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  Delyth edged closer. She couldn’t make out Zad’s expression or hear what he said, but whatever it was it stoked Jerzy’s fury. “Didn’t you hear me?” When Zad stood mute, he roared, “What’re you going to do about it?” He grabbed Zad by the back of the neck and propelled him from the doorway and down the front path. Zad stumbled. Jerzy rushed to stand over him. “You’re going to have to do something about your dog or I will.”

  A black Rottweiler—the dog Jerzy had just threatened?—charged from the house and playfully jumped around her fallen master, wanting to join in the game.

  Zad took advantage of the distraction to stand. Crouching into an exaggerated martial-arts stance, he weaved from side to side, and waved his arms in front of him like a snake charmer. “Of all people, you should know not to threaten me,” he hissed. “I know how to defend myself.” For a moment they circled each other like roosters, then Jerzy straightened to his full height and slugged Ajnabee between the chest and right shoulder, yelling, “Don’t give me that crap, you fag!”

  The blow seemed to leave Zad more startled than hurt. He responded with a swing at Jerzy’s midsection. Jerzy caved inward with the fist, lessening its effect. He grabbed Zad’s extended arm and pulled, sending them both sprawling to the ground. Jerzy, with a considerable weight advantage, easily rolled on top and pinned Zad’s arms.

  The dog, at last registering the threat, stood over them growling, ears forward, tail down.

  Jerzy screamed in Zad’s face, “I’ll kill the bitch if she comes near me.”

  The dog responded by charging at Jerzy. Although its teeth were bared, it didn’t seem to try to bite; rather, it crashed into him, knocking him off balance and off Zad.

  Zad sprang up with more agility than Delyth would’ve expected. He backed toward the door. “You won’t get away with this.” Reaching behind himself to open the door he called, ”Yagi, come.”

  After a moment of hesitation, the dog followed him into the house.

  “You hear me? You won’t get away with this,” Zad shrieked and slammed the door.

  Jerzy rushed up and began banging on the door. “Get back out here, you little bastard,”

  “I’m calling the police,” Zad shouted back.

  At that moment a horn sounded. A silver DeLorean like the one in Back To The Future was sitting behind her car. On the driver’s side, the gull-wing door stood open, looking like a raptor’s head arching to spot its prey. The driver was standing beside it. He was tall and, even from a distance, Delyth could tell he was athletically built. She turned, waved an apology and jogged to move her car. The driver jumped into his. The gull-wing flapped closed.

  Delyth debated whether she should pull to the side and stay to watch more, but there was no story here, just behavior she found intriguing and baffling. She had the Board of Education meeting and obits waiting for her back at the office. She decided to drive on.

  Early April

  TWO

  Helen Terfel had started going to a Saturday morning yoga class with Delyth soon after they’d met or, more accurately, soon after they realized they’d become friends. It was a surprising friendship for Helen, so late in life and with a woman half her age. Just four months earlier, Helen’s chocolate lab, Coco Chanel, had sniffed out trouble and dragged her to a neighbor’s body lying facedown, halfway in a garden shed. Helen and Delyth each had her own motive to get involved—Helen to prove an ex-student innocent, Delyth to kick start her career—but they soon responded to the same allure: the excitement of discovering who’d done it. At least that was how Helen saw it. She’d never questioned Delyth to find out if she agreed.

  As usual, they arrived at class separately. Delyth’s purple yoga leggings and blue top accented her blond hair and revealed a boyish figure. Helen, who had thirty years and fifty pounds on her, stuck with the loosest black yoga pants she could find. They also matched her hair, although it was more a matter of the hair having been dyed the same color as the pants.

  Most days Helen was the oldest person in the intermediate class where she knew the names of the poses, and Delyth could do them. In the two months she’d been going Helen watched women her age try a class or two then not return, scared off by the lithe bodies that so easily contorted trunk and limbs into serene poses—at least that was what she assumed. But she persevered, staying in the back and trying to smile when the instructor gently pressed on her back during the downward dog. Even so, she’d come to look forward to the incongruous combination of grass-scented soy candles and old gym socks that permeated the studio.

  After an hour, the instructor, Lekshana, her long blond hair belying her name, announced shavasana, the death pose, Helen’s favorite. Lying on her back, her arms and legs spread, her eyes closed, Helen tried to follow Lekshana’s gentle exhortations: “Focus on your belly rising and falling with each breath.” After allowing for a few conscious breaths, Lekshana purred, “Notice your toes. Release any tension you feel in your toes.” She proceeded up the body “from toes to nose,” as Helen described it to her husband, Frank, although Lekshana never really mentioned relaxing the nose.

  That morning Helen couldn’t keep her mind from straying to thoughts of the conversation she wanted to have with Delyth over a coffee and muffin after the class. Even when Lekshana murmured, “If you notice your thoughts beginning to take over, don't be hard on yourself. Notice them, then let them go like leaves floating down a river.”

  When Lekshana at last released them, others were still in the middle of their namastes, as Helen was already rolling up her mat.

  Delyth, who preferred the front row, came up and smiled. “Someone’s hungry.”

  Helen took Delyth’s arm in an asana-killing grip and guided her to where they’d stored their shoes. “I think I’m going to retire.”

  “Not from yoga? I thought you liked it.”

  “No, from teaching.”

  “Lucky you.”

  Bending over to tie her shoes took Helen’s breath away for a second. When she could, she asked, “Why am I lucky?”

  “You’ll get to do what you want.”

  Lekshana was standing by the door thanking everyone and creating a bottleneck.

  Finally outside, Helen returned to their conversation. “That’s the problem. I don’t know what I want to do.”

  They crossed the foyer to the coffee shop.

  “Then don’t retire.” Delyth held the door.

  They were interrupted by ordering drinks, then an ex-student came up to say hello to Helen and show off her new baby, who babbled happily in a stroller. Helen was in the middle of cooing at the child and complimenting the mother for regaining her figure so quickly, when the barista called her name. Carrying both drinks, she joined Delyth at a table flooded with sunlight streaming through the window.

  “Sorry about that,” Helen said.

  “I’m used to it,” Delyth said with a smile. “You know everyone in the town.”

  “Hardly.” Helen pulled a small portion off their shared muffin.

  “So, a bad week?”

  “Yes. Why do you ask?”

  “Whenever you talk about retiring, it usually means you’re pissed at something the new principal did.”

  “You’re right, but I don’t want to talk about it.” She broke off more muffin, then asked, “How’s Detective Griffin?”

  “Josh? He’s fine. He’s the happiest man I know. Always whistling and smiling and driving me nuts.”

  “Amazing given all the evil he sees in his job. Homicide detectives must deal with the very worst of humanity.”

  “He manages to maintain a clinical approach, as detached as a surgeon cutting out a tumor.”

  Helen nodded, although she couldn’t understand how anyone could be unaffected by murder. “And you two? Things fine between you?”

  Delyth crinkled her nose.

  “Okay,” Helen said. “I’ll let you have your privacy to work it out yourself.” She took a long sip of latte. “It’s strange how a person�
��s good traits can be the very ones that drive you crazy,” she said as if thinking aloud.

  “Problems with Frank?”

  “Frank? Dear me, no. He’s a little remote lately, but he always gets that way when he’s trying to decide on a new art project. He’s convinced he needs something big, something more of a statement. He just can’t figure out what that something should be.” She reached for more muffin, but stopped herself, fearing she’d already taken more than her share. With her hand safely back holding her cup, she went on, “I was actually thinking about Linda. You remember, she used to be my principal. I hated it whenever she handed out some ridiculous directive that’d come down from on high, and she’d say, ‘You don’t have to worry about that, my dear.’ Why bother handing it out if she didn’t plan on implementing it? Now I see she was abiding by the letter of the law in a way that shielded us from a lot of bureaucratic idiocy.”

  Delyth waited to let Helen go on. When she didn’t, Delyth asked, “How’s she doing?”

  “Linda? It’s difficult. Her husband’s Alzheimer’s is progressing faster than they’d expected. She hopes the new medication will help.”

  “Do you think she’ll come back when…”

  Helen understood and shook her head. “I doubt it. The board was overjoyed to be able to replace her with someone more to their liking. They’re not about to give the boot to Ms. Jennifer to make room.” She tried to keep her voice neutral when referring to her current principal.

  She mustn’t have succeeded because Delyth asked, “What’d she do now?”

  “I really don’t want to talk about it.” She drained her cup. “You know? I think I’ll have another. You want one?”

  “Living dangerously, I see. It really must have been a bad week.” She stood. “Let me get it. Do you want to make it decaf?”

  “No. Full octane, please.”

  While Delyth was gone, Helen sat brooding about school. She’d been teaching for thirty years. Jennifer had never even had a regular classroom of her own. Yet she was constantly asking Helen—no, telling Helen—to do things that were just plain wrong for the age group, based on curriculum changes that weren’t designed by actual teachers. Always pushing technology at the expense of language development, social skills, problem-solving. Frank said Helen shouldn’t let it get to her. “She’s the new cat in the neighborhood and she has to mark her territory.” It didn’t help. Perhaps Helen was getting too old for teaching.

  When Delyth returned, Helen said, “The problem is, I don’t know what I want to do if I retire. My soul will literally shrivel and die if all I have to fill my days is cooking classes and tango lessons.”

  “You could travel.”

  “I can’t drag Frank away from his studio and his art. I wouldn’t want to.” She looked down at her new latte. “Didn’t you want one?”

  “I’ve reached my limit.”

  “Oh. Well then, thank you.” She took a gulp then wiped the white foam from her lips. “It’s truly unfortunate that Sullyton isn’t the sort of place where murders happen on a regular basis.” She looked around quickly. “I guess I shouldn't say that in public.”

  Delyth laughed. “At least keep your voice down.”

  “It’s interesting murders we lack.” Helen enjoyed being a little outrageous with one of the few people who’d understand. There was always Frank, of course, but she suspected he sometimes tired of the game. “Take that man, Meherzad Ajnabee, who got killed last week. With a name like that, you’d expect his murder to be exotic and complex. Instead the police say it was just another drug-related execution; they suspect a rival gang.”

  It would have been a blip on the local news, except California had just legalized marijuana and the murder provided a lead-in to a story about competing cartels in Colorado shipping illegally grown weed to other states.

  “Most murders are pretty cut and dry,” Delyth said. “Either creepy or sad, but not very interesting. That’s why the police tend toward the usual suspects and the obvious solution.”

  It could have been the caffeine kicking in, but Helen jumped on a subtext she heard, or imagined in Delyth’s response. “Do you think there could be something more to Ajnabee’s murder? Maybe it wasn’t about the drugs?”

  “They found a sophisticated marijuana growing operation in his garage, but all the equipment had been destroyed and the plants pulled out. That points to drugs being at the bottom of it.”

  “I guess you’re right, although I can’t imagine cartels in Sullyton, much less a drug war. Of course, I learned recently that not everything in my small town is what it seems. The murderer could be a friend or one of his neighbors.” Then, remembering that the police at first arrested an innocent neighbor and ex-student of hers for the murder of Cécile DuQuenne when it turned out the woman’s brother had done it, she added, “Or maybe another vengeful relative, like Cheyne.”

  “You know, I actually interviewed one of Ajnabee’s neighbors for an article about family farms. Jerzy Dudda and—”

  “And Karen.”

  “Oh my God. You know them too.”

  Helen had learned to ignore Delyth’s teasing on the subject. “I don’t remember seeing them in your article.”

  “You read that?”

  “Of course I did.” In fact, Helen read all of Delyth’s articles she could find, even searching for those published before they’d become friends. She didn’t want to admit it in case it made her seem like a stalker.

  “That was months ago and you still remember the Duddas weren’t in it?”

  “I’d remember if Karen was mentioned. She’s a Bailey.” To Delyth’s quizzical look, she explained, “The family’s been around for a long time. Her grandfather, Ethan Bailey, started the little church in the center of town.” She knew Delyth enjoyed good gossip, and living so long in a small town Helen knew a lot of it. She went into storytelling mode like she’d do on rainy days when her class was getting restless. “He chose a religious path later in life, something like a modern-day Buddha. Right after the Second World War, he began going on trips by himself, trips he called pilgrimages. At first he was gone for a day, then a weekend, then a week at a time. One trip he was gone for three months. When he got back, he said God had called him to preach. He sold some of his land to build the church and moved into town, leaving his teenage son to manage the farm. That son was Karen’s father. He remained yoked to the land like a horse to a plow until the day he died, when Jerzy took his place in the harness.”

  “How do you know all this stuff?”

  “One hears things. Especially in the teachers’ break room. Teachers learn all sorts of family secrets. Not that they're supposed to be talking about any of it. Which I guess I just did.” She didn’t feel the least bit guilty about it, but she liked admitting to her own ethical inconsistencies. “I don’t know much. I’ve heard people describe Karen’s husband as a bad boy who was saved by the pastor's granddaughter.”

  “I'm not so sure about that. She seemed to enjoy his going off to beat up Ajnabee.”

  “He what?”

  “Like I said, I went out to interview them for the article. Suddenly their little daughter comes in crying because one of their cats was killed. Her father gets it into his head that Ajnabee’s dog did it, even though the mother says there was no proof. Didn’t matter. Jerzy stalks off to confront the guy and ends up wrestling him to the ground.”

  “Did Ajnabee press charges?”

  “My guess is he didn’t want the police snooping around his marijuana operation.”

  “So you’re saying Jerzy committed murder because of a dead cat?”

  “I doubt it. The fight was months ago, and the cat was just one of the strays they feed. I can't see the connection. Not even someone with anger management issues, like Jerzy seemed to have, would kill over that.”

  “Just because the connection isn't obvious at first is more reason to investigate it. Especially since the police are already convinced it was about drugs. I don’t have t
o remind you how single-minded they can be once they get a suspect in their sights. They arrested poor Mikey for the old woman’s murder and didn’t bother to pursue other evidence.”

  “Give Josh a break. He was following up on other leads.”

  “Until you pointed him in the right direction.” Although Delyth quickly looked down, Helen caught a brief smile. “Maybe he needs us to help him out again.”

  “I don’t even know if he’s in charge of the investigation. You know how close-mouthed he is about his work. And you forget. I’m no longer the crime reporter.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “Miss what?”

  “Being the crime reporter.”

  “Not really. It offered more opportunity to ask tough questions, but the banality of most crimes left little to ask about. Though I have to admit, it was more fun than writing obits and weather reports.”

  “Come on. That’s not all you write. Your series about the impact of charter schools on the public school system was really interesting.”

  “Thanks.” Delyth poked at the muffin crumbs on the plate between them. “Ted encourages us to follow up on different stories, but I have to be careful about crime. Vickie Sullivan is being very territorial since she came back from maternity leave. Maybe it’s a new mother thing.”

  “She’s just jealous of the splash you made on the DuQuenne case, afraid you’ll take over her job”