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I’m not an investigator, but it seems to me there are a lot more reasons to link Daria Flynn’s death to the sniper attack last April than to me. Female victims, both shot at a rest stop from a green pickup—”
    “We are aware of the similarities.”
    Of course they were. “Well, if there’s anything else you can tell me, something you haven’t remembered about the pickup or the incident or the girl, you’ll call, right?”
    “Of course.”
    “By the way,” he added. “Expect a call from the Walworth County Sheriff’s Office. Maybe the Lake Geneva Police, too. We’re working the case with them. I’ve filled them in, but they’ll probably want to follow up on their own.”
    “Can’t you tell them what I told you?”
    “I did. But they’re Wisconsin. We’re Illinois.”
    “Cheeseheads versus Flatlanders, huh?”
    There was a beat of silence. “Good-bye, Ms. Foreman.”
    ***
    After dinner, I took a glass of wine out on the deck and swung back and forth on my glider. I’d splurged on it last spring, knowing as soon as I tried it out in the store that I would buy it. It was made from redwood and had a green cushion, and its gentle motion has a soothing, almost primal feel. I rocked and sipped my wine and watched the sun retreat across the backyard, glazing everything with splashes of rosy gold.
    I’d thought the murder of Daria Flynn at the oasis was linked to the first sniper attack in April, but from the tone of Milanovich’s questions, I gathered he wasn’t so sure. I could even empathize; I was not only a witness but a possible suspect. But I have a love-hate relationship with cops, and I wasn’t eager for more questions.
    I thought back to my conversation with Susan. If I’d just refrained from chit-chatting with Daria, I wouldn’t be involved. All I had to do was buy my drink and head straight out to the car. I would have been long gone before anything happened. But making conversation is part of my nature, and given a similar situation, I’d probably do the same thing again.
    The phone rang inside. I slowed the glider.
    “Got it,” Rachel yelled out.
    When a minute had passed with no summons, I started up again, thinking about Daria Flynn. Had she told her mother what time she’d be home? How much time passed before her mother began to worry? Yes, Daria was an adult, but a mother never stops worrying. What did she do? Read? Wash dishes? Or did she turn on the television, preferring its empty chatter to the silence of the house? What did she think when she heard that a woman from Lake Geneva had been killed? Did she assume it was some other person? Or did she know, in the pit of her stomach, that the victim lying on the tarmac was her daughter?
    The sun fled, and the evening light bathed everything in muted shades of green. My mother died from pancreatic cancer. If she were alive, though, she never would have spent time in a glider with me. She was always too busy doing errands, taking care of the house, saving the world. When I was little and had the mumps, it was my father who spent the week at home with me in an old black rocker. Sometimes he’d tell stories. Sometimes he’d sing—not often, happily, since his voice is somewhere between an angry frog and a badly tuned bassoon. But most of the time, he didn’t talk at all. He just sat there with me in his lap and rocked.
    I slapped at a mosquito emboldened by the deepening dusk and went inside. Rachel had commandeered the couch in the family room, sprawled like Cleopatra on an immovable barge with her possessions spread out around her. Her long legs dangled over one armrest, her mop of curly blond hair against the other. The cordless was glued to her ear and the sound of her conversation floated just over the noise from the TV. I kissed the top of her head.

Chapter Six
    Vegetable soup. When the wind blows across Mac’s studio from south to north, the smell of whatever they’re making at the food-processing plant down the block