Page 13 of Wrong Mail

“Yes, well, I disagree.” Her voice loses the joke. “You need to get back in the saddle. Get your feet wet.” A beat. “No pun intended.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m serious, Mal. I want to know if anything’s caught your interest. Anything at all. It doesn’t have to be a pitch. It doesn’t have to be finished. It doesn’t even have to be good yet. Just something you’ve been reading at midnight that you can’t put down.”

I turn around.

I don't mean to. My body does it before I've agreed to anything, the same as it did before.

The clippings sit in the afternoon glare, four columns of old newsprint I have no right to be looking at.

County names I've never visited. A husband and wife in Josephine County, found by their gardener. A husband and wife outside Bend, found by a daughter home from college.

No forced entry anywhere. Nobody who heard anything.

Years of it, stacked up, and not one of these reporters seems to know the other cases exist.

Somebody should have connected these.

The thought arrives in a voice I recognize, older than the life I have now.

"Mallory?"

"I'm here."

"You went quiet, which in my experience means one of two things." Cassandra waits. She's very good at waiting. It's how she's gotten thirty years of people to tell her things they meant to keep to themselves. "Either you're about to lie to me, or you're about to tell me something."

Kane's face swims up in front of me, on the laptop, with his glasses off. Can you promise me that? And I promised. It's only been a few hours since I promised.

"There might be something," I hear myself say.

The words are out before I can decide whether I meant them.

"Go on."

"I don't have it yet. I don't even know if it's a thing." I'm walking back toward the island now, and my free hand is already moving over the clippings, straightening a column that doesn't need straightening. "It's old. It's Oregon. It's a lot of counties and a lot of years and I don't think anybody's ever put them in the same room."

"Put what in the same room?"

"That's the part I don't have."

Cassandra doesn't laugh. That's the thing about her. Anyone else would laugh, and I'd have deserved it.

"How did you come by it?"

The truth is spread across my kitchen island beside a padded envelope with another man's name on it.

"It came to me," I say.

There’s a long pause on the line, and I can feel her deciding whether to push.

“You know what you sound like right now,” she says at last.

“Don’t.”

“You sound like you did before.”

“Cassandra.”