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wall, fenced-in by spiked gates like those at Dracula's castle. It only added to the eccentricity of the place, as though we should all know that graveyards are only a kind of playground where you ate franks and beans and ran into ghosts with willow swatches. Crummler kept waving and waving, both arms in the air as if he was guiding planes to safe landings. He laughed and called out more of his Crummler talk, frantic and hysterical and filled with meanings I would never understand.
    I hoped.

FOUR
     
    It began snowing again as I drove back to Anna's. The wind rose to beat and twine the wafting flakes into spiraling sheets around the van. An odd mood descended, partly darkened by recalling murder yet buoyed by meeting Katie, and this time I got to do it without the foam cakes.
    I got out of the van feeling like one of those skaters in a glass globe, the world shaken up stuck behind transparent walls. Stasis, for the moment, but something would give soon. The spot where Richie Harraday had died on the lawn had already been covered with fresh snow. I clopped slush off my shoes, and walked into the foyer. Anubis snapped forward growling until he recognized me, then settled back on his haunches at Anna's side, mildly perturbed. My grandmother put Agatha Christie's final novel, Sleeping Murder , on her reading stand and grimaced sadly at me.
    "Uh-oh," I said.
    Her lips were thin, like my father's had been, and smoothed out thinner still. "You were right, Jonathan. It doesn't pay to be too pushy with our local constabulary."
    "And just what does that mean?"
    "I may have already committed the first faux pas of this case."
    I couldn't stand it when she called our— experiences or whatever the hell they were—cases. They weren't cases. A case was what you put suits in, or books. It was twenty-four beers packed into cardboard. It's what lawyers take to make money, and what prosecutors fail at too often. But for those exceptions, I didn't want to think that cases have anything to do with me.
    "What happened, Anna?"
    "I held off from immediately phoning the morgue. Instead, I spent the afternoon reading until a few minutes ago when I called Wallace and inquired into what progress had been made in determining Harraday's death."
    "And?"
    "And although I'm certain Wallace doesn't have any reservations with sharing his findings, I believe he's under direct orders from the sheriff not to confer with me about this case."
    "It's not a case. Did he offer any information?"
    "No," she sighed, rubbing her hands together. The sunlight behind her snapped brilliantly against the snow and caught in her silver hair. "But he did tell me that Broghin is at this moment on his way here to talk to you."
    "To me?" That one tagged me hard. "Why?"
    "I'm not certain, but Wallace claims that Broghin is in, quote, a sour enough mood to piss lemonade, unquote."
    "Oh, that's just terrific." I had a feeling I was going to be heading to jail again soon.
    "He has a flair for capturing the spirit of the sheriff, our Keaton Wallace does. I believe we may have to continue mending a few pickets on those neighborly fences."
    "But what did I do?"
    No point in asking; there didn't have to be a particular reason behind Broghin pissing lemonade or wanting to heave me off a bridge. I'd known him my whole life, but the first time we ran into each other in a collision-course was a week after my parents died in a car accident out at the Turnpike, on their way to visit me during my senior year at New York University. Anna had gone along; on the day I nearly cracked Broghin's skull, she was still in a coma, her spine having been crushed in the wreck.
    I was as alone in my life at that moment as I can imagine myself ever being.
    Broghin didn't take kindly to my pestering him during his investigation of the accident, and took even less kindly to my hurling his desk chair at him when he wrote the crash off as Dad's fault, claiming the autopsy had found enough liquor in my father's