We didn’t hear the detective knock. Freddy was reading in his room. I was almost done working on a new painting in my studio, a figurative experiment, though it was getting too dark to see anything clearly.

When no one answered the door, the detective walked along the side of the house and tapped on the window over my desk. His appearance was so unexpected that I assumed it must have something to do with the hurricane that started pounding us with rain and wind the night before. Maybe he was from the electric company. The electricity was off, which I didn’t mind in the daytime, but it unsettled me at night. I liked it to be dark out, not dark in. 

The detective was short and pudgy and wet from the rain. He looked cold and miserable, trying to hide from the wind on our front porch. He didn’t take his hat off and hold it in his hands in front of him, like a real detective. So I didn’t invite him inside. 

He told me that all the neighbors in the houses on either side of us had been shot and killed by an unknown assailant who was still at large. The entire Muñoz family of five on the downhill side, as well as Sandrine and her tenants, a friendly couple from Florida who took lemons from the tree at the end of our driveway and made big batches of delicious limoncello, on the uphill side. All of them were dead. The detective had no further information. 

“You’ve caught me by surprise,” I said. “Is this real?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t answer any questions,” said the detective. 

There was an awkward pause when it occurred to me that the poor man had seen all eight dead bodies. He asked me who lived in the house with me, our whereabouts during the last twenty-four hours, and whether we’d heard anything unusual. I told him I lived with my husband and our two teenage sons, Freddy and Karl. Actually, Freddy just turned twenty and was visiting from college for the weekend, but that felt too complicated to explain. My husband was still at work and Karl was on his way home from school.

I hadn’t seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. “The hurricane is out of the ordinary, so maybe everything that’s happened since it began is extraordinary,” I said.

The detective shook his head. He didn’t want to talk about the hurricane. Maybe he expected to find more bodies at our house. Particularly when no one answered the door. 

“As a courtesy, we’re going to post two squad cars on the street, one at each end of the block. Just as a safety precaution, to ensure your safety,” he said. “It’s a courtesy.”

Before I could thank him, the lemon tree at the end of the driveway fell into the street, its roots torn violently from the earth, pulling the phone and cable lines down. The mess of wires slapped against the wet pavement.

“Fuck me,” said the detective. He wiped his brow. “Excuse me, ma’am.”

“Not at all.”

I said something about our poor tree as he walked out to the curb and slid into the driver’s side of an SUV. The entire block was full of emergency vehicles—maybe a dozen of them. The violent storm had brought on the murders, which led to the proliferation of detectives.

I locked the front door and called out to Freddy, who didn’t answer. I ran up to my bedroom. From the window I watched a tall man in a blue hoodie walking in the sad alley behind the house. He was soaking wet. I could see his blank eyes and mottled skin and his miserable expression. If I were in his situation, I thought, I might be able to kill someone just to get indoors and stop walking around in the hurricane. I was upset about the neighbors and the electricity and the lemon tree, that’s why I was thinking crazy stuff. Also, Karl wasn’t home yet. If all four of us were at home I would have felt less uneasy.

The man stopped at our back fence. He looked so cold.

“What’s up?” Freddy’s deep voice rang out from the covered patio below.

The man raised his chin in acknowledgement, and then took another couple of steps. But he stopped again, as though he’d had a second thought, and he turned back to Freddy. 

Involuntarily, I tapped on the bedroom window. The man looked up and our eyes met. I was afraid of him, a stranger out in the rain alone, in no apparent hurry. I wouldn’t have been afraid if I’d seen him before the detective came and I realized that maybe I hadn’t heard the armed assailant at our door and that’s why Freddy and I were still alive.

The tall man trudged on through the wet weeds and mud to the top of the alley. Off to lord knows where.

When I went downstairs again, the detectives had multiplied. There was a massive huddle of them in the street. Uniformed officers were going back and forth between their cars and our neighbors’ houses. I stood on the porch watching the downpour fall through the darkness. Even the streetlights were out. All my neighbors were dead. The lemon tree was dead. Somehow I had to get back to my studio and finish that painting. 

When Freddy and Karl were small they loved to climb into the lemon tree and toss the fruit down to us in the driveway. Every year the tree bore so much fruit. Enough to share with all the neighbors who cooked with lemons or who wanted to make lemony drinks and desserts. We never had to buy lemons. There were always a few ripe ones. Now the poor tree lay in the road.

“What a mess.” Freddy joined me on the porch.

“Unreal,” I said.

“Why are there so many detectives?”

“They’re looking for a guy. Let’s go inside.”

I locked the door behind us. I was describing my new painting to Freddy when my husband came in the back way carrying Sandrine’s cat. 

“The police told me what happened so I thought I’d grab Poncho. I always liked this little guy.” He placed the cat on the kitchen counter. 

“They let you in the house?” I said.

“It’s pretty gruesome over there.” He stroked Poncho’s back. “Our poor lemon tree is kaput.”

“The electricity is out. I guess that’s obvious.”

“Do we have candles?” he said.

“I don’t know where. I should have looked while there was still daylight.”

The three of us had gathered around the cat and took turns scratching his soft little ears.

“I want to go meet Karl when he gets off the bus,” I said. “I’m sad about our neighbors.”

“I’m staying home with Poncho,” said Freddy.

“But it’s so dark in here.”

“Mom. It’s dark everywhere.” 

“I know. I can’t stand it. I can’t work on my painting.”

Freddy rifled through cabinets looking for candles.

My husband and I put on raincoats and boots and walked through the alley and down toward the bus stop. The streetlights were out, all the houses were dark, and we passed another downed tree. A big cedar.

Up ahead of us were two figures stopped on a corner. One of them was Karl. We picked up the pace.

Karl appeared to be pointing a knife at the chest of the tall man from the alley. He waved when he saw us. The tall man took the opportunity to walk away from Karl. We ran the last fifty yards.

“Who was that?” asked my husband.

“Some sus guy. He asked me where I lived so I pretended I was lost and asked him for money.” Karl was sixteen and thought this was funny. He folded up his Swiss Army knife and returned it to his pocket.

“Trying to get yourself killed?”

“Mom. Shut up,” said Karl. 

“My little armed assailant.”

“Freddy texted to say all the neighbors got murdered,” said Karl. “I couldn’t tell if he was being serious.”

“Not a joke,” said my husband.

The three of us walked home through the dark. I kept trying to hold Karl’s hand. He let me take it but then I’d squeeze too hard and he’d pull away.

Our street was still crawling with detectives. Freddy came running out of Sandrine’s house with a box of twelve-inch ivory tapers.

“Freddy, what on earth are you doing in there? It’s a crime scene!” I said.

“Mom. Relax. The detectives let me take Sandrine’s dinner candles,” he said. “She keeps them in a kitchen drawer, like a normal person.”

The tall man from the alley who Karl threatened with a knife rounded the corner and slid into the passenger seat of the squad car parked at the top of the block. Another detective.

I went back into my studio to finish my new painting by candlelight. I wanted to have some recent work completed just in case the armed assailant turned up again and I didn’t survive the encounter. But soon Karl interrupted me because he remembered that the Muñoz’s had a pingpong table in their basement. So I ordered a pizza with sausage and green peppers to be delivered and we gathered up Sandrine’s candles and headed down to play.

Karl tapped on the squad car window to say “no hard feelings” to the tall detective. He invited him to come play the first game but unfortunately the detective said no, he had to work.

“Join us later if you get a break,” said Karl.

A wave of maternal pride washed over me as I watched this exchange from the sidewalk. I was proud of Karl for extending an olive branch to the detective after going too far with his Swiss Army knife.

The hurricane continued to blow all night. In the morning the lemon tree was gone, more neighbors were gone, and more detectives had come to take their places. I finished my painting, though it didn’t turn out to be as much of a departure from my previous work as I hoped. The assailant, or assailants, remained at large.

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Samantha Peale is the author of the novel The American Painter Emma Dial. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, LA Times, Los Angeles Review of Books and other places. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches screenwriting at Chapman University.