“She was very willful. She wouldn’t let Mrs. Castle and me do everything.”

I thought we had barely begun, but after placing the thin red ribbon on the current page, Detective Broumas closed his notebook. He visibly relaxed, waving a sort of postural off-duty flag.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” he said.

“Can I see her?”

Detective Broumas stood. I stayed in the model’s chair.

“Tomorrow, after the autopsy,” he said. “What’s this like?” He gestured to indicate the room.

“What’s what like?” I asked.

“Doing what you do for a living?” His smile came easily. I hated it. I hated it because I could not tell him to fuck off, because I knew the kind of interest he had. There was sincere and there was prurient.

“Like any other job, but that much more exposed,” I said.

He chuckled to himself and stepped off the platform. I took this as my cue that I could stand.

“We have a few people we still haven’t tracked down who we want to talk to. Neighbors at work, that sort of thing.” He took his jacket off the easel and slipped it on. “There are fingerprints and a footprint to run. We found a small bit of blood on the side porch. It could be your mother’s. Her body had been moved.”

I stepped down from the platform. I felt myself floating.

I pictured myself nude and curled up in the bathtub of my father’s workshop. The tools and hooks that had fallen from the walls were sticking halfway out of my bloodless flesh.

Coldness kills. I saw it as an entry in Jake’s journal, scribbled in his hurried hand. I thought of my mother leaning out my bedroom window when I was a teenager, to braid and rebraid the vine outside. Protecting me from Mr. Leverton had seemed so crucial to her that she had regularly risked falling from the second story of her home. Why hadn’t she been frightened? Had she loved me that much or had it had nothing to do with me? Had my birth merely created an extension of her fear?

The uniformed police officer opened the door.

“I’ll let you get back to your friend and your husband. Oh,” Detective Broumas said, “I’m sorry. Your ex-husband, correct?”

I nodded my head. I had gotten down off the platform only to find myself desperately in need of a chair. I leaned, as nonchalantly as I could, into the carpeted edge of the platform.

“Yes.”

“And how long have you two been divorced?”

“More than twenty years,” I said.

“That’s a long time.”

“We have two daughters.”

“You’re close enough that he would come and repair your mother’s window.”

“Yes.”

“All the way from Santa Barbara?”

“Actually,” I said, “he’s in town to meet his-”

Detective Broumas cut me off. “Yes, yes, he gave me a name. Let’s go, Charlie.”

I stood then and walked toward the door. I thought of the game of shadow the girls had played when they were small, in which one of them walked right behind the other, turning left when the other turned, leaning right when the other leaned, so that the one in front could never see the shadow girl.

I could see Natalie and Jake talking in the room opposite. Both of them had taken seats in the front row of what was a more traditional classroom used for art history and Western thought classes. The desk part of the molded chairs was a light lemon yellow and curved around their bodies.

I saw the policemen walking down the hallway, Detective Broumas slightly behind the two uniformed officers. He was talking on his cell phone. I heard him say “hair ribbon” to someone in a directive tone and then the word “braid.”

Jake, who was facing toward the door, spied me first.

Natalie turned awkwardly around in the school chair and looked at me. “I don’t even know who you are sometimes,” she said.

I felt my stomach drop. I started to speak but then saw Jake vigorously shaking his head side to side and mouthing, No.

There was only one other thing Natalie could be referring to. Why would he have told her?

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You’ve known him since he was a baby.”

This didn’t matter to me. Plenty of fifty-year-old men slept with thirty-year-old women, and I was certain that among their number were those who had known their conquests as infants. Unfortunately the only person I could think of just then was John Ruskin and a ten-year-old named Rose la Touche.

“It was mutual,” I said.

“Jesus,” Natalie spat out. She looked away from me and toward the blackboard. I followed her glance. One of the students had taken advantage of an emptying classroom to draw a giant penis on the board. The caricature fellating it looked an awful lot like Tanner.

“You slept with Hamish?” Jake asked, incredulous.

“Last night, in her car,” Natalie said. “I called home to tell him about your mother, and he comes out with that! He says he’s in love with you.”

“Did you tell the police I was with him?” I asked, knowing that it conflicted with what I’d just said.

“That’s what you care about? That’s all you have to say?”

Jake was staring at me now. “You took him to the Limerick spot.” It was not a question.

I nodded my head.

Natalie’s dress, as often happened, had loosened, and the deep overlapping V of the neckline now hung low and open, revealing her bra and her ample cleavage.

In comparison I felt like a twig that could be snapped underfoot-brittle, insubstantial, combustible. Fodder for fire or lust. “There’s an autopsy scheduled for this afternoon,” I said. “She was killed somewhere other than where her body was found.”

Natalie stood. She walked over to me.

I bowed my head, avoiding her gaze.

“I guess I should congratulate him,” she said. “Hamish has wanted a run at you for a long time.”

“And me?” I asked.

“Truth?”

“Yes.”

“I’m tired. I’m tired of living in that stupid house and of this job, and I’m seeing someone.”

“A Downingtown contractor,” I said.

“Of course you don’t approve.”

“I’m not in a position to judge anyone right now,” I said.

Natalie brought her hand up to my cheek. A gesture, I was aware, that Hamish also used. “But you do.”

The three of us left the Art Hut. In my joints I felt the ache of tension-the accruing of the previous night’s deeds with posing and the police questioning. I wanted desperately to go and sit where I had that morning, overlooking the rotten oak tree behind the building.

“Remember my father’s plywood people?” I said to Natalie. We stood in the parking lot. Jake’s red car glistened in the sun.

“Yes.” She had seen them only once, shortly before they’d finally been demolished. Jake had only heard about them.

“They were more real to him than my mother and me.”

“I feel sick looking at you,” she said.

She dug in her shoulder bag for her keys. They were easy to spot. After she had lost them dozens of times, Hamish had presented her with a key chain topped off by a giant red cat.

Jake tried to fill the space. “Sarah is coming on one of her visits today. We won’t have the happiest news to greet her with, I’m afraid.”

He had put his hands in his pockets, which he had always done to keep himself from fidgeting. Out of nowhere I thought of the shirt he was wearing beneath his sweater: “Life is good.”

“I’m headed up to York with my contractor. I’m meeting his mother for the first time,” Natalie said to Jake. She would not look at me. I had suddenly become the unstable one to their upright citizens. Had I killed the only person who, in comparison, made me appear sane?

Moments later I was lying curled up in the backseat of Jake’s car just as I had the night before in my own. Natalie had turned from me with no good-bye.

“Take care,” she said to Jake.

“It was nice to see you again, Natalie.”

“I guess it was,” she said. Jake started the car, and I closed my eyes. I would ride in the back the way I had as a child, with my father driving and no one in the front passenger side. I hadn’t told Natalie about my mother, and now I never would.