She straightened. Not quickly. She had not straightened quickly for anyone in forty years, and she was not going to begin for a patrol car. She moved the hose to her other hand and let the water keep falling where it was needed, and she watched the cruiser ease the last few feet along the curb of 422 Ashbury Lane and stop.
She did not set the hose down. In the moment, that detail meant nothing at all.
It was about to mean everything.
Chapter Four
Homeowner or Help
The water reached him because she turned, and she turned because she is a courteous woman.
She saw the cruiser stop and she shifted, half a step, to face it properly, the way she would face anyone who stopped at her home, and in shifting she changed the angle of her wrist, and the fan of water at the end of the hose swung wide of the rose bed, past the fence, and freckled the leg of the officer's trousers as he came around the front of the car.
Three drops. Bright against the dark cloth. Gone to nothing inside a minute, but a minute was more time than Ryan Holt needed.
He stopped in the street and looked down at his leg the way a man looks at a thing he has decided to be insulted by. Then he looked up at her, and his voice arrived, pitched for the whole street to hear.
"Ma'am. Are you going to keep waving that thing around, or do you want to put it down and talk to me?"
Naomi lowered the nozzle so the water fell at her feet. She did not put the hose down. A small distinction, and she was a woman who lived by small distinctions.
"Good morning, Officer," she said. "You are wet. I am sorry about that. It was my hand turning, nothing more."
"Three drops is what it was." He came two steps closer, to the fence line, not through the gate. Not yet. "Do you live here?"
"I do."
"Then this will be easy." He hooked a thumb in his belt, a gesture he had practiced in mirrors and in a thousand doorways, and let his eyes travel from her face to the house behind her, the wide porch, the two floors, the carriage lamp still burning by the door, and back to her face again, and the journey his eyes took said things his mouth had not yet gotten to. "Identification."
"May I ask what for?"
That landed wrong. She could see it land. His jaw set, and the rookie, Price, out of the far side of the cruiser, went still the way young men do when they hear a tone from the training videos.
"You may ask," Holt said, "and I may ask you again, slower. Identification. Something with your name and this address on it. Proof you live here."
"Proof," she repeated, without heat. She had heard the word in her courtroom ten thousand times, offered by people who did not have it. "Officer, I am standing in my own front yard, in my dressing shoes, watering my own roses. The mail in that box has my name on it. The woman across the street is watching us from her porch, and she will tell you I have lived here longer than you have been on the force."
"Then getting proof will take you one minute," he said. "Unless the proof is the problem."
Across the street, Evelyn Porter's screen door sighed shut, and Evelyn took her place at the porch rail with the air of a woman who has kept the records of this street for forty years and recognizes the exact moment a morning becomes a memory.
"Let me ask it plain, then," Holt said, and now he smiled, and the smile was worse than the stare had been. "Are you the homeowner, or are you the help?"
The street heard it. The rookie heard it. Somewhere a sprinkler ticked and went on ticking.
Naomi Greer did not answer at once, and her silence was not hesitation. Anyone who had ever watched her work could have told him that. It was the silence of a woman setting a thing down carefully on the record of her mind, in order, where it would keep.
In her cardigan pocket, her phone began to buzz.
She felt it against her hip, two pulses, a pause, two pulses. Aaron. Her son called most mornings on his way to the station, paramedic hours, a ritual sturdier than most marriages, and he would be frowning at his dashboard right now, wondering why she had not picked up, because she always picked up by the second ring.
She did not reach for it. Reaching meant looking away, and she had decided she was not going to look away from this man first. Whatever this was, it was going to be met standing still, with her eyes open, in her own yard.
The phone buzzed again, longer this time, and stopped, and the silence it left behind was louder than the ringing.