Elise folded the newspaper and tossed it on her desk. The cemetery photo was kind of campy, but the reporter had done a good job on the TTX article, getting her facts straight and displaying the Savannah Police Department tip line in large numbers on the front page.

Smack. Smack. Smack.

The sound came from beyond her office window.

Elise looked out to see David and Audrey in the cemetery, playing catch. She zipped her computer in its carrying case and went down to meet them.

"The pitcher hurt her arm," Audrey announced. "So I'm going to pitch a few games. Isn't that cool?"

"Isn't pitching a dangerous position?" Elise asked. "Didn't somebody break a nose last season?"

"I have to practice." Audrey lined up her fingers on the softball. "A lot." She tossed the ball to David, who was crouched in white shirtsleeves, his jacket and tie draped over a tombstone.

He caught the ball and straightened, shaking his bare hand. "That's enough for me without a glove."

"Mom, will you practice with me? Maybe tomorrow or the next day?"

Elise had never tossed a ball in her life. "What was her name? The girl who broke her nose? Camille? Didn't they say if it had hit any harder, her nose would have been shoved into her brain and she could have died?"

"Mom!" Audrey let out a laugh of exasperation. "Will you practice or not?"

"Okay." Since life made no sense, Elise would probably be the one to end up with the broken nose.

She eyed her partner. He obviously knew quite a bit about gloves and balls. "Need a ride home?" she asked. His car was still in the shop.

"Love it." He grabbed his jacket and tie.

It was late afternoon and traffic was heavy getting from downtown to the suburbs. They hit every red light and breathed in enough carbon monoxide to kill all of the canaries in the state of Georgia. Audrey, still excited about pitching, chattered the entire way and bailed out of the car as Elise pulled to the curb in front of Thomas' house.

"I'm going to pitch!" she shouted, dropping her glove in the grass and running toward Vivian, who was strolling around the yard, a baby on each hip.

Vivian passed off Toby to Audrey, then came over to sit cross-legged in the grass so that she could chat through David's open window. In the background Audrey put her mouth against Toby's belly and blew, making the baby grab fistfuls of her hair and laugh hysterically.

"We're having a neighborhood block party and cookout in two weeks," Vivian said, bouncing baby Tyler on her knee and making faces at him. "Please come. Both of you. You need to have some fun, Elise," she added as if anticipating an argument.

"Oh, I have fun," Elise muttered. "Lots of fun."

Block party. It meant a bunch of strangers milling around, struggling for common ground. Elise didn't fit in that kind of world. A world that pretended bad things never happened. But then, was her world any more real? A world where horrendous things happened on a daily basis?

Vivian attempted a new tactic. "Try to get her to take some time off," she begged David. "Try to get her to come."

David was slouched in the passenger seat, eyes squinted against the setting sun, arm braced on the window. "Sounds nice to me," he said congenially. "But I don't have any influence over her."

Everything seemed way too normal all of a sudden. It made Elise feel a little queasy. "We'll try to make it," she lied.

After a lot of waving and too much baby talk, Elise and David drove away, heading back toward civilization and a higher crime rate.

"You have no intention of showing up, do you?" David asked.

"I don't know… I might. Depends on what's going on at work."

"Sure." He made a sound that implied he knew better than that.

Was she getting more transparent with age? "I love Vivian dearly," Elise said, "but I'm no good at that kind of small talk. I hate it."

"What you really mean is you're afraid of it."

"I can't believe you're lecturing me. You. Mr. Antisocial."

"I'll go if you go. That way we can talk shop if things get too awkward."

"Oh, that would be a hit. Maybe we should bring along some crime scene photos to pass around while we're at it."

"Eight-by-ten color glossies. I can see it now."

Elise veered to the left and pulled into the parking lot of a sporting-goods store. "I need a glove," she explained in answer to David's look of inquiry.

Inside, David made a tight fist and punched the center of the leather baseball glove.

"This one seems pretty decent." He pulled it off. "Here. Try it."

Elise wiggled her fingers into the glove. Her hand was healing nicely. The butterfly bandages were gone, replaced by two small Band-Aids. "It doesn't go all the way on."

"It's not supposed to."

"It's stiff."

"It'll soften up. You have to work with it. You don't want to get one that's too soft, or it'll start folding up on you. How does that feel?"

She made a fist and smacked it against the padded palm of the glove. "I don't know. How's it supposed to feel?"

"Okay." He let his shoulders sag, his arms dangle. "I can accept that you never played softball, but you surely played catch."

She smacked the glove again. "Nope." The ball fit so nicely in the glove. She rolled it around, pressing her fingertips against the stitching.

"What'd you do instead? Don't tell me you actually played dolls with those Barbies."

Elise thought about the time she'd tried to put a spell of silence on her sister. She'd found a doll with brown hair. She cut the hair so it resembled Maddie's. She superglued an X of black thread across the mouth, burned some herbs, and read a spell she'd been taught by the old lady conjurer down the street. It had been one of her many early failures.

"Yeah," she told David. "I played with dolls."

"Hmmm." He squinted his eyes and appraised her. "There's something you're not telling me."

"So, you think this glove's okay?" She pulled it off and tucked it under her arm. "What about Ms one?" She lifted a red glove from the shelf hook. "I kind of like it. Or what about that pretty blue one?"

"The brown glove is better."

"It's more expensive."

"With a glove, you get what you pay for."

She put the red glove back and picked up a ball.

"That's a hardball. You need a softball. Here." He plucked two from a wire barrel. "One more thing…" He perused the shelf until he found a small brown bottle. "Glove oil. You have to oil the glove, put the ball inside, then tie it closed so it will get a good shape to it."

"How has this gotten so complicated?" She shook her head in bafflement. "We're just going to play catch. Play"

"Play takes work."

David picked out a glove for himself. Something that took a little longer, because he was even more particular about his purchase than he'd been about Elise's.

"Stay where you are."

He gave her a slow, lazy throw.

She had no choice but to try to stop it, just snagging the ball with the top of her glove. She didn't toss it back.

"I'm assuming you played a lot of ball, so why don't you have a glove that already fits you?" Elise asked as they walked to the checkout area. "That's already formed to your hand?"

"I do, somewhere. It could be at my mother's in Ohio, or in storage in Virginia."

"I can't imagine my life being that scattered."

"They're only things. Material possessions."

He tossed the ball straight up and caught it in the glove. "You don't strike me as materialistic."

"No, but I become attached to my possessions in an emotional way. Like my car. It has over one hundred fifty thousand miles on it. I know I should get a new one, but emotionally I'm not ready. I can't let it go. I've had it so long that it's a part of me. An extension of who I am."

He got in line and put the glove with the ball inside on the conveyor belt. "Your car is a piece of shit."

"But it's my piece of shit." She thought over what she'd just said. "Figuratively speaking."

"Of course."

"I'll probably get attached to this ball glove if I use it long enough. Especially if it eventually forms to the shape of my hand and only my hand."

She was already feeling herself becoming fond of it. She particularly liked the way it smelled.

Their items were rung up separately.

"Some people believe objects take energy from their owners," Elise said once she'd paid and grabbed the noisy plastic bag. "And when they absorb so much, they begin giving it back."

David paused as the automatic door opened. "So does that mean there's a part of me packed away in the bottom of a box, in a shed in my mother's backyard along with my Matchbox cars and microscope?"

The image he suggested gave her a strange, sorrowful feeling in her chest. "I think you should find the glove."

He laughed.

"I'm not kidding."

"I know you aren't."

Elise's phone rang.

Headquarters. Their brief foray into normalcy was over.

James LaRue had been caught and was at that moment being escorted back to Savannah.