She returned to the front door and tried it gently, somewhat relieved to find it locked. Then stepped back onto the path and took the whole house in again. There was no one at the windows, no sense of movement from within. In fact, the house seemed as still as a dead heart. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, but as she crossed the street and began to walk in the opposite direction out toward Spadina Avenue, she felt disappointed.

She wasn’t surprised to feel the radiophone in her pocket begin to vibrate. She took it out and put it to her ear without saying anything.

“I didn’t think you gave up that easily.”

“You want me to commit a B & E, Joanne?”

“Ah,” she said. “It’s nice to hear you say that name.”

She’d stopped before reaching the avenue. Red and black streetcars swam past on their rails. “You can see me,” she said. “Where are you?”

“Someone can see you,” she said. Hazel turned around and looked behind her, but the street was empty.

“Have you rented a room in every house on Washington?”

“If you didn’t want us to find each other, then why did you come back here?”

“I came back because I have questions.” Cameron said nothing. “We found her,” Hazel said. “Your girl. She drowned in Lake Ontario on August 4, 2002. She was not, at the time, someone who should have been operating a boat.”

“Tell me how long we’re going to stick to the official story.”

“Marijuana, alcohol, and Ativan. That’s what she had in her. That’s what I know.” She’d decided to play her cards close to her chest for the time being. “There was water in her lungs, so she was alive when she went in. It’s going to be hard to convince any examiner that she did anything but end her own life.”

“There’s a key between two empty flowerpots at the back of the house.”

Cameron hung up. Hazel was facing the direction she’d come in. She took a deep breath and began walking back to the house. It seemed to her that all the windows in the houses on either side of the street had sprouted eyes and every move she made now was being marked. The skin over her spine was tingling. She slid her hand down to her belt and flicked the snap on her holster open.

She walked up from the sidewalk at number thirty-two again and followed the path to the right gate, tripping the latch. Her heart was beating fast in her chest as she stepped into the garden, keeping to the wall as she moved slowly to the pots. There was a keychain lying in the second one down, as Joanne Cameron had told her, with two keys on it.

The fact that she would need a key to get in meant she would be alone in the apartment. But how would she know what to look for? Cameron would tell her. She knew this now. Cameron was leading her, completely. She realized she had accepted this, no matter the danger it posed her, or the rules it broke. Her hunger to know the rest of the story was greater than her sense of self-preservation.

She walked back down the pathway to the front of the house and went up the steps. With the key in the front door (she’d had to try both keys) she was joining herself to Cameron now, she was complicit.

She held the phone, waiting for a sign that Cameron was with her. She gripped the silent device in her hand. It felt hot.

The door opened silently on the dark hallway. The door to the main apartment was to her right. She stood in the hallway and listened to the house. Apart from the sound her entering had made and her weight on the floorboards, there was silence. The other key opened the apartment door.

It was empty. From the window outside, she’d viewed a denuded space. Inside, it was a generous, open set of rooms with blond wood floors burnished to a warm glow. The apartment was an empty shrine. A fireplace was bricked up in the wall across from her. She crossed into the room carefully, her hand on her hip holster. She took small, shallow breaths. Behind this living room, through the opening she’d seen, was the dining room, perhaps the main dining room in the house of old, from the time when it contained a single family and servants as well. The most gracious room in the house. A window in the back wall looked out on the half of the garden she hadn’t walked through. She passed into the room, taking small steps. And then she was alone there as well. Her watchfulness intensified as the space she’d moved through diminished.

To the side of the dining room was the kitchen, and behind the kitchen, a small hallway leading to a bathroom and a bedroom. Her footsteps followed her through the apartment. From a vantage in the doorway leading into the kitchen hallway, she could see all four rooms of the apartment. It seemed a good place to establish as her blind, and she stopped there and listened again.

She thought she saw movement through the open bedroom door and pressed her back against the end of the hallway, beside the kitchen, and then smartly transferred herself to the other wall and slid down it, giving herself a vantage on the bedroom. It was empty. She felt comically grateful the closet had two doors on it, both of which swung open outwards. The closet was empty as well.

A shock went through the palm of her hand and she dropped the phone. It buzzed against the floor like a mad insect. She snatched it up and marched back to her post with the handset against her ear.

“Detective Inspector.”

“I’m here,” she said.

“Thank you.”

She stayed completely still to listen for the voice under the voice, but if Cameron was anywhere near her, she wasn’t within earshot. “There’s nothing in this place,” Hazel said. “Am I supposed to tear up the floorboards?”

“You could, but I can do it for you. Look around at the space you’re standing in. I can fill it with tables and chairs and hang paintings on the walls. I can put my daughter here on the night of August 4, 2002, with Colin Eldwin.”

“What’s putting me in an empty room going to show me, Ms. Cameron?”

“It might look empty, but there’s a heart under these floors.”

Hazel couldn’t help looking down at her shoes and, as she thought of the box buried in Nick Wise’s garden, the back of her neck went cold. “I’m listening,” she said quietly. She slid down the doorframe until she was sitting half in the hallway, half in the dining room. The action had pulled at her lower back, but the pain was bearable. From this vantage, she’d be able to see anyone coming from any direction.

“He’d placed an ad in one of the university papers,” Cameron began. “That was where he threw his nets. ‘Creative writing tutor,’ it said. He auditioned them in a student pub up on Bloor Street, looked them up and down to see if they had any talent, and if he liked them, he told them he could help them improve. Get them published. Brenda was in a good place then – she’d signed up as a ‘mature’ student in the night-class programs at U of T. She wrote poetry. Did you know she wrote poetry?”

“They tend not to include that kind of detail in a police report.”

“Just the bodies, not who lived in them. She wasn’t a good writer, yet, but she was trying to grow. That was my daughter, always looking around for another chance at life. She’d had a lot of them. Almost as many lives as a cat, I always told her. She’d been messed up with drugs, in trouble with the police; she hooked up with the wrong men, took stupid jobs in rotten parts of town, but she always got up and dusted herself off. She made me proud of her.”

Hazel shivered, thinking of Martha, and felt herself shift a spiritual inch closer to Cameron, a fellow watcher in a world where people like them suffered for others. “Anyway,” she continued, “she answered his ad and went and had a beer with him. Brenda was a beautiful girl. And for all her familiarity with the street, she was unworldly. That kind of thing can help you in life if it keeps you open to the right kinds of things. They had a couple of meetings and he went over some of her poems. Then he suggested they meet here. In this apartment.” Cameron lowered her voice and continued. “Maybe the first time, he served her coffee, there in the front room. Then he suggested she come for dinner. What do you call that, Detective Inspector? The modus operandus? That’s how it worked. Like there was a conveyor belt from the front door to the bedroom and it took a few weeks to get there. Where are you right now?”