Where they stood, the morning sun was insistently bright. The air was warm. Gentle breezes stirred palm fronds into a rhythmic, benign dance. And now what connected the two of them was murder. And fear, too, she thought. But she wasn’t quite able to gather all that anxiety up into a neat package and describe it to Moth the way she had related all the details of her conversation with the West Coast psychiatrist the night before. When she told Moth all that the doctor had said, she imagined herself some sort of executive secretary of killing. Details had flooded her afterward, and she’d tried to sort through them all: You go to a college frat house party and it becomes death. You get a call from your old high school boyfriend and it becomes death. You fly to talk to an old psychiatrist and that becomes death. What’s next? Too many things were conflated together inside her head. She wanted to grasp something solid, but nothing seemed quite real to her any longer. Dead monkeys in a psych lab thirty years ago.
