“Outside our house. On the beach last night. They say …” I swallowed the lump. “They say he shot himself.”

“Oh my god.” Tina is not much on originality about anything, including her expressions of surprise. “Are you okay?”

“Well …” I didn’t have an answer for that.

“Oh my god. I’m coming down.”

“That’s not necessary, Tina—”

“I’m catching a plane this morning. I’ll call you from the airport. Oh my god. What are the funeral arrangements?”

“The what?”

She was losing her patience. I was supposed to be the cooperative victim, I guess. “The arrangements. Who’s taking care of them? When’ll he be buried?”

“I have no idea.”

“That’s what I figured. I’ll be there tonight. Don’t bother coming to the airport to pick me up.” The thought had never entered my mind. “I’ll take a limo. We’ll stay up and talk all night if we have to. Gabe’s killed himself. Oh my god. Love you.”

“Me too,” I said. And she was gone.

I slumped back in the chair. My husband was shot to death practically in our own backyard, and my sister was coming to stay with me, maybe for a week. How much punishment could one woman take?

6.

One of my neighbours has a helicopter on his front porch. It has sat there for more than a year. Not the whole helicopter, just the part you ride in that looks like a large white plastic egg on skis. The rest of it, the blades that spin on top and the long tail with the small propeller on the back, are missing, but Gabe assured me it’s a real helicopter. We would pass the house with the helicopter on the porch during our walks along Beach Boulevard on summer nights, when we wanted to avoid the boardwalk crowded with skaters and skateboarders and bicyclists and joggers and retired people and vagrant hoodlums. We would stroll past the few remaining Victorian-era cottages and the tar-paper shacks and the new prefab homes with goldfish ponds in the front yard and hot tubs in the back, and we would be happy doing it.

The neighbour with the helicopter on his porch also keeps a Florida swamp buggy in the lane next to the house, in front of an army machine that Gabe said looks like an APC, which he translated as Armoured Personnel Carrier. I don’t know what the man who keeps this stuff looks like, because I have never seen him.

The beach strip is peppered with misfits and eccentrics living among young professionals winding themselves up and retired people winding their lives down. They start out in Porsches and end up in golf carts.

If misfits and nonconformists can be catalogued, I do not know any faction that is not represented among our neighbours.

Hans and Trudy, the German couple down the beach with the schnauzer, have been building their stone castle since Gabe and I moved here. Along with the rooftop parapets, it includes narrow windows set deeply into the walls—the better for archers to aim their arrows, I guess—and a heavy oak door studded with rivets. I expected to see gnomes in lederhosen at work on a moat someday. Most of the neighbours think it’s quaint. Nobody considers it out of place.

A motorcycle club converted a cottage at the south end of the beach, the scuzzy end, into a clubhouse, adding steel bars to the windows and drawing weekly visits from the police. Near them, over the dusty upholstery shop, lives a woman who for the past month had been stalking the boardwalk and glaring into our garden, her mouth moving without any words emerging.

Compared with the people, the homes on the beach strip are almost conventional. Some are abandoned, others nearly so. It is a community, as the sociologists say, in transition. A few custom homes are being built among the decaying cottages. The new homes feature cedar shake shingles, bay windows, and something called a great room, which is what you get when you don’t put a ceiling on the living room. They sit among the cheap frame cottages and the trailer park and the retirement homes. There are many distractions on the beach strip. There is little boredom.

AFTER SPEAKING TO TINA, I looked out the kitchen window and into my garden, where two police officers were standing near the gate. The news reporters had moved on to some other disaster, I assumed. The air was already warm and heavy. It was going to be one of those August days they invented air conditioning for.

I opened my door and almost tripped over two jars of marmalade and a plastic-wrapped loaf of banana bread with a note taped to it. Call us if you need to, the note said. It was from Maude Blair, of course. There are many people like the Blairs living on the beach strip. They keep no helicopters on their front porch or bars on their windows. They always nod and smile, and they do not gossip. They care for you, but they find no need to tell you about it except when necessary.

I set the bread and marmalade in the kitchen and returned to look out at the garden shed. The door was closed, but I could see the hook dangling free. “Somebody’s been in our garden shed,” I said to Gabe the first time I found the hook unlatched earlier in the summer. “We should start locking the door.”

“What’s to steal?” he said. “If we’re lucky they’ll take the old lawn mower, maybe the rusty rake and the bag of topsoil.”

“You’ll do anything to get out of gardening,” I muttered.

The shed door was normally held closed with a simple hook and eye. “How much will a padlock cost?” I asked when I found the door open again a day or two later. “Three dollars? Five dollars?”

Gabe said if we hung a padlock on the door we would have to keep the key somewhere, and he was always losing keys.

“Get one with a combination,” I suggested.

Gabe said we would forget the combination and never be able to get back in. So the garden shed remained unlocked. Someone had been in there last night. It might have been a police officer. Or one of the reporters. Or someone could have been hiding in the garden shed when Gabe came out the garden door wrapped in the blanket and carrying the bottle of wine. They could have followed him into the bushes and shot him there.

I walked to the shed and looked inside. It was, of course, empty except for some dusty garden tools.

Why would anyone, assuming they had a need to kill Gabe, follow him onto the beach? It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense. Gabe was gone, whoever had been in the garden shed had gone, and I needed time in the sun. I needed to heal.

I sat in one of the garden chairs, my back to the beach. Traffic soared along the high bridges spanning the canal, and beyond them the steam and smoke of the steel companies rose through a still-clear sky. I heard the warning blast from the lift bridge down the strip, and geese calling to each other as they passed overhead. I smelled the roses growing against the fence. None of the sounds and smells reached me the way they might have a day earlier. I was untouchable. I was distant. I was in free fall, waiting to land on solid ground. I was something else as well, but I didn’t want to think about that at the moment. I tilted my head back and closed my eyes, feeling nothing except a sudden hand on my shoulder.

I jumped at the touch, spilling my coffee. I screamed as well, and I’m sure I swore before looking around to see Mel Holiday holding his hands up in surrender. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have said something—”

“You should have knocked at the damn door,” I said.

“I did.” Mel lowered his hands. “Then I came around the side and saw you out here—”

“And decided to scare the hell out of me.”

“How are you doing?” Mel looked toward the shrubs behind the house. The two cops, their attention attracted by my scream, turned away.