“Just tell me again how you happened to find her,” Marta Schuster said, leaving her brother to fend for himself. She looked sideways at her deputy. He nodded. They seemed to be good at nonverbal communication. She addressed me again. “Then you can go, long as we know where to reach you.”

I gave her the Joe-Friday facts: Mrs. Rossiter’s phone number, my cell phone number, my home phone number, and where I’d be working this afternoon if I ever got to leave this stretch of road.

“And you knew the deceased how?” she asked again, as if that was a point she hadn’t quite gotten straight in her head.

“I cleaned her place. I live next to her apartment building,” I said.

“How long had you worked for Deedra?”

The tall deputy had gone down the path with a camera after making sure that Marlon was off his tear. The sheriff’s brother had recovered enough to haul himself up to the hood of his Subaru. He was sprawled over it, weeping, his head buried in his hands. His sister completely ignored him, though he was making a considerable amount of noise.

Two more deputies arrived in another squad car and emerged with rolls of crime-scene tape, and Marta Schuster interrupted me to give them directions.

“I worked for Deedra-though I’m sure her mother subsidized her-for over three years,” I said, when the sheriff turned her attention back to me. “I cleaned Deedra’s apartment once a week.”

“So, you were friendly with her?”

“No.” That didn’t require any thought.

“Yet you knew her for more than three years,” Marta Schuster observed, pretending to be surprised.

I shrugged. “She was most often gone to work while I was at her place.” Though sometimes she was still there; and sometimes the men would still be there, but the sheriff hadn’t asked me about the men. She would, though.