I leaned back in the chair.

The scent of lemon oil and old pine had soaked into that room for so long that it had stopped being a smell and had become the room itself.

Under the ledger was a grocery pad.

Yellow roses, it said, in her writing, followed by a list of six other things, and the last line read Diana’s coffee.

I turned the pad over and set it squarely on the blotter.

I shut the ledger and laid it on the oak desk, and the cover came down with a click that echoed through the empty house.