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microwave. She got treats for the pets: a strip of rawhide for Corrigan, the longhaired dachshund, and a freeze-dried minnow for Rita, snoozing on the bed. Jeanie rescued her pillow, making a mental note: Never feed fish to a cat on the bed.
    A memory shot to the surface, of a cat bounced off the bed with an affronted yowl, as she and Edward tangled arms and legs in snuggling tenderness. The suddenness of it, and the cat’s indignant commentary, reduced them both to helpless hysteria. They’d had the waterbed, and they’d had Tristan then. Eight years back?
    The quicksand of despair sucked at her feet. Her life had diminished to treading water, and trying not to mire herself in memories. She taught for three hours a day, spent countless hours at Oriole’s Nest trying to drag Edward from his mental pit, and yearned for the lifeblood of e-mails and phone calls from family. Then she woke the next day, facing it all again.
    The microwave binged. The half-warmed manicotti filled a hole in her stomach. It was food, of sorts.
    The computer barely fit into the corner of the smaller bedroom. Corrigan’s ramp to the foot of the bed took up most of the remaining floor space. Geoff, her older son, a physicist with NASA, built the ramp so Corrigan could sleep on the bed. Dachshunds shouldn’t jump.
    She downloaded her e-mail and her heart lifted. She had notes from Geoff, Julianne, and Andy, all from their respective addresses: father, mother, and son. Geoff’s daughter, Lillian, was only five, so her e-mails were hard-fought battles of love, with long silences between them. Keith hadn’t written, as usual. Keith preferred to phone, tossing off his rapid-fire jokes while pacing around his apartment. She didn’t have a note from Shelley, but time zones did screwy things to the transmissions between Germany and Oregon . Sometimes Jeanie heard nothing from her sister for three days, and then got several notes in a row, zip, zip, zip.
    Her shoulders relaxed, and tension sloughed away as she wrote to her sister Shelley, in the habit of a lifetime. E-mail’s fast, cheap transmissions were a blissful addiction. Everything either sister saw, heard, thought, or felt flowed through her fingers into a stream of detail. It was like journal writing, with a kindred soul inhaling the words on the other end.
     
    ... I’ve hired a nice boy, Cody, to help me chip away some of the rock in the front yard. I have to make room for Julianne’s flowers. She sent another box, irises this time ...
    Remember Sorrel, who works at the courthouse? Somebody set a pipe bomb against the outside wall under a judge’s window. They found it while Sorrel was right there at work. They evacuated the entire building. Mackie told me all about it. She figures the police will pull Sorrel in for questioning. I said, that’s nuts, she’d never plant a bomb while she’s working there. And if she was after the judge, she’d never have put it under his window. Under his desk, maybe. Of course, she wouldn’t have access to his desk, would she? But she could figure out where he parked his car, and in that underground parking structure with everyone coming and going, that’d be a safe place. Why would anyone put it under a window? It doesn’t make sense.
    I asked Mackie about Dillon. She placed him at Delancey Brothers last May. He stuck it out for about three weeks, and then had a massive blowup with Bryce Wogan. Mr. Wogan insisted that hand tools were missing. One of those big drills for going through masonry and metal, a hundred-foot extension cord, and some other stuff. She pulled Dillon, had a lot of trouble placing him again (you can imagine!), and finally got him onto a loading dock for a frozen foods plant. Not a lot of temptation for theft there, I guess. They’ve got a lot of equipment, but most of it’s not portable.
    I said, what if Dillon didn’t steal the stuff. If it was cut and dried, Delancey Brothers would have pressed charges, wouldn’t they? And