I was a bit early, so I took the time to look around at my new neighborhood. The corner house, to the right of Jane’s as I faced it, had beautiful big climbing rosebushes round the front porch. The one to the left had had a lot added on, so that the original simple lines of the house were obscured. It had been bricked in, a garage with an apartment on top had been connected to the house by a roofed walk, a deck had been tacked on the back. The result was not happy. The last house on the street was next to that, and I remembered that the newspaper editor, Macon Turner, who had once dated my mother, lived there. The house directly across the street from Jane’s, a pretty little house with canary yellow shutters, had a realtor’s sign up with a big red SOLD slapped across it. The corner house on that side of the street was the one Melanie Clark, another member of the defunct Real Murders club, had rented for a while: now a Big Wheel parked in the driveway indicated children on the premises. One house took up the last two lots on that side, a rather dilapidated place with only one tree in a large yard. It sat blankfaced, the yellowing shades pulled down. A wheelchair ramp had been built on.

At this hour on a summer morning, the quiet was peaceful. But, behind the houses on Jane’s side of the street, there was the large parking lot for the junior high school, with the school’s own high fence keeping trash from being pitched in Jane’s yard and students from using it as a shortcut. I was sure there would be more noise during the school year, but now that parking lot sat empty. By and by, a woman from the corner house on the other side of the street started up a lawn mower and that wonderful summer sound made me feel relaxed.

You planned for this, Jane, I thought. You wanted me to go in your house. You know me and you picked me for this.