Trophy House by Anne Bernays

paying guests. She tried to pretend it didn’t matter, but I could tell she wasn’t exactly thrilled about it. She needed the money.
    The three of us sat around, suspended in inactivity and small talk while the afternoon wore itself out. I called Tom, who said he was sorry he wasn’t here with me. “Please don’t let it get to you, Dannie. If I tell you it’s not really our business, I know what you’ll answer so I won’t say it. But try not to overreact.” This struck me as a supremely silly instruction. How else could I be expected to act when something awful happens to a neighbor, no matter how unappetizing he happens to be?
    We ignored the gorgeous sunset and then, I suppose inevitably, as anniversaries always stir up the unconscious, started talking about what had happened a year ago. “It’s like there’s this big gray shadow over us, the way it was in the City. Even here, where we’re probably safe,” Beth said. It had taken me two days to reach her by phone. By the time I finally got through to her, I was a basket case. She was horribly upset; from her office window she had seen the towers go down.
    We ate a meal of leftover vegetables piled on angel hair spaghetti—pretty good, if you ask me. I sometimes think I should change my game and be a chef. We tried to talk about other things and kept returning to Mitch Brenner and his house, as if talking about it would hold it steady. At one point I said, “Most of the time, we don’t get to see anything really awful. We know someone who knew someone who saw a crime being committed, but that’s already one step away. People like us are cushioned. Somehow we manage not to stumble over the corpse on the beach. I know all these people are killed on Route 6, but I’ve never actually seen a car crash.” Raymie said she’d seen one and that it was nothing you’d want to remember. “The driver’s head was sheared off not twenty feet from where I’d stopped my car. You know that place where you’re making a left-hand turn across the opposite lane, to get to Wellfleet Center? Well, this guy was in a convertible and he ran a red light and this other car was making the turn and they crashed head-on. I still see it sometimes when I can’t sleep at night…” Beth, it turned out, had been near enough to get the visual gist of a knife fight between two teenagers in Tribeca. “They took one of the kids to the hospital,” she said. “You know how they say ‘It left me shaking’? Well, it left me shaking—and I didn’t even know them.” I thought of her living in a place where people settled disagreements with knives and it made me tremble for her.
    â€œHow come you never told me that before?” I said.
    â€œI guess I forgot,” she said. But I’m certain she meant she didn’t want to have to deal with my anxiety, a faculty that occasionally gets out of hand.
    Raymie’s cell phone did an aria. She pulled it out of her purse, unfolded it and answered. She listened briefly, then said, “They took Brenner to Hyannis. Pete says it’s both legs, but they think he’s going to be okay.”
    I thought how convenient it was for Raymie to have a direct line to behind-the-scenes at police headquarters. “By the way, Pete’s fairly certain it was Lyle Halliday,” Raymie said. “All the pieces fit.”
    â€œIt fits too well,” I said. “It’s too obvious.”
    â€œNo such thing as too obvious,” Raymie said. “Haven’t you read Sherlock Holmes?”
    â€œI know,” Beth said brightly. “He hated the trophy house. He couldn’t stomach what it stood for. He was like an activist, an ecoterrorist and a Nazi. To say nothing of his being a whack job.”
    â€œInteresting combination,” Raymie said.
    â€œWe don’t know anything yet,” I said, more upset