. “Fortyish, blandly handsome. The toothpaste ad type.”
    “So apropos,” Laurel observed. “You are so descriptive, Annie.”
    Annie ignored that comment, too, and continued doggedly. “Drives a Mercedes, of course. Plays tennis. Jogs. And has a young, second wife, Lisa. And a teenage son, Joel. He drives a jeep.” Annie didn’t add that Joel paid a little too much attention when she jogged by their house. She enjoyed admiring glances; she didn’t enjoy lascivious looks. “Lisa drives a Mercedes, too. And plays tennis and jogs.” Annie tried not to sound tart, but she had a natural sympathy for first wives. Though certainly Agatha Christie was a prime example of how betrayal in a first marriage, though heartbreaking at the time, could lead, ultimately, to a second, much happier union. Perhaps the first Mrs. Graham was