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during the weekend, Andersen didn’t give Joyce another thought, until Wednesday, when all of a sudden there were cop cars everywhere, detectives prowling with a cool efficiency “across our roof and in the bushes.” They came into the travel agency, where Andersen worked, asking, “The owner of the gallery next door was murdered, anyone seen anything over the weekend?” No, no, no. Then came a second influx of large vehicles and activity when the news media caught wind and came swarming.
    No work was getting done on Palm Avenue. Folks were out in the street talking a mile a minute about what happened. Some in tears, some just stunned, their eyes a little too wide. Some felt ill. The smell, now that they knew what it was, was so damned sinister ! Vague gossip about the crime scene spread. Someone thought Joyce might be missing a body part. Snippets of police conversation had been overheard. They were looking for something that didn’t just belong to her, but was part of her .
    No one knew the details, but it had to be bad. The Provenance Gallery’s windows were covered to protect the crime scene’s privacy, and they stayed covered for a long time.
    Andersen had a friend, maybe more of an acquaintance, who was a cop. She asked him what it was like in Joyce’s gallery. The police officer said, “Michelle, you don’t even want to know.” She’d known a lot of cops in her life, and she recognized his tone. Her stomach raced, spun, and dropped. She felt the little hairs at the nape of her neck prickle.
    She would never be able to go to the parking garage alone again. It was too dark and creepy—a world where psycho killers lurked in shadows.
    Andersen felt intense grief, of course, but news of the murder also overwhelmed her with her own raw vulnerability. That feeling was common with her neighbors. She thought about how the storefronts on Palm, built as they were with no back doors, could turn into a trap. She remembered the shock—and the indignity—felt by the Palm Avenue crowd. Sarasota was special and this sort of thing didn’t happen here. This—and it shouldn’t even need to be mentioned—was not Middle America!
    Some wondered if keeping the details of the murder from the public was such a good idea. “It leaves your imagination going crazy,” said a Palm Avenue neighbor, interior designer Sherry Simons. “We will all feel better when they disclose how it happened.”
    The shops along Palm Avenue were thinking in terms of security for the first time. Sherry Simons’s boss, Sally A. Trout, said that she grew up in Sarasota and it had always been one of those charmed cities, relatively untouched by modern dangers.
    â€œNo one locked their doors,” she recalled. “Mom would take us all to the beach and just drop us off. It was an easy time. We were all so innocent.”
    She thought back to all of the times she’d been in her office alone. It had never occurred to her in a million years that she was in danger.
    She did recall—well, it wasn’t really a problem, but rather an annoyance from homeless people. They would move up and down the street looking for handouts. A lot of them were familiar; but every once in a while, there would be one who was creepier than the others.
    Now everything was different. She planned to install a buzzer on the front door and keep the back door locked at all times—precautions that had not previously occurred to her.
    Trout’s interior design space was only a couple of doors down from Wishart’s gallery. Sally herself had done business with Joyce. She bought a painting, only two days before her murder.
    Trout remembered vividly the shock that Wednesday when all hell broke loose on Palm Avenue. She had been working with a client, when all of a sudden it seemed as if an ambulance and police cars were coming from all directions. She went outside to see what was going