Ella made a face. “She likes you fine.” Ella made another face. “She just thinks you’re a little … well … you know … strange…”

I didn’t want to hurt Ella’s feelings – after all, she is related to them – so I didn’t say that I, personally, think both Mrs and Mr Gerard are strange. They’re so perfect they might be aliens masquerading in human form.

“And she worries that I don’t see as much of my old friends – you know, since you and I started hanging out.”

Ella’s “old friends”, such as they’d been, were Carla Santini. Carla and Ella – and all Carla’s crowd – live in Woodford. Woodford is a “private community” – it says so outside the electric security gate. Woodford has mega-expensive houses, rolling lawns, shady streets, and its own leisure centre. I’d never even heard of a “private community” before I moved to Deadwood. A “private community” means you aren’t supposed to go there unless you live there, are visiting someone by invitation, or are delivering something to someone who does live there, and that there’s a guard at the gate to make sure that all riff-raff is kept beyond the fortress walls. According to Ella, she and Carla were pretty close in elementary and middle school – when they took dance and music lessons together and went to each other’s parties – but that all changed when they hit high school. It was then that Carla began to blossom and Ella didn’t. Carla more or less dumped the quiet and slightly dull Ella and started gathering a more glamorous retinue around her. They were still friendly, of course, as girls whose parents play bridge and tennis and golf together would be, but they weren’t exactly twin souls. How could they be? Carla doesn’t have a soul.

“Pardon me, Ms Gerard,” I said, in a fruity English accent, “but I thought you said that you hardly ever saw Carla. I thought you said that you’d drifted apart.”