"You need to understand your position in this case," Detective Lang said.
They were sitting in Daniel's kitchen. It was the third time Lang had come by, and by now the detective didn't bother with the notebook — he just talked, the way people talk when they're trying to make sure someone grasps the shape of what's coming. Megan was at the stove, ostensibly making tea, actually listening to every word.
"Chris Marsh's attorney is going to attack the physical evidence," Lang said. "The mirror was replaced — the defense will say the damage could have come from anywhere, any time. The paint transfer is suggestive, not conclusive. The doorbell footage puts him at his mother's house at eleven-oh-three, but his mother says he was there all evening, and a jury might believe a mother."
Daniel nodded slowly. He could see where this was going, and he didn't like the view.
"What the case has," Lang continued, "is you. You're the only person who saw the truck hit Paul Jensen and drive away. Your description — the dent, the partial plate, the brake lights — led us to the truck before we had any other reason to look at Chris Marsh. Without your testimony, this is a damaged truck and a mother's alibi. With it, it's a case."
"So I'm the whole case," Daniel said.
"You're the spine of it," Lang said. He said it without drama, the way a man states a weather report. "The hearing is tomorrow at nine a.m. Preliminary hearing. The judge decides whether there's enough to bind it over for trial. Your testimony is the centerpiece. I won't lie to you — the defense knows that too."
After Lang left, Daniel stood at the kitchen window and looked out at his garden. The raised beds were coming along nicely — the tomatoes were staked, the peppers were flowering. His green chair sat by the beds where he'd left it that afternoon, angled toward the sun. In the morning, Helen Marsh's upstairs window would be watching the yard the way it always did.
Megan set a mug of tea in front of him and sat down.
"Are you scared?" she asked.
Daniel considered the question. He was not, he realized, scared of testifying — he'd rehearsed what he'd say a dozen times, and the truth was a simple thing to carry. What unsettled him was quieter: the sense that Helen Marsh had been watching him the way you watch a problem you're trying to solve. The visits. The questions. The way she'd started appearing at the fence at four o'clock, as if by coincidence, three afternoons a week.
"She's been working on me," he said.
"I know," Megan said.
That evening, Lang called back. His voice had changed — tighter, faster. The department had pulled Daniel's security footage from the morning, the gate camera, the yard camera, the hidden camera behind the garage. They'd heard the fourteen-second phone call.
"Daniel," Lang said, "I'm reclassifying this. What happened in your yard this morning is now an attempted murder investigation, and I'm taking it over personally. I need you to do exactly what I say for the next twenty-four hours. Do not go into the yard alone. Do not talk to Helen Marsh. Do not talk to her son. If either of them contacts you, you call me immediately."
Daniel looked out the window at the dark garden. The tank was gone — hauled away as evidence that afternoon — leaving a scarred patch of earth and the crushed beds.
"Detective," he said, "the hearing is still tomorrow at nine?"
A pause. "That's your call, Daniel. Nobody can make you testify. But I'll tell you this — if you don't show up, she wins. Everything she did this morning was to make sure you don't show up."
Daniel thought about the green chair, folded now in an evidence locker somewhere, and the four inches Helen Marsh had moved it.
"I'll be there," he said.
After he hung up, Megan asked what Lang had said. Daniel told her about the reclassification — attempted murder — and watched her face change. They'd both been treating the morning as a frightening but essentially property-related crime: a sabotaged tank, a destroyed garden. The words "attempted murder" rearranged the furniture in the room.
"She tried to kill you," Megan said slowly, testing the sentence. "To keep you from testifying."
Daniel nodded. "Tomorrow at nine," he said. "I'll be there, and you'll drive me."
Neither of them slept much that night. Daniel lay awake listening to the house settle, thinking about the fourteen seconds of audio, the four inches of moved chair, the twelve minutes of a phone call about a bookshelf. Small things. Ordinary things. The kind of things that only looked like a pattern once someone had tried to kill you with them.