The Dark Room(47)

“I talked to Officer Combs, inside,” Cain said. “He said you were both awake and heard the shot.”

Dana handed the badges back. She glanced up at her husband, and he nodded to her.

“We heard,” she said.

Roger looked at the glass door. Cain had closed it after they stepped out, and from the backyard it was impossible to see into the house. The glass was glazed, mirrorlike.

“Mrs. Castelli’s gone?” Roger asked. “Your officer took her away?”

Cain had no trouble reading the tone.

He wasn’t worried about Mona Castelli; he only wanted to know if he could have his living room back. It wasn’t surprising. Just look at them: you couldn’t find two people more different from the Castellis. Not on this street, anyway. But Cain knew Mrs. Petrovic had come out this morning, had talked her way past the cop in the driveway to tell the paramedics that Mona Castelli could wait in their house.

Whatever differences they had, the neighbors had some kind of relationship.

“She’s out of your hair,” Cain said. “Couple nights in a hotel—after that, I don’t know.”

Mr. Petrovic relaxed his arms from across his chest. His wife took his hand.

“We’ll sit in the kitchen,” she said to Cain. “You’re cold. Agent Fischer, too.”

“Your officer probably drank all the coffee,” Roger said. “Worrying if that woman would choke on her puke.”

“Roger.”

“You should’ve seen her—passed out on our sofa and snoring like a bum in a drunk tank.”

“You’ve never been in a drunk tank,” Dana said.

“It’s all right.” He held her hand close to his chest as he led them across the soaked lawn to the house. “I’m just glad she’s gone.”



While making sure Mona Castelli didn’t die like a rock star on Roger Petrovic’s couch, Officer Combs hadn’t drunk much of the coffee at all. There was still enough in the pot to fill four mugs. They sat at the maple-topped island bar in the kitchen, and Roger Petrovic waited for Cain and Fischer to get out their notepads and flip to fresh pages.

“We were up later than usual,” he began. “We’d had friends for dinner—you need their names?”

“If I do, we’ll circle back,” Cain said.

“They left at eleven,” Dana said.

Fischer penciled the time into her spiral pad, then spoke while scrolling through something on her phone.

“You’re sure about the time?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I flipped on the TV when they left,” Dana said. She pointed at a small flat screen on the wall near the refrigerator. “The news was just coming on. The eleven o’clock news. I listened to it while we cleaned up.”

“How long did that take?”

“Half an hour,” Roger said. “Give or take.”

“So it was about eleven thirty,” Dana said. “And we were turning out the lights downstairs, about to go out to bed. And I looked out the window there, by the breakfast nook, and I saw the moon.”

“A third-quarter moon,” Roger said. “It rises at noon and sets at midnight.”

“You knew that already, or you looked it up?” Fischer asked.

“I looked it up this morning. We’d put it together, what we heard. So I knew we’d need to know the time.”

“All right,” Cain said. “Go on.”

Dana took her husband’s hand again.

“It was so clear,” she said. “It had been foggy all night, and then it got clear. So I called him down and poured us each a glass of wine—the bottle was already open, what we didn’t finish at dinner. We put on our jackets and went outside to sit on the chairs—”

“Where you found us just now.”

“He knows that—and we had our glass of wine and watched the moon set past the horizon. It was too beautiful to leave—”

“About midnight,” Roger said.

“—and right after the last of the light was gone, we heard the gunshots.”

“How many shots?” Fischer asked.

“Two,” Roger said. “The first one, and then maybe a minute later, the second.”

“You’re sure it was a minute?”

“It wasn’t like this,” he said, and snapped his fingers twice, quickly. “There was a pause. Maybe a minute, maybe two.”

“Could you tell where they came from?” Fischer asked.

“Castelli’s house.”

He pointed out the kitchen window at the broad stucco side of his neighbor’s house. A low redwood fence, overgrown with ivy, separated their yards.

“That direction, at least,” Dana said. “If you asked me, at the time, did I think it came from the house? Not really.”

“The two shots, did they sound like the same gun?” Cain asked.

The Petrovics looked at each other.

“I wouldn’t know about that—we didn’t even know it was a gun,” Dana said. “There were two bangs. They could have been anything.”

“A car backfiring,” Roger said. “Somebody slamming a door.”