Detective Hardy: Did he come back?
Charles: Not while I was there, no. I had the feeling... sometimes, when you’re in a house with a woman who’s on her own, they get a little nervous. So she might have been saying he was going to be back soon even if he wasn’t so I wouldn’t try anything.
Detective Hardy: Try anything?
Charles: You know. Make a pass or something.
Detective Hardy: Is that something you sometimes do? Make a pass at customers?
Charles: Shit, no. Sometimes, well, sometimes it’s the customers that end up coming on to you.
Detective Hardy: Really.
Charles: Been known to happen. I’ve had calls, over the years, a woman didn’t have so much as a spider in her house, but she calls me to check the place out. Some people are lonely, you know. I’m no prize, I get that, but some ladies, they can be on the desperate side, if you know what I mean.
Detective Hardy: How long were you there?
Charles: ’Bout an hour. Didn’t see much evidence of any kind of infestation, although an old house like that, you wouldn’t be surprised to find something. If not mice, termites. Who knows? Lots of ways for the little rodents to find their way inside with an old place. You know mice can actually climb walls? Had them come into one house through the outside vent for the fan over the stove. Mice would have had to climb up an eight-foot brick wall to get to the vent. They’re a very interesting species. Did you know—
Detective Hardy: And when did you return to the house?
Charles: The next morning.
Detective Hardy: What time?
Charles: Just before eleven, guess it was.
Detective Hardy: She had asked you to come back? She called you?
Charles: No, but I think I’d said something about coming back the next day to see if she’d caught anything. I gave her a couple of traps. The kind that don’t kill the mouse, just catch him, so you can take him outside and set him free.
Detective Hardy: Is that the kind you recommend?
Charles: We’re all God’s creatures. I don’t always feel good about what I do, to be honest. Trapping and poisoning things. But we’ve all got to pay the bills, am I right?
Detective Hardy: How did Ms. Mason seem to you?
Charles: You mean on the Sunday? Because she wasn’t there on the Sunday. Neither was her husband.
Detective Hardy: I mean on the Saturday. How was her mood? Anxious? Apprehensive?
Charles: She seemed a little antsy, to be honest with you. But like I said, having a man in the house, that might have made her a titch uneasy. Although I don’t think I come across as threatening. Do you think I do?
Detective Hardy: You seem perfectly charming, Mr. Underwood. Did she talk about her husband? Other than that he was coming home soon?
Charles: That was about it.
Detective Hardy: So, back to the Sunday, the following day. What happened when you returned?
Charles: I knocked on the door, but I got no answer. I figured she was home because the car was in the driveway.
Detective Hardy: Just the one. The one that was there the afternoon before?
Charles: Yeah. A little Volkswagen. A Golf.
Detective Hardy: And the husband, he wasn’t around, you said.
Charles: Yeah. Whether he was there between the time I left the day before and when I came back the next morning, that I couldn’t tell you.
Detective Hardy: Okay, go on.
Charles: I thought maybe she was in the bathroom or went for a walk or was out back. So I knocked again, and waited, then walked down the side of the house and into the backyard, but she wasn’t there, either.
Detective Hardy: And that’s when you left?
Charles: No, no. I went up to the door there. You go in that way and you’re in the kitchen, which is at the back. I called in, instead of knocking. Said, “Hey, Ms. Mason, you there?” And I didn’t hear nothin’ back. That’s when I noticed the door wasn’t quite latched.
Detective Hardy: The door was open?
Charles: Not open, just like when you let a door swing shut on its own, and it needs that little push to lock it into place. It hadn’t had that push. Am I going to get in trouble here?
Detective Hardy: Why would you be in trouble?
Charles: Well, did I, like, break-and-enter or something?
Detective Hardy: Don’t worry about that. Go on.
Charles: The thing was, I wanted to check what happened with the flour.
Detective Hardy: Flower? You saying you brought Brie Mason some flowers the day before? Or were these flowers from her husband?
Charles: Not a flower, flower. But flour, like you bake with.
Detective Hardy: I’m not following.
Charles: Okay, so, if you want to know if you’ve got mice scurrying around in the night, you sprinkle some flour on the floor so you can see their footprints.
Detective Hardy: You did that?
Charles: No, but I told her she should do that before she went to bed. Sounded to me like she was going to do it. I wanted to take a peek and see if there were any tracks. If there were, then we could get a little more aggressive, dealing with the infestation.
Detective Hardy: Where was she to sprinkle the flour?
Charles: On the floor in front of the sink. I thought I’d seen some turds — you know, mouse droppings—
Detective Hardy: I get it.
Charles: —under the sink area. So I thought, if they were running around, that was a good place to spread some flour.
Detective Hardy: And you had the impression she was definitely going to do that? Sprinkle the flour?
Charles: Pretty much.
Detective Hardy: We didn’t notice any flour on the floor when we went through the house.
Charles: Huh. Well, maybe she didn’t do it, or...
Detective Hardy: Or what?
Charles: Or she saw the tracks in the morning, and then vacuumed it up.
Detective Hardy: Her, or somebody else.
Four
Andrew
I told Jayne I was making a run to Home Depot for some bags of weed and feed. The scraggly front lawn was clearly in need of some springtime TLC.
Once I was behind the wheel of the Explorer I drove out of my Stratford neighborhood, across the bridge that spanned the Housatonic and headed for the east end of Milford, where I used to live, with my wife, Brie. I avoided not just this part of Milford, but all of it, as much as I could. Not so much because familiar sights triggered unpleasant memories. I didn’t need familiar sights for that.
I just didn’t want to run into people I knew.
There was still a risk of that, of course, living in nearby Stratford. But at least the risk was reduced, going to different stores, frequenting different restaurants. Had I never moved, still been a fixture on Mulberry, I’d have had to deal with the inevitable questions and comments, even six years after Brie disappeared.