But in the months I’ve spent wandering my town since my death, I have come to understand that people need meaningless chatter. They use small talk to fill the spaces between themselves and others, as the old lady’s neighbor was doing now. He prattled on in a nervous monologue about his job; his mother; his desire to do the right thing; and, most of all, his fear that he might accuse an innocent man, thus triggering an avalanche of injustice.

My god, but he never stopped talking. It was as annoying as a thousand sand flies buzzing inside my head. The chattering of monkeys would have been more soothing.

I do not trust people who talk too much.

As a detective, I pegged suspects as guilty the instant they offered unasked-for information. And I had been right, most of the time, at least before I descended into ineptitude. Guilt made people talk, as if they could regurgitate their shame in words.

None of the man’s inane chattering seemed to ripple the surface of the old lady’s calm. She was kinder than me. She understood the man’s need for contact and, perhaps, his need to exorcise the thoughts he had about the man in the park.

The trouble was, I suspected there was no man in the park. He was the man with the thoughts that should be feared. And how would I protect her if I turned out to be right?

“It’s an organized effort, actually,” he was telling the old woman, who was busy admiring her neighbors’ gardens as they walked past each. “It was started by a retired colonel. I was his first volunteer, actually. He’s in a wheelchair because of a war injury, so he relies on other people, like me.”

The old lady smiled at him. “It seems more worthy than watching television.”

They turned a corner toward the park. I hurried to keep up, an unseen interloper on their privacy. “I’ve never had a problem until now,” he told the old lady. “And I’ve been keeping an eye out for months. They make those sorts of fellows register. You can look up their names and addresses on the Internet and know right away if one lives near you. It’s public information. We keep track of them all.”

“Oh, dear,” the old lady said, her calm finally ruffled. But I could not tell if she rejected the idea of such men living near her or the idea that they were tagged for life like animals in the wild.

“What’s your name, dear?” she interrupted firmly when her new friend had gone on too long about his idea for basil ice cream, a suggestion I am certain revolted the old lady as much as it did me. “I remember what your mother looked like quite clearly, but I cannot remember her name. I am a bit forgetful these days.”

“It’s Robert,” he said. “For my father. He died when I was young. My mother named me Robert Michael Martin. She said three first names were better than one.”

“And her name was Eleanor,” the old lady remembered. “I recall it now.”

“That’s right,” the man said. “I already know your name.”

Oh, really? Then why had he said nothing until now?

“At least,” he continued, “I know part of your name. You’re Mrs. Bates.”

“But you must call me Noni,” she insisted.

Noni, Noni, Noni—no, no, no. Did your mother never tell you not to talk to strangers, not to invite them into your life?

“Isn’t the park the other way?” Noni asked when he led her down a side street.

“Yes. But if we go this way, we’ll be able to approach the bench from behind and you can study him without him even knowing, maybe get a better read that way.”

And if you do that, you’ll also be marching straight into a deserted bramble with a strange man, far from anyone who could hear you, with me as a powerless witness unable to sound the alarm. No! I wanted to shout. For God’s sake, have you been living in a bubble? You don’t even know this man and you surely don’t know what he is capable of, no one can know just by looking. Oh, the things I have seen, the moments that have turned people’s lives from triumph to terror, the decisions that have brought on suffering—how small they can be, how the smallest of choices can end a life.

“We shall go your way,” my friend Noni declared. “There are some hydrangeas on this block I have been wanting to see up close.”

A hundred thoughts ran through my head, accompanied by a hundred paralyzing images. I had seen so much violence in my life, before violence cut my life short. I had long ago learned that people had no shame when it came to inflicting pain on others. They’d murder a sweet little old lady as surely as they’d kill a soldier in his prime, all to fill some terrible void that yawned inside them. There are wounded people walking this earth, people whose souls have been poisoned and whose minds have been warped and whose selfishness has risen to such heights that they can take a human life as casually as stomping on an ant.

But what could I do about it but follow them? I had no power over the physical world, just a slight ability to influence wind and water and, sometimes, fire. Even then, my influence was meager. I could inspire a breeze, ripple the surface of a pond, maybe even create a spark or two, but none of that could stop a man. If he wanted to hurt my morning’s muse, there would be nothing I could do except witness her suffering—and I was not at all sure this was something I could endure. Having wallowed in human misery while I was alive, I was not anxious to have it follow me in death.

They were approaching the undeveloped edge of the park, hidden from the playground and picnic area by acres of untamed overgrowth. Early in my career, I used to bust men in the shadows of the ramble ahead, hauling them in for lewd conduct and indecent exposure. This was code for some poor bastard groping another poor bastard in the dark, both seeking something raw and real to counteract the charade of their lives. Back then, I’d enjoyed arresting those men with the same enthusiasm my father had reserved for hunting deer. But I was ashamed of my actions now—and I’d have given anything to encounter another human tramping among the shadows. Anyone at all. I feared for my new friend, Noni. Could she not see what this man was up to? He was a loner who had lived with his mother his entire life. Did she need a Hitchcock movie playing right in front of her to realize the truth? You’d think someone named “Mrs. Bates” would know better.

“Look,” Noni said suddenly. “Did you see that? Follow me.” And she’s leading him even deeper into the brush. It is hard to be a guardian angel given what humans bring upon themselves. She placed a finger over her lips, and the chubby man dutifully followed, tiptoeing closer as she bent forward and parted the branches of a bramble bush. “See?”

There, nestled under a protective layer of thorny branches and thick leaves, a mother rabbit had just returned to her nest of grass. Eight newborn kits crowded around her, seeking her warmth.

“They’re very good mothers,” the old lady whispered to her new friend.

Something profound rose in the man named Robert Michael Martin at her comment: sorrow, panic, need—emotions flared like a fire doused with gasoline before he pushed it all back into the past and concealed it with a rush of self-assurance.

I would have no time to wonder. The stillness of the spring morning was split by the sound of sirens, arriving from all directions. Their wails filled the air, terrifying the rabbits and flushing birds from the brush. Even I, so used to sirens when I was alive, felt a dark cloud pass through me.

“Oh, dear,” the old lady said.

“We’re too late,” Robert Michael Martin said in despair. “He’s taken someone.”

“You don’t know that,” Noni said firmly. “It could be a fire.”

It was not a fire. I reached the scene well before the pair hurrying across the park behind me. But it was a not a kidnapped child, either. Squad cars were converging on a cottage across the road that bordered the playground in the park. Already, there were three first responders at the curb and more arrived within the minute. Whatever had happened was bad—and the possibilities were made worse by the fact that the cottage did not look like a crime scene at all. It seemed more like a perfect home for happy endings. It was a white-clapboard, copper-roofed house only one story high, a modern fairy cottage among the larger homes surrounding it. The yard was well tended and in full spring bloom, though its glory would not survive the day. Already, heavy-booted patrolmen were trampling the grounds as they stretched crime scene tape from corner to corner, barricading the cottage inside a perimeter of officially sanctioned space that none could cross but the anointed.

And me, of course. No crime scene tape could stop me.

Unseen, I entered the house and found a tidy home with pink-painted walls and plump furniture heaped high with pillows. There were family photos displayed on shelves and fresh flowers in a vase set on a delicately carved table in the foyer.

Death waited a few feet beyond.

I felt it before I saw it: a flat, cold void, as if in taking life away, death had taken all the oxygen and light with it.

Death is always startling, even when you live in it. Sprawled across a pastel carpet lay the body of a small woman. In her stillness, she seemed as frail as a broken-boned bird. She had been dead for some time, perhaps as long as a day. No trace of life lingered around her.

She was lovely even in death. Her delicate face showed few wrinkles, and her dark hair flowed out behind her in thick, chocolate waves, luxurious in a way that seemed obscene in the face of death. Her skin was pale and she was dressed in the floral scrubs of a nurse. She had not voided, as so many others do in death, and I was glad for that small dignity.

Her mouth was slightly open, as if she were waiting for a kiss that would never come. Snow White without her prince. Her eyes stared up at the ceiling, as if looking through infinity and beyond. In her right hand she clutched a small, gray pistol. It was a delicate weapon that looked like a toy. But she was proof the gun was real. A bullet hole bloomed neatly in the center of her right temple, as precisely defined as if a surgeon had drilled a hole there. It seemed impossible that such a tiny opening had taken her life in an instant, but I had seen such deceptively neat wounds before. I knew they had the power to obliterate all.

As I grew accustomed to the heaviness of death, I sensed the undertones beneath it. Emotions filled me, giving me a glimpse of what her final moment had been like. I felt, strangely, a strong vein of deep love but, most of all, betrayal of the most terrible sort.

What had happened here?

Blood had seeped out in a halo around her head, staining the carpet beneath. A patrolman was kneeling by the body, examining it with the curiosity of someone confronting death for the first time. He touched her left arm, then lifted it by the wrist and checked for a pulse, even though she was clearly gone. He let the arm flop back down, out of place, and then moved to her right side. He touched one of her fingers, curled around the gun, checking it for rigor, pushing it away from its original position without realizing what he had done.

I had been careless like that once, I knew. But I still wanted to take the gun out of the dead woman’s hand and shoot the guy right then and there for maximum stupidity.

“What the hell are you doing, Denny?” a voice cried out from across the room. Excellent—maybe I wouldn’t have to shoot the dumb bastard after all. Maybe his partner would do it for me.

An outraged black woman in uniform stood at the edge of the carpet glaring down at the wide-eyed patrolman. “Get away from the body,” she ordered him. “Go stand over there by the door and remember exactly what she looked like when you first got in this room, because Gunn is going to lay you out.”

Gunn? My heart skipped a beat. Maggie was on her way.

“I didn’t touch anything,” the patrolman mumbled.

“I saw you touch her hand.”

“I was checking to see if she was breathing,” he said defensively.

“I ought to do the same for you. There’s no blood getting to your brain. Get over there.” The cop shuffled, ashamed, to a corner of the room. He mumbled something as he passed her, but his partner was in no mood to hear it. “Hell, no,” she said to him. “You’re going to tell them yourself. Look at the body, you dumbass. You might have just screwed up evidence we needed to tell us whether this was murder or suicide.”

She was right. There was something odd about the curve of the dead woman’s right arm and the way she held the gun. I’d seen many an unhappy human blown to the other side by a self-inflicted gunshot. They dropped like rocks in a pond, arms flopped out in instantaneous surrender to death. I’d never seen a suicide with an arm curved as gracefully as a ballet dancer’s. Something was off.

I tried to read the emotions lingering in the room more closely, but the emotions of the living interfered. Already, crime scene specialists had started to flood into the house, including several I recognized. Peggy Calhoun, an older woman just a few years from retirement, had arrived, even though she usually stayed in the lab to supervise her less-experienced colleagues. Her cat’s-eye glasses dangled from a chain looped around her neck and, as always, she had orange lipstick smeared on her teeth.

“What are you doing here?” the female cop asked her.

“Gonzales sent me,” Peggy explained, naming the department’s commander which, in our town’s case, meant the de facto chief of police, since our chief had long since slid into a state of moldy senility after five decades of distinguished service. I knew Gonzales wouldn’t wait much longer before he went for the top job.

“What’s Gonzales got to do with the victim?” the cop asked.

“He knows her.”

The cop stepped back, ceding the crime scene to Peggy’s expertise. But Peggy looked around the small house instead. She saw the unlived-in bedrooms and the single place setting still on the kitchen table from breakfast. “She lived alone?” Peggy asked the cop.

“Looks that way. No sign of anyone else. All the clothes in the closet look like hers. A couple prescriptions in the bathroom are made out to her, nothing big. Mild antidepressants, I think, that’s all. I checked her bureau drawers myself.” The cop looked at Peggy meaningfully. “I thought another woman should do that, know what I mean?”

Peggy nodded, understanding.

“None of the usual, you know, toys or anything. No guy stuff left lying around, no signs of outsiders at all, except for the photos.” She nodded toward a shelf where younger versions of the dead woman posed with relatives at graduations and birthday parties. “It’s not going to be easy telling all those people she’s gone. I’m hoping they live out of town so someone else has to do it.”

Peggy’s eyes filled with tears. I was surprised. She’d seen many a crime scene before. She bent over the body to disguise her lack of composure, and was examining the carpet for trace evidence when the female cop announced, “Doc and Gunn just arrived. Plus that slimy new partner of hers.”

Maggie. Salvation had arrived.