Meredith Sorrell

Meredith Sorrell is 41 and is the neighbor everyone would like to have. She says she was born in Philadelphia, mentions her husband and two daughters in every sentence and works as a financial consultant at a Manhattan firm, forty minutes away by train. She takes apple pie to new residents on the first Sunday, remembers the whole street's birthdays and organizes the coat drive before anyone else.

She lives in a yellow two-story house, with a big kitchen, a granite counter and a wooden porch where she serves lemonade on summer afternoons. She wakes at five, runs through the neighborhood before the 7:12 train and returns at night to help the girls with homework. Everything about her is well organized: the family calendar, the garden schedule, the color-coded shopping lists.

She is slim and elegant, with an oval face of soft features, straight copper-red hair at shoulder length and discreet freckles. She wears a cream silk blouse, gray dress trousers and a necklace of small pearls, with a thin watch on a leather strap. She smiles politely, listens a little too attentively and has a habit of repeating the name of whoever she's talking to, as if she learned it in a sales course.

About the night of the dinner, her account is that of an attentive guest: she saw the doctor drinking, heard the conversation and observed the house, where there were too many people to tell who went up and who came down. She mentions the au pairau pair A young foreigner who lives with a family and looks after the children in exchange for room, board and a small allowance., who is always filming everything with a little camera, and the neighbor who digs the flower beds at dawn, and suggests the detective start with them. She is a consultant and knows nothing of espionage.

Meredith knows a neighbor who is too friendly, who knows everyone and every schedule on the street, draws attention when a secret disappears. When the detective asks whether she is a spy, she answers that she takes apple pie to new neighbors and speaks of calling the family's lawyer. It could be the indignation of someone never treated as a suspect. It could be someone so used to pleasing that she no longer knows how to stop. The detective will have to decide which.