"Do you think," I ask Drew after we are inside my kitchen and he’s reassured Jesse that we’re all safe and the neighborhood is secure, and Jesse’s bought into it even if I haven’t–

"Often," he says, pulling two mugs out of my cabinet and getting the coffee pot going because, face it, I won’t be sleeping tonight anyway.

"Very funny. Do you think that he knew me? I mean, there are what, a hundred houses in this development? He could have–"

"Two hundred seventeen," Drew says without losing count of his spoonfuls of coffee.

"So why come to mine?" I ask. It comes out more like why me? than I intend.

"Yours was the only house with a real live witch in it?" he suggests, handing me a wet paper towel like that’ll get the green gook off my face.

"I’m serious. Could his winding up on my step be some sort of clue. . ."

He stops for a moment to look at me. He tries not to smirk, or maybe he’s just trying to look like he’s trying not to smirk. "So, you mean, was it like the da Vinci Code? Was this guy sending some message by curling up in a ball on your front step, hand outreached? Like. . .?" He clearly thinks it’s out of the question – like even with the chances being one in two hundred and seventeen, it was still simply, randomly, me. Again.

Which I don’t buy. It’s hard to believe in chance and coincidence when so much crap seems to come your way. On the other hand, believing it’s your fate is even worse.

Look, I just want life to make sense. And to have some modicum of control over it. If not for me, at least for my kids.

The phone rings and I let Jesse answer it. He shouts down that it’s the psychic hotline, which I take to mean my mother, calling from her exclusive part of Long Island’s South Shore.

"Hi, Mom," I try, but her spy network has gotten to her and she wants to know why there are police cars in front of my house. I tell her I’ll have to call her back, but not to worry.

Drew takes the phone from my hand and assures her that her daughter and grandchildren are in good hands.

Just what she wants to hear.

"It’s him, isn’t it?" my mother says when I take the phone back. Before I can neither confirm nor deny, she’s on a rant. "You know," she tells me, "people have their own hairdressers, their own pedicurists. I have a floor waxer. I don’t know anyone, Teddi, who has her own detective. How did you get him over there? Put something in the kids’ loot?"

She says all this loudly enough for Drew to hear every word, and not by accident. I figure my father will have googled the whole mess by morning, so there’s not much point in trying to hide it.

"There’s a dead man on my porch, Mother," I say. "So I really can’t talk right now. We’ll talk about it in the morning."

My mother gasps and I hear her yelling to my father to pack a bag.

"Mom! No!" I try, but it’s futile. She and my father will be on the Expressway heading for Syosset in no time. Great. Just great.

I smile weakly at Drew. In turn, he pulls off my phoney nose and sits down on one of my hand-painted and trimmed with ball fringe bar stools, folding his hands over his chest like he wouldn’t miss seeing this for the world.

I offer hot cups of coffee to the two uniforms still searching around outside in ther ain, which they all decline. And I return to ask Drew about the little figurine I found. I wish I’d gotten a better look at it before the police were all over it, bagging it and screaming about me messing up the finger- prints. They, of course, hadn’t even noticed the thing.

"What about it? We don’t even know it was his," Drew says, which is true, though how else would it have gotten there? Figurines like that don’t grow on trees, despite its being found under one.

When I’m quiet, he asks if I know something I’m not telling him. I know lots I’m not telling him, like being in the same room with him makes my knees go weak, but that having fallen for sex appeal before, there’s no chance in hell I’ll make that mistake again.

But I don’t think that’s what he means.

"What if he was bringing that thing to me because he thought I’d be able to figure out who killed him if I saw it?"

Drew pretends it’s a possibility. "Could you?"

Instead of saying the truth – that no, of course I couldn’t, I say that I hardly got a look at it before it was whisked away and bagged.

"I could shoot you a picture of it by e-mail," Drew says, as if it’s a dare.

And he knows just who he’s dealing with. "I’ll give it a look. I think that Jesse might recognize what kind of figure it is. It reminds me of some of his dungeons and dragons stuff."

"So it’s probably not all that valuable?" Drew asks.