And there's the business of Earl, or Devlin Smythe, as I always think of him now. He didn't make it to Emerg alive. His head, police told us, was a burnt marshmallow.
I took one of my walks down by Willow Creek the other day. It's the most beautiful part of the neighborhood, still untouched as it is by development. It's up in the air whether houses will ever be built along its banks, but there's a greater chance now than ever before that they won't be. The Oakwood Town Council has decided to reopen all deals it had made with Valley Forest Estates, now that corruption charges had been laid against one of its own and Don Greenway was being charged with murder. Greenway was the one who'd ordered Rick to kill Spender, after all, and even though Rick was no longer around to cut a deal and testify against him, Carpington seemed prepared to say anything in a bid to reduce his sentence. There are new environmental hearings scheduled, and a raft of lawsuits between Valley Forest Estates and the town are under way.
The Suburban has been running stories with all the details, but I don't read that many of them. I just want to get out of town, put all this behind me. One thing that has allowed me to move forward is the knowledge that my stealing Stefanie Knight's purse wasn't what led to her death. Smythe was already in that house, waiting for her to come home, before I'd blundered my way into this mess at the grocery store. It was even possible, although this was not a point I went out of my way to make, that her killer, and Jesse Shuttleworth's, might never have been uncovered but for my foolishness.
I walked back up our street, smiled at the housecoat lady as she watered her driveway, and saw that Sarah was home from work. Her Camry sat in the driveway. We haven't bothered to replace the Civic, figuring we won't need but one car when we move back downtown. We're putting the insurance money toward the new house. I wandered up onto the lawn, ran my hand along the top of the For Sale sign, then rounded Sarah's car as I headed for the front door.
As I came up alongside the Camry on the passenger side, I happened to notice, glancing through the window, that the keys were still in the ignition. It could have been Sarah's set or, possibly, Angie's. One or the other of them had forgotten to remove them, and the Camry sat there, a statistic just waiting to be added to the stolen-car lists.
I stared at the keys, wondering what, if anything, I should do about them, when Sarah came out the front door, smiling.
"Hey," she said. "They accepted."
"Great," I said. She was referring to the Hayden family. The house on Crandall was ours.
"And some agent's coming by with an offer on this place at seven," she said, coming up to the driver's door of her car, facing me across the roof.
I opened the passenger door, leaned in, took out the keys, walked around the car, and handed them to her. "Here," I said. No lecture, no smartass comment, no rolling of the eyes, no shaking of the head.
"Thanks," Sarah said, pocketing the keys, and smiling with amusement at my restraint. "You keep acting this way, people will start wondering whether you're such a big asshole after all."
And she reached her hand out to mine and led me inside.