Ren went to the chest of drawers under the window. She pulled out the top one. It had a handful of pastel cotton multi-pack panties. Ren smiled. One of her friends called them darkroom panties; things would only develop if the lights were out. Every woman had a couple, but they didn’t make up their entire underwear collection. The next drawer down had bras – big, plain and seamless sporties or minimizers. My head would fit in one cup. You go, girl. The rest of the drawers were filled with neatly folded T-shirts and shirts from Gap and J. Crew.
Jean’s office was like a preserved room on a historic tour, but without the human touches of a cup or a pair of folded glasses or a diagonal pen. Everything was laid straight. There was no sense of interruption. Her laptop had already been taken away, so there were no files to go through, except the paper ones, organized perfectly in the cabinets behind the desk. A phone charger was plugged in with the lead wrapped around it.
All over the house, there was sad, unfinished business: leftovers of salad wrapped on a shelf in the refrigerator, sticks of carrots and celery, a hand-washed sweater lying flat on a dryer, a pile of photographs. Ren flicked through them – they were from inside the house. She looked around and could see everything in the photographs, wide shots, macros, with flash, without. Jean Transom was testing a new camera and a new printer. A house and its contents suspended, waiting to strike up again when the right person came through the door.
Ren looked at the family photos on the wall; Jean and Patrick Transom, his wife, their children. And no shadows in the background.
‘Hey,’ said Ren, walking toward the next-door garden. An older woman was backing down the path, bent forward, dragging a rug, giving it an emergency shake-out. She was wearing red oversized pajamas and giant silver snow boots. A cigarette was gripped tightly in her mouth at a ninety-degree angle.
She turned to Ren and rolled her eyes. Ren looked down at the rug.
‘Ooh, sick dog,’ said Ren.
The woman nodded, stood up and pulled out the cigarette. ‘Why do you think I’ve got this under my nose. Whooo.’ She batted her hand in front of her face. ‘Stay back,’ she said. ‘This shit is some age-old curse coming back to wreak vengeance on the world.’
Ren laughed. And stayed back, watching the woman from Jean’s drive. People unde restimated how much neighbors noticed. They had quiet, familiar eyes. Depending on what they thought of you, they could store a massive amount of accurate details about you, or they could process it all through a filter of distorting emotions – dislike, bitterness, jealousy, lust, love, hatred, mistrust. One person’s hot neighbor was another person’s freak. Or to a third person – both. Ren talked to neighbors from the neck up, distracting them from the hand she was shoving through their belly to wrench out their gut for inspection. There was no face value with neighbors.
‘Seriously,’ said the woman, pulling a black garbage bag from the waistband of her pants, ‘let me wrap this up tight and I’m all yours. I presume you’re with the FBI.’
‘Yes, ma’am. My name is Ren Bryce.’
‘Well, I’m Margaret Shaw and I clean up more shit than you ever will.’ She laughed and pushed the cigarette back between her lips. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’m done.’ She had washed her hands under an icy outside tap.
‘Margaret, I’m investigating Jean Transom’s death,’ said Ren. ‘And I’d just like to talk to you a little about her.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘What was Jean like?’
Margaret shrugged. ‘That’s a good question.’ She nodded her appreciation.
‘Right … is it a question you’d like to answer?’
‘Ha. Sure. “I don’t know,” is the answer.’
‘OK,’ said Ren. ‘Why is that?’
‘She’s the stereotypical quiet neighbor you hear talked about on the news. I’m wondering should we all be noisy so we won’t get killed?’
‘You could be on to something,’ said Ren.
‘I didn’t even know Jean was an FBI agent ’til I saw it on the news. I thought she was a forest ranger with her clear skin and those tan pants of hers.’ She looked Ren up and down. ‘You don’t look like one either. You could be …’
Don’t say anything that will scar me.
‘… well, you have those eyes, so …’
Don’t say squaw.
‘… one of those Disney on Ice people.’
Original.
‘My son used to be the letter D in Disneyland Paris,’ said Margaret. ‘The ones that dance in the parade. He was dating Y …’ Margaret’s face said she wasn’t impressed with Y.
‘Hmm,’ said Ren. ‘Interesting that Y picked one of the only letters there were two of. And don’t tell me – one day she made the mistake of going with the wrong D.’
‘Or did she? Did she make a mistake – that’s what I said to him.’
‘But the … suit,’ said Ren. ‘Didn’t that … like, didn’t she notice, after the suit came off?’
‘He said they didn’t always take them off … sometimes they worked around them.’
Ren was stilled with mental images.
‘Anyway,’ said Margaret. ‘He’s Pinocchio now.’ She paused. ‘My guess is he’ll need to do a lot of lying to keep that Y bitch happy.’
‘And I thought it was the truth that hurts.’
Margaret slapped Ren’s forearm and let out a dirty, smoky laugh. ‘Good for you,’ she said. ‘I like your style. I’ve decided not to bullshit you about Jean now.’ She laughed more.
‘Well, I appreciate it,’ said Ren. ‘So, back to business …’
‘OK. Lowdown is as follows: Jean was private. Hello, goodbye, good weather, bad. I had no keys to her house. None of the neighbors did. She was quiet and a subdued kind of friendly. She ran in the morning … like she was being chased by the devil. She went to work early, she came home six, seven, seven thirty … I could hear the TV at night. She looked after her cat.’ Margaret paused. ‘I guess she was one of the millions of women in the world who do exactly the same.’
Ren was nodding her head without raising it from her notebook.
‘Now, that’s how come I’m telling you all this,’ said Margaret, ‘so the scene is set.’
Ren looked up, frowning. ‘OK …’
‘Well – and this could be absolutely nothing – in the last few months, she had a visitor, a very attractive woman, must have been in her mid-to-late twenties.’
‘Was she … a friend, a relative?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Did Jean mention her name to you, or did you see them greeting each other, saying goodbye at the door, the car, anything like that?’
‘I saw her arrive, this young woman, with maybe a bag of something from the store. And I would