I went back to sleep. But she was not gone for very long. It was only an hour or two later when I heard the window grating open again.

“You smell like fucking gas,” I said.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Why do you smell like that?”

“I splashed gas on my shoe when I was gassing up the Jeep,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”

And I did.

* * *

—

The cops came while we were eating breakfast. Cheap bagels, the kind that are too sweet and never toast correctly, slathered in cream cheese. There was a knock on the door, and when I answered they swarmed inside, sliding past me and filling the space, at least six or seven police officers and a gaggle of crime scene techs.

“We have a search warrant and a warrant for your arrest,” one of the officers told Bunny. “You’re charged with the second degree murder of Ann Marie Robertson. You’re also wanted for questioning regarding an act of arson at the construction project on 605 Grand Street. Please stand up and put your hands behind your back.”

“I’ll call your dad,” I said. “I’ll call Swanson.”

Bunny nodded. But she didn’t look scared. She looked somehow enlivened, bold, the way she did when she was on the volleyball court, about to slam a ball out of the sky on her new legs. As though she were proud of herself for the first time in a long time.

Bunny was taken away in a cop car, the house was searched, I gave a statement, and then I just sort of sat on the sofa. The statement had been remarkably easy to give. The detective, a different one from the detectives I had talked to in the hospital, was named Kirby, and she was the most tired-looking person I had ever seen. She questioned me like she had already reviewed the entire history of the earth and there was no longer one single thing that could surprise her. For every hyper-specific question about what we did the night before, what we ate, what we watched, when we went to bed, I told the truth. And then I simply omitted Bunny waking me up by coming through my room. It was some of the easiest lying I had ever done really. I don’t know. I’d been lying to people about what I did and where I was going for so long, and maybe I should have been anguished, but I was calm.

The background questions were more difficult to field and so I opted for total ignorance. What did I know about those apartment buildings under construction? I said I thought they were going to be pretty when they were done. Did I know Bunny Lampert owned them? I said I had no idea and I asked how an eighteen-year-old could even get a mortgage. Maybe that was a mistake, but honestly I didn’t care what happened to Ray. I hoped they found out that he routinely cheated his friends and neighbors, that he’d convinced the city council to change building codes not because it was better for the town but because it would be more attractive to the developers he had lined up. I hoped they found out he’d opened a credit card under his baby girl’s name when she was only four. I hope they found out he’d destroyed her credit and she’d never get college loans now. I hope they found out every single dirty rotten thing that man had ever done.

No, she had never mentioned them to me. No, to my knowledge she had had no input on the construction process. Did I know what Bunny wanted to be when she grew up?

“Well, a volleyball player,” I said.

The woman stared at me, then wrote this down.

I don’t know, it seemed crazy to me, this woman was a North Shore police officer and Ray Lampert was one of the most visible citizens and his daughter one of the most prominent athletes, how could she not know?

“Has she ever talked about going into business with her dad?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think it would really suit her.”

“How so?”

I didn’t feel she was trying to suss out some hidden truth from me so much as she was appalled by anyone not wanting to become a real estate agent when their daddy had it all teed up for them. “Well, I don’t know. Bunny is not very good at being slick is all. She’s a very genuine person, she’s not a sales kind of person.”

Just then there was a lot of shouting and then laughter, backslapping. They had found her clothes soaked in gasoline.

Mainly I was worried about Bunny. What was happening to her now? Were they taking her mug shot? Were they taking her fingerprints? Were they being mean to her? On the worst possible day of your life, which is the day you are arrested, you would think people could be a little softer with you, but they aren’t. It’s like you’re not human at all anymore. You got yourself into this and now it’s just fucking funny or it’s just fucking life.

“Was she seeing anyone?” the detective asked me, and I gained control of my facial muscles just a fraction of a second too late. She’d seen me tense up. If I lied now, she would think everything I’d said was a lie. If I told her the truth, she would be more likely to assume the rest was the truth, or at least this was my logjammed logic in the moment. Plus, I wanted to roll on Eric like the wheels on the bus.

“She was seeing someone, but it was a secret. Coach Eric, her volleyball coach. He’s the assistant coach at the high school, but after she was suspended her father had hired him to keep her skill set up, and eventually things turned romantic between them. But as far as I know, this was only in the last couple weeks.”

I suppose I had wanted Detective Kirby to seem surprised, or at least interested, but she just nodded and said, “We’ll talk to him too.”

“Is he going to be in trouble?” I asked.

“She’s eighteen,” Detective Kirby said, and gave me a look like I was crazy. “Is there some reason he should be in trouble that you know about?”

“I guess not,” I said, fiddling with my ear.

“All right, well, let me get your phone number and we may ask you to come down to the station again later on.”

“I’d be happy to,” I said.

I called Ray again and got his voicemail. Where the fuck was he? The search had been going on for two hours now. I had watched them cart item after item from Bunny’s room, her laptop, bags of her clothes, her school notebooks. There were two officers deep into digging through Ray’s office, which perhaps explained why he was staying far away. One of the SWAT guys was smoking out by the pool. And I thought: Isn’t that unsanitary? Isn’t that disrupting the crime scene? I saw Detective Kirby go up to him. “Get the fuck out of here,” she said.

“Let me milk this,” he said, laughing. “I’m on overtime. Give me fifteen more minutes and I can buy my girlfriend a mani-pedi.”

“Manicures cost more than you think,” Kirby said, unsmiling. “Get gone.”