corners of her eyes, and a former husband named Norm. She smoked too much and drew spirals in the air with her hands when she talked. During the time when Nora and Davey were living in the guest wing of the Poplars on Mount Avenue with Alden and Daisy, the older Chancels, Natalie Weil had intuited the emotional atmosphere within the big house and invited her grateful charges for dinner at her own raised ranch house on Redcoat Road. There Nora and Davey had eaten chili and guacamole, drunk Mexican beer, and half-attended to wrestling matches on cable while Natalie anatomized, to their delight, the town where Nora’s new husband had grown up. “See, you’re from Mount Avenue, Davey, you see this town the way it was about fifty years ago, when everybody dressed for dinner and everybody stayed married forever and nobody knew any Jews. Forget it! These days they’re all divorced or getting divorced, they move in and out of town when their company tells them to, they don’t think about anything except money—oh my God, there’s Ric Flair, one day I am going to humiliate myself and write him a really lurid fan letter. And we have three synagogues, all booming. Ric sweetie, could you be true to me?”
After selling them the house on Crooked Mile Road—a house paid for by Alden and Daisy Chancel—Natalie took them for lunch at the General Sherman Inn, advised them to fill the family room with babies as soon as possible, and disappeared from their lives. From time to time, Nora had seen her spiraling one hand in the air as she steered two new prospects up the Post Road in her boatlike red Lincoln. Six months ago, she had come across Natalie dumping frozen pizzas into a shopping cart already piled with six-packs of Mexican beer and Diet Coke, and for ten minutes they caught up with each other. Natalie had said yes, she was seeing someone, but, no, it wouldn’t amount to anything, the guy was a prune. She would call Nora, you bet, it would be great to get away from the Prune.
Two nights before, Natalie Weil had disappeared from a blood-soaked bedroom. Her body had not been left behind, like those of the other four women, but Natalie was almost certainly as dead as they. Like Natalie, they were divorced businesswomen of one kind or another, and they lived alone. Sophie Brewer was an independent broker, Annabelle Austin a literary agent, Taylor Humphrey the owner of a driver-service company, Sally Michael-man the owner-operator of a lighting-supplies company. All these women were in their mid- to late forties. The younger Chancels had installed a security system soon after they moved into their new house, and after the first two deaths, on nights Davey came home late Nora punched in the code that turned it on before she went to bed. She kept all the doors locked when she was in the house. After Taylor Humphrey’s murder, she began hitting the buttons as soon as it got dark.
Nora had heard about Sally Michaelman from an immaculate twenty-something two places in front of her at a checkout counter in Waldbaum’s, the supermarket where she had last come across Natalie Weil. Nora first noticed the young woman because she had put on drop-dead makeup and a loose but perfectly fitted linen outfit to visit a supermarket at ten in the morning. She might have been drifting past fluted columns in an advertisement for a perfume named something like Arsenic. In the baggy shorts and old blue shirt she had changed into after her morning run, Nora leaned over her cart to see what the twenty-something had put on the belt: thirty cans of gourmet cat food and two bottles of Swedish water, now joined by a third.
“Her cleaning woman called my cleaning woman,” she was saying to the woman behind her, also an armored twenty-something. “Can you believe this crap? It’s that woman from Michaelman’s, and I was in there last week, looking for a, you know—”
“That thing in your entry, that thing just inside the door.”
“For something like you have. Her cleaning woman couldn’t get in, and with all the, you know—”
She took in Nora, glared, and swooped into her cart to drop a bag of plums on the moving belt. “We might as well be living in the South Bronx.”
Nora remembered that woman from Michaelman’s” she didn’t know her name, but the woman had persuaded her to go ahead