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he began tossing them angrily into the trash. “Doesn’t she keep any plain old Lipton’s around?”
    Megan was about to warn him about certain medicinal teas her mother kept on hand, when Detective Berlin appeared in the doorway. “You guys have a dog?”
    “No,” said Frank.
    “Because there are a bunch of paw prints out back.”
    “What about human footprints?”
    “Not that we can find. Then again, it’s been snowing all day. It doesn’t surprise me.” The detective looked troubled, and Megan felt her heart begin to race. Between her mother’s pot and Natalie’s ecstasy, she had a lot of things that she would rather keep to herself at the moment.
    “Here’s the thing I don’t get,” he went on. “Diana was a lady with a bounty. She had a direct line to the police station. Why would she put her house on the Home Tour?”
    Frank didn’t mention that that was another thing they’d fought about.
    “Just seems weird,” the detective went on. “Because if I was getting threats on my life, I wouldn’t want all these strangers tromping through. Can you shed any light on this?”
    “No,” said Frank. “No I cannot, sir.”
    The detective waited, then shrugged. “That and the broken lock. Oh, well.” He glanced around the room. “Hey look, between you and me, I know you’re not going to mess around with things but see, Ernie gets pretty uptight over stuff like this.”
    “We’re not messing with things,” Frank said.
    “I know that.”
    “This is weird,” said Megan, glancing from one man to the other.
    “It’s just Ernie’s a real stickler for procedure,” the detective said. “So if you could call—”
    “Excuse me,” said Frank. “Did you just lose your wife?”
    “I did not,” said Huck.
    “Did you just lose your mother?”
    “I did not.”
    “Then give us a little peace in here, okay?”
    (“Really weird,” Megan murmured.)
    Huck scratched the back of his head.
    “Thank you,” said Frank.
    “What’s going on?” Megan demanded as Huck left the room, but her father didn’t answer. He was flipping through the Rolodex on Diana’s kitchen desk, and when he came to the number he was looking for, he picked up the phone and dialed.
    “Dad?”
    Her father shook his head. “Yeah, Curt,” he said, straightening up. “It’s Frank Thompson. Look, sorry to bother you at this hour, but I’m going to need a little help.
    “No,” he said. “It’s not about Megan.”
    —————
    Upstairs Megan closed the door to her bedroom. She was glad to be alone at this point. She thought it strange that her father was calling an attorney for help. Then again, maybe there were will issues. Or maybe that’s just what you did when someone died: you called your lawyer.
    She leaned against the door. Since she’d gone off to college, her mother had been using the room for storage. Summer clothes lay folded and stacked on the bed, old computer parts sat on the floor, an ironing board waited with a shirt over its nose. Megan set the stack of clothes on the floor, turned back the comforter, and slid between the sheets. Staring at the ceiling, she tried to recall just exactly which words had triggered the fight with her mother that morning. She had a way of pushing her mother’s buttons. And oh my god, push them she had.
    She lay there and felt her heart pound against the wall of her chest. She took her pulse, calculated a hundred beats a minute. She never should have taken the second half of the ecstasy. She assured herself that her father was clueless; he was way too preoccupied, and besides, he never suspected anything with her. (Worried about, yes; suspected, no. Unlike her mother, who didn’t worry but suspected everything.) The detective, on the other hand . . .
    There was no way she was going to sleep. For someone whose mother had just died, she felt awfully numb. She waited for a flood of emotion, but it didn’t come. Outside it continued to snow, and she watched it through her