Here’s the thing nobody tells you about being three feet tall: everything above the waist is rumor.

Eight months on that door. Eight months of shoes and cuffs and the bottom eighteen inches of everybody who’s anybody in this town, and I’d gotten good at reading an animal from the ankle down. Badger by the gait. Weasel by the shine. A doe with money wears the kind of heel that says she has never once had to run.

So when the legs came through the door, I read the legs. Long, and long is breeding. Red, and red is money. Above that was fur coat, and coat is coat — I know exactly what a mink stole looks like from underneath, which is to say it looks like the ceiling. I did not look up. Looking up is amateur. Looking up is how you get a boot in the throat.

She said big boy, and no doe had ever called me that, and I let it go straight to the part of my brain that does the wanting instead of the part that does the arithmetic.

She was five foot eleven. I thought she was standing on something.

In my defense — and I’ve had six years of payment plan to work on this defense — the fur was somebody’s. Somebody’s aunt, going by the color. So from where I stood there was fur, and a voice like the last four bars of a slow number, and a ring with the name Rabbit on the paperwork behind it. Every one of those checked out. The evidence was fine. I just never gathered any of it above chest height.

Anyway. The case.

Roger had been gone eleven days. She said eleven the way a doe says it when she’s been counting, and I took the counting for grief. She’d been counting because of a deadline. There was paper on a quarter share of the iceberg beds out past the reservoir — Big Pete’s operation, refrigerated, hydroponic, the imported stuff that goes four dollars a leaf in the fruit-and-seed bars where bucks like me hold the door. Dead husband, she gets nothing. Live husband with a signature, she gets the quarter. That’s the whole of it. That’s the whole of every case, once you take the fur coat off.

I found him in Willowbrook Estates. Chicken wire, plastic igloo, one of those water bottles with the ball bearing in the spout. A wooden plaque with MR NIBBLES burned into it. A buck who used to move kohlrabi across three counties looked me in the eye with no recognition in it whatsoever and told me he liked the pellets because they were consistent.

I should’ve walked. But I’d already said OK to a pretty doe, and I’ve never learned how to unsay it.

Here’s why I ended up in the lake. I called from the payphone at the gas station on Route 9 to say I’d found him. Forty minutes later there were badgers in the lot wearing four hundred dollars a head of night vision, and exactly two people knew where that payphone was, and I hadn’t sold me out. Badgers cost money. Somebody about to come into a quarter share can borrow against it.

Rabbits can swim. Nobody expects that. We’re not good at it — we just don’t drown immediately, which, looking back, is the load-bearing skill of my entire career.

They got me at the far bank. What the vet wrote on the chart was Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, and he said the word twice because he liked it in his mouth. Pseudotuberculosis. Not even the real disease. Wearing another animal’s name and a fur coat, same as everything else that’s ever cost me money.

Nine thousand four hundred dollars. Seventy-two months. I’ve got a laminated card.

She got her quarter. Mr Nibbles was very cooperative — the lady with the salt lick held his foot steady for the print, and cried a little, apparently, because it was such a big day for him. Jess went to Palm Springs with Dane. Or Kane. One of the -anes. My dam always said you could tell a decent buck by whether he still had his own front teeth, and I’ll give her that: they all did. Every one. It’s just that teeth aren’t a character reference, Mom. Teeth are a tool.

She paid, though. Cash, on the doorstep, in daylight. I took it standing on the step below her, and I finally looked up, and I want you to understand that I stood there a good four seconds doing sums that any first-grader in our end of the burrow could’ve done in one.

Everybody in our end of the burrow used to let you be whoever you needed to be. Nobody mentioned there’d be a written test.

Mopsy sends a card at Christmas. Non-binary, non-Fibonacci, still a biter, and doing better than me by every measure I can name.

Some nights on the door, in the tuxedo, with the celery money in the till behind me, I think about that ball bearing in the spout. And the pellets. And how consistent they were.

Don’t let it happen to you.

COMING SOON — the second Buck Warren mystery

A Hutch of One’s Own

The pellets were consistent. The pellets were never the problem.

Eighteen months on, Buck’s off the door and onto the payment plan’s home straight, working repossessions for a seed bank and telling himself it counts as detective work. Then a woman in Willowbrook Estates calls to say Mr Nibbles has stopped eating — and would he come, because Mr Nibbles wrote a name on the newspaper lining, in pellets, and the name was Buck’s.

Roger remembers everything. Roger has remembered everything for eighteen months. And somewhere out past the reservoir, the iceberg beds are being drained a foot a night by somebody who knows exactly whose quarter share they are.

Big Pete’s badgers still have the goggles. The vet still wants his money. And this time the ceiling has a face on it.

Look up. Look down. Look at the newspaper.