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hated by teenagers because it reminded both of the same time, seen through different lenses and distorted by different memories.
    To her left, in the living room, she saw Mary Riggins and Scott West—the boyfriend—perched on the edge of a sofa. Scott had his arm loosely draped around Mary’s shoulders and gripped her hand. Cigarettes burned in an ashtray on a coffee table. Cans of soda and half-empty cups of coffee crowded the tabletop. Poised uncomfortably to the side were two uniformed officers. One was the late-night shift sergeant and the other was a twenty-two-year-old rookie who’d been on the force for only a month. Clearly the sergeant was still engaged in the breaking-in process for the younger man. She nodded in their direction, caught a slight roll of the eyes from the sergeant just as Mary Riggins burst out in a howl: “She’s done it again, detective.”
    These words ended in a torrent of sobs.
    She had been crying and her makeup was streaked, black lines scarring her cheeks, giving her a Halloween appearance. Crying had turned her eyes puffy, making her look far older than she was. Terri thought that tears were always difficult for middle-aged women—they instantly brought out all the years they tried so hard to hide.
    Instead of launching into any further explanation, Mary Riggins buried her head into Scott the boyfriend’s shoulder. He was a little older than she was, gray-haired, distinguished looking even in jeans and faded red-checked work shirt. He was a new age therapist who specialized in holistic treatments for any number of psychiatric illnesses and had a successful practice in the academic community, which was always receptive to different techniques in the same way that some people flit from diet to diet. He drove a bright red drop-top Mazda sports car and often cruised around the valley in the winter with the car open, bundled in a parka and lumberjacks floppy fur hat, which seemed more than merely eccentric and had a sense of defiance to it. The town police were very familiar with Scott West and his work; he and the Mazda collected speeding tickets with daunting frequency, and on more than one occasion the police had been forced to quietly clean up psychological messes created by his eccentric practice. Several suicides. A standoff with a knife-wielding paranoid schizophrenic he’d advised to stop taking Haldol and exchange it with Saint John’s wort purchased from the local health food store.
    The cigarettes and soda cans and coffee cups shouldn’t be there, Terri thought. Scott came from the yoga-Pilates traditions that considered a Diet Coke or a Starbucks latte a sign of disconnect with the greater deep benign forces of nature. Terri thought his attitudes had more in common with astrology than psychology.
    If she could have, she would have laughed at him and said something about the addictive powers of hypocrisy. But she had learned early in her police career that there was no end to the many contradictions people clutched in their lives, and pointing them out rarely did anyone any good. Terri liked to think of herself as a cold-eyed pragmatist, reasoned and ordered in her thinking, straightforward in her approach. If this style occasionally made her appear unfriendly, well, that was okay with her. She had already had her fill of passion and eccentricity and madness in her own life in years gone by, and order and process was what she preferred, because, she thought, it kept her safe.
    Scott leaned forward. He spoke in a practiced, therapist’s voice, deep, calm, and reasonable. It was a voice designed to make him seem like her ally in the situation, when Terri knew the opposite was much closer to the truth.
    “Mary’s very upset, detective. Despite all our efforts, on a nearly continual basis…” He stopped there, refusing to complete the sentence.
    Terri nodded. She turned to the two uniformed officers. The sergeant handed her a piece of loose-leaf ruled notepaper, the sort