Death Before Facebook

elegant Amaud’s, but offered a very different dining experience. It was a barn of a place out by the lake, serving all the basic seafoods and sandwiches—nothing fancy, just good. A little noisy for a meeting like this, but otherwise you couldn’t fault it.
    Lenore was the first person Skip saw when she arrived, sitting once more with Kathryne Brazil. Bigeasy was there too, already at the bottom of a beer.
    She held out a hand to Brazil and introduced herself.
    “I’m Kit,” said the other woman. “Are you new on the TOWN?’
    “I’m not on it at all. I’m a police officer investigating Geoff Kavanagh’s death—Pearce invited me.”
    Something that wasn’t delight crossed Kit’s face.
    “Oh, dear, is that a problem? Maybe I shouldn’t stay.”
    But Layne arrived and broke into an ear-to-ear grin. “Skip. Nice to see you.”
    Kit had the grace to turn pink. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. Lenore, are you okay with this?”
    Lenore nodded, somehow quieter around Kit. Submissive almost.
    “Stay, please,” said her protector.
    Layne said, “Who else is coming?’
    “Neetsie and Suby, I hope. Not Cole, of course.” He glanced at Kit, who sighed and said, “He never does.”
    “He doesn’t do F2F?” Skip said, glad she’d brushed up on the jargon.
    “It’s not exactly that,” Kit said. “Maybe I should mention that I’m his ex-wife. Could be that.”
    Skip felt gobsmacked. “You’re…
what?
Why didn’t anyone tell me?” She looked accusingly at Layne, who shrugged.
    “Can’t think of everything,” he said. “Anyway, you two just met.”
    Right. He didn’t know she knew Kit from the cult. Skip was quiet a moment, trying to process it. That would certainly explain the odd exchange she’d heard between Cole and Kit at the church.
    Pearce gave her a sly look, clearly enjoying her confusion. He signaled a waitress. “Another beer, please. Anybody else?’
    When orders were taken, Skip turned to Kit. “Do you work with computers?’
    “Me? No, I’m a nurse. I just got on the TOWN because of a private conference I knew about. And because everybody I knew was on it.”
    “Oh?”
    “Well, that was in Kansas City, if you can fathom that. There’s a really great medical conference, and the people I worked with lived and died for it. They were the ones who told me about the other one—the private conference.” Starting to relax, she smiled. “So of course when I moved here, I got in touch with all the TOWNsfolk. Great people. Suby, hi. Neetsie—I’m glad you came. I didn’t think you would.”
    The two young women had come in together, and now hugged everyone but Skip. Neetsie’s nose ring (out for the funeral, in again now) made her want to avert her eyes. She thought of herself as a rebel, and hated being such a fuddy-duddy.
    She wondered why Neetsie had it. In L.A., it would be one thing; in New Orleans, it was quite another. Here, everybody would notice. Almost no one would like it. Yet Neetsie seemed in most ways perfectly conformist. Maybe she liked stirring people up.
    That seemed hostile, but why shouldn’t she be hostile? Two murders in one family was more than the national norm.
    Skip reflected, as she did when she saw family violence, that you couldn’t know what goes on in a household.
    Once, when she’d been sent to the scene of a nasty beating, the atmosphere in the house had seemed so charged, so electric with brutality and hate, that a line had come to her, a paraphrase: “In these mean rooms a woman must live.”
    She’d thought about it later—couldn’t get it out of her mind—and it had become her phrase for unhappy households, enclosed spaces where families clawed at one another, ripped each other’s psyches open, dined on each other’s Achilles tendons: Mean rooms—where you always hurt the one you love.
    She’d walked down her share of mean streets, but not nearly so often as she walked and talked and sat in mean rooms. She saw them every day, in every case, and usually they looked and felt like any other rooms. She was quite sure those on the mean streets came out of them.
    Kit said, “I’m not as much in love with the TOWN as all these folks.”
    “Oh, Kit, you spend two hours a day on it.”
    “Two hours a week’s more like it. And that’s just because I don’t have time to have real relationships. That’s what I think’s wrong with it. It’s a pacifier. You think you’re in a relationship, but you’re