After a moment of silence, I turned on my heel and went down the road, all too aware that he was staring after me. I didn't get that uneasy feeling with Deputy Emanuel, that prickling-at-the-back-of-the-neck feeling that some people gave me; the feeling that warned me that something sick and possibly dangerous lurked inside that person's psyche. But after our little conversation I was sure that Marta Schuster was lucky to have the devotion of this man, and I was glad I was not her enemy.

On my way into town, I was thinking hard. Now more than ever, it seemed to me - and I thought that it seemed to Clifton Emanuel, too - there was something phony about the crime scene in the woods. Though Deputy Emanuel had run out of confidence in me before we'd run out of conversation, he too had seemed dubious about the scenario implied by the trappings left at the scene.

At my next job, Camille Emerson's place, I was lucky enough to find the house empty. I was able to keep thinking while I worked.

That implied scenario: though I'd gone over it with Emanuel, I ran it again in my head. Deedra and a flame go out to the woods in Deedra's car. The flame gets Deedra to strip, which she does with abandon, flinging her clothes and jewelry everywhere.

Then a quarrel occurs. Perhaps the man can't perform sexually, and Deedra taunts him (though Emanuel had testimony and I agreed that such taunting was unlike Deedra). Maybe Deedra threatens to tell the flame's wife, mother, or girlfriend that Deedra and the flame are having sex, period. Or possibly the flame is just into rough sex, killing Deedra in a fit of passion. But would that tie in with the catastrophic blow that stopped her heart?

I was so tired of thinking about Deedra by that time that the last explanation tempted me. I didn't want to think Deedra's death was anything more than passion of one kind or another, passion that had gotten fatally out of hand.

But as I finished dusting the "collectibles" on Camille Emerson's living-room shelves. I caught sight of myself in the mantel mirror. I was shaking my head in a sober way, all to myself.

The only injury Deedra had sustained, according to every source, was the killing blow itself. I knew all too well what rough sex was like. It's not one blow or act or bit of brutality, but a whole series of them. The object of this attention doesn't emerge from the sex act with one injury, but a series of injuries. The bottle insertion had happened after Deedra was dead. Therefore, I realized, as I carried a load of dirty towels to the laundry area, that little nasty, contemptuous act was no more than window dressing. Maybe the equivalent of having the last word in a conversation.

That said something about the person who'd performed the insertion, didn't it? I covered my hand with a paper towel and pulled a wad of bubble gum off the baseboard behind the trashcan in the younger Emerson boy's room.

So, we had someone strong, strong enough to kill with one blow. The blow was probably purposeful. Evidently, the person had meant to kill Deedra.

We had someone who despised women. Maybe not all women, but women in some way like Deedra. Promiscuous? Attractive? Young? All of the above?

We had someone who had no regard for human life.

And we had someone clever. When I turned it over in my mind yet again, I could see that the staging was successful if you didn't really know Deedra. Deedra wouldn't throw things around like that, even if she were stripping for someone, which I could very well imagine her doing. Even then, she might sling a blouse, but it would land on something that wouldn't tear or dirty it. She wouldn't toss her pearls around. And the woods... no, she wouldn't do that in the woods! Where was the lap robe or blanket for the lovers to lie on? Why ask Deedra to strip if the goal was a quick screw in the backseat of the car?

I concluded that whoever'd killed Deedra hadn't thought anything at all about her character, had only known facts: that she was promiscuous and biddable. He hadn't thought of her fastidiousness about her surroundings, hadn't thought about her care for her possessions, the care that had never extended to cover her own body.

As I closed the Emersons' door behind me, I realized that now I knew much more than I had this morning. What to do with it, how to make it work for me, was still mysterious. These pieces of knowledge were not evidence to which anyone else would give credence, but at least Clifton Emanuel had listened. I was relieved to know he had been wondering, as I had been, if the whole scene in the woods was a setup.

A setup to serve what purpose?

Okay, the purpose had to be, as the deputy and I had hinted to each other in our conversation, to misdirect. The scene had been staged to make it appear that Deedra had been killed for a sexual reason; therefore, if the scene was false, Deedra had not been killed because she was sexually active.

She had been killed because . .. she worked at the county clerk's office? She was Lacey Dean Knopp's daughter? She was the granddaughter of Joe C Prader? She was easily led and promiscuous, so she was an easy target? I'd hit a mental wall.

It was time to dismiss Deedra from my thoughts for a while. When I was sitting in my kitchen at noon, that was easy.

My house felt empty and bleak without Jack in it. I didn't like that at all. I ate lunch as quickly as I could, imagining him riding back to Little Rock, arriving at his own apartment. He'd return his phone messages, make notes on the case he'd just finished, answer his E-mail.

I missed him. I seemed to need him more than I ought to. Maybe it was because for so long I had done without? Maybe I valued him more deeply because of what I'd gone through all those years ago? I saw Jack's faults; I didn't think he was perfect. And that didn't make a bit of difference. What would I do if something happened to Jack?

This seemed to be a day for questions I couldn't answer.

Chapter Twelve

At karate class that night, I wasn't concentrating, which called down a scolding from Marshall. I was glad we didn't spar, because I would've lost, and I don't like to lose. Janet teased me as I tied my shoes, accusing me of being abstracted because I was pining for Jack. I managed to half-smile at her, though my impulse was to lash out. Allowing thoughts of a man to disrupt something so important to me was ... I subsided suddenly.

It would be quite natural. It would be normal.

But picturing Jack in the shower wasn't what had distracted me. I'd been thinking of Deedra - her face in death, her positioning at the wheel of her red car. I didn't know what I could do to help her. I had done all I could. I finished tying my shoes and sat up, staring across the empty room at Becca, who was laughingly instructing her brother in the correct position of his hands for the sanchin dachi posture. She motioned me to come over and help, but I shook my head and gathered the handles of my gym bag in my fist. I was ready to be by myself.

After I got home I resumed the task of scanning Deedra's tapes, since I had promised Marlon that if I found the one that featured him I would give it to him. I found myself feeling a little sick at the idea of him keeping a video of him having sex with a woman now dead, but it was none of my business what he did with it. I disliked Marlon Schuster, though that was maybe stating my feeling for him too strongly. It was more accurate to say I had no respect for him, which was quite usual for me. I had found nothing in him to like except his tenderness for Deedra. But that was something, and I had made him a promise.

I almost dozed off as I looked at the videos. I found myself looking at things I'd never seen before: talk shows, soap operas, and "reality" shows about ambulance drivers, policemen, wanted criminals, and missing children. After viewing a few tapes I could predict what was coming next, her pattern. It was like an up-ended time capsule for the past couple of weeks in television land. When I'd transferred the videotapes into a box, the most recent ones had ended up on the bottom.

Most of the videos weren't labeled - the ones she'd already watched, I guessed. The labeled ones had abbreviations on them that only gradually began to make sense to me. I discovered that "OLTL" meant One Life to Live and that "C" meant Cops, while "AMW" was America's Most Wanted, and "Op" was Oprah.

After I'd scanned maybe ten of the tapes, I found the one of Marlon and Deedra. I only watched a second of it, enough to confirm the identity of the couple. (That was all Marlon needed, to get a tape of Deedra with another man.) I put the tape aside with a discreet Post-It.

Since I'd started the job, I kept on with it out of sheer doggedness. I was able to weed out one more home movie - Deedra and our mailman, in partial uniform. Disgusting. All the other videos seemed to contain innocuous television programming. When I got to the bottom, I realized that I could match these shows with the synopses in Jack's old magazine. These were things Deedra had taped during the week before she died. There was even an old movie Deedra had taped on Saturday morning at the end of one tape.

Deedra had had at least two tapes with previous Saturday night shows on them in her film library. She'd taped the same pattern of shows each weekend. So where was the tape from last Saturday night? She hadn't died until Sunday; she'd been alive when Marlon had left her Sunday morning, he'd said. Even if I didn't want to believe Marlon, she'd talked to her mother at church, right? So where was the Saturday night tape?

It was probably an unimportant detail, but unimportant details are what make up housecleaning. Those details add up. A shiny sink, a neatly folded towel, a dustless television screen; this is the visible proof that your house has been labored over.

I was beginning to get a rare headache. None of this made sense. I could only be glad I wasn't on the police force. I'd be obliged to listen to men tell me day after day about their little flings with Deedra, their moments of weakness, their infidelities. Surely watching a few seconds of homemade porn was better than that, if I was still obliged to clean up after Deedra in some moral way.

It was a relief when the phone rang.

"Lily!" Carrie said happily.

"Mrs. Dr. Friedrich," I answered.

There was a long pause over the line. "Wow," she breathed. "I just can't get used to it. You think it'll take people a long time to start calling me Dr. Friedrich?"

"Maybe a week."

"Oh boy," she said happily, sounding all of eighteen. "Oh, boy. Hey, how are you? Anything big happen while we were gone?"

"Not too much. How was Hot Springs?"

"Oh ... beautiful," she said, sighing. "I can't believe we have to go to work tomorrow."

I heard a rumble in the background.

"Claude says thanks for standing up for us at the courthouse," Carrie relayed.

"I was glad to do it. Are you at your house?"

"Yes. We'll have to get Claude's things moved soon. I told my parents about an hour ago! They'd given up hope on me, and they just went nuts."

"What do you and Claude need for your wedding present?" I asked.

"Lily, we don't need a thing. We're so old, and we've been set up on our own for so long. There's not a thing we need."

"Okay," I said. "I can see that. What about me cleaning Claude's apartment after he gets his stuff out?"

"Oh, Lily, that would be great! One less thing we have to do."

"Then consider it done."

Carrie was telling Claude what I proposed, and he was objecting.

"Claude says that's too much on you since you clean for a living," Carrie reported.

"Tell Claude to put a sock in it. It's a gift," I said, and Carrie giggled and gave him the message.

"Lily, I'll see you soon," she said. "Oh, Lily, I'm so happy!"

"I'm glad for both of you," I said. Sooner or later, someone would tell Carrie about the fire, and she'd chide me for not telling her myself. But she didn't need to come down from her cloud of happiness and be retroactively worried about me. Tomorrow she'd be back at work and so would Claude. The lives of a doctor and a chief of police are not giddy and irresponsible.

The next morning I found myself wondering why I hadn't heard from Lacey. She'd wanted me to work some more in the apartment. Her marriage crisis must have changed her agenda, and I wasn't surprised. I worked that morning after all. The gap caused by losing Joe C as a client was filled when Mrs. Jepperson's sitter called to ask me to come over.

Mrs. Jepperson was having a lucid day, Laquanda Titchnor told me all too loudly as she let me in. Laquanda, whom I held in low regard, was the woman Mrs. Jepperson's daughter had had to settle for when better aides had all been employed.

Laquanda's greatest virtues were that she showed up on time, stayed as long as she was supposed to, and knew how to dial 911. And she talked to Mrs. Jepperson, rather than just staring at the television silently all day, as I'd seen other babysitters (of both the young and the elderly) do. Laquanda and Birdie Rossiter were sisters under the skin, at least as far as their need to provide commentary every moment of every day.

Today Laquanda had a problem. Her daughter had called from the high school to tell her mother she was throwing up and running a fever.

"I just need you to watch Mrs. Jepperson while I run to get my girl and take her to the doctor," Laquanda told me. She didn't sound very pleased I was there. It was clear to both of us we weren't exactly a mutual admiration society.

"So go," I said. Laquanda waited for me to say something else. When I didn't, she pointed out the list of emergency numbers, grabbed her purse, and hightailed it out the kitchen door. The house was still clean from my last visit, I noticed, after I cast a glance in the master bedroom at the sleeping lady. For something to do, I gave a cursory scrub to the bathroom and kitchen surfaces. Laquanda always did the laundry and dishes (what little there was to do) in between monologues, and Mrs. Jepperson was bedridden and didn't have much occasion to litter the house. Her family visited every day, either her daughter, her son, their spouses, or any of the eight grandchildren. There were great-grandchildren, too, maybe three or four.