by Chuck Hogan
Donny said, "She asked to use the bathroom."
"For what, to shoot up drugs in there?"
"What do you know about shooting drugs?"
"What do you know about having a girl like that inside your house?"
"You notice, I stayed outside."
"Because you knew I was coming."
She might have been yelling. It was a possibility. She stopped speaking for a little while because she did not want to seem hysterical. Her mother was the one who got hysterical.
Tracy felt the sun boring a hole into her. "I only wish you had told me you liked girls that skinny. Girls on a sperm-only diet."
Wow. The smile stretching her cheeks felt tight as a strap. The burning in her throat was acid left over from the taste of those words.
Donny retreated to his front step and sat down. His strategy was to try and wait her out.
Tracy said, "Isn't she with Bucky Pail already?"
"I believe so."
"So one Black Falls cop isn't enough for her? Does she want to take on all six at once?"
"This is how women talk about each other when the gloves come off?"
"When one is sniffing around my man? You bet."
She then had a wild thought that he was holding back a smile.
"Am I being ridiculous?" she said, her voice getting away from her again. "Do I look ridiculous? Do I look hysterical?"
"No. You look pissed, and you have every right."
"You're goddamn right about that, mister." Mister? She nodded like she had won the argument. "Goddamn right about that." She folded her arms and walked in a neat little circle. "So what are you going to tell me? This has something to do with work?"
"That's right."
"Her walking halfway across town barefoot to your house. On a Saturday afternoon. Uninvited?"
"Completely uninvited."
She was the cop now, checking his eyes for lies. Breaking down his alibi. "But you won't tell me why."
"I don't know why."
She stopped. "Come on."
"I did not invite her here. I don't know why she showed up."
Tracy threw her hands out at him. "How do you know her at all? You're a Black Falls cop. An auxiliary patrolman, part-time!" The pounding surged inside her again. "Fine. Then why do you think she came here, to you, today, this hour?"
"Honestly? For sex. And possibly air-conditioning."
Tracy kept staring. The thought was so repulsive to her, she needed to show him how much it hurt by baring her wound. "And what about me?" she said. "Is that what I come here for?"
He very wisely declined to answer that.
"She was inside your house," said Tracy. "That no-ass trash."
Tracy remembered when Wanda repeated eleventh grade and wound up in some of Tracy's study periods and gym class. How she was always being sent to the office. A hard girl with hashed-up hair and an underage, oversexed snarl, who made out with boys between classes, right there in the hallway. When Wanda dropped out for good halfway through the year, every single girl in Tracy's class sighed with relief.
"So she's poor," Tracy said. "And we're all supposed to feel sorry for her. But, GodI could loan her a bra if she needs one. I work. I might get my knees rough working around a barn, but I don't need to live off a man."
He nodded, infuriating her.
"And me, stupid meI was coming here to apologize to you. For my mother this morning. For the way she lumped you in with the rest of the cops in town." She shook her head. "It's proof anyway that my mother doesn't know anything about us. No one diduntil today. Until Wanda fucking Tedmond. But, whatever."
It was stupid. The afternoon was ruined, the day was ruined, everything was ruined. When Tracy got disappointed like this, she always thought of her mother, who was the queen of disappointment. She remembered her scowling at Donny that morning.
"What did Pinty mean? 'If I can take it, you can too'?"
"What?" Donny said.
"This morning. See, sometimes when I sign for my mother, people talk around me like I'm deaf too. To keep you from going after the Pails, he said, 'If I can take it, you can too.' Take what?"
"I can't really get into it."
"No, of course not. Because of how critical your part-time police work in Black Falls is. I'm sorry, Donny, but this is bullshit. It's crap, this whole thing. Skinny cop-sluts coming out of your house in the middle of the day? Your truth-only pledge, which lets you dodge all the questions you don't want to answer? That's so convenient for you."
"You have every right to be angry"
"Stop agreeing with me!"
"I've been up front with you all along. I've said the whole time, once I sell this house"
"You're leaving, good-bye. I know it. I'm shrill."
She had lost herself in this relationship, happily, purposefully, using it to escape from everything else in her life. Over these past few months she had felt herself growing in ways and at speeds beyond anything she had ever experienced.
Best of all, it was an affair. A beautiful secret. She had a man.
Now the fact that he had become so much in her life so fast scared her. He was the only good thing she had, and what would that mean once he went away?
She was pissed off, she was scared, and yet she still wanted to believe him. "I don't understand," she said, "why everything has to be so undercover with you."
His patient look vanished then. Almost like she had offended him somehow.
But bitching at him wasn't going to get her anywhere. This much she had learned from her mother, from her parents' divorce.
"I can't do this right now," she said. It was only dinner they had planned, because he was working an overnight. But still: saying this took great courage. "I can't stay. Don't you see?"
"Stay," he said. "Stay and talk."
She shook her head. "I can't. I need to think, or something."
Huge and scary, walking away from him like that. She was punishing him, yes, but she was also, if he could see it, demanding respect. A drastic move, but not a deal breaker. Not a relationship ender.
She hoped.
As she drove off in her old Ford, gripping the steering wheel, this seemed like just a preview of coming attractions. How it was going to end between them for good. Which made Tracy realize, for the umpteenth time, just how far she had fallen for him.
9
HEAVEY
"I KEPT THE BOYS OUT of the pool today," said Heavey, standing over Maddox's shoulder. "I'll tell you, it wasn't easy."
"I appreciate it," said Maddox.
Maddox, in his cop shirt and cap, squatted over the impression in the dirt near the aboveground swimming pool. The rest of the backyard was grass, but the boys had worn out a track between the small skateboard ramps and the pool ladder.
Heavey said, "It's a sneaker, right? Adult size."
Heavey could tell by the outline of the tread, the way it was broken with notches. The center of the tread had not made an imprint. Heavey brought out his two pairs of sneakers, as well as Gayle's walking shoes, to prove he wasn't crazy.
With the sun going down, Maddox brightened the impression with his flashlight beam. Marks before and after it indicated tracks from the treeline along the right side of the yard to the rear of the house. Heavey said, "Ground dried up a bit today with the heat."
"Muggy last night," said Maddox, eyeing the edge of the forest. "No AC in my patrol car. Your house air-conditioned?"
"Not centrally. We've got a unit in the bedroom window. I keep it on Economy and it cycles on and off. Does the job."
"It cycled on soon after you heard the shot?"
Heavey remembered now, how after going around checking on the boys and double-checking doors and windows, he had jumped when the box started up again in his bedroom. "In fact it did."
Maddox straightened and took in the yard in the dying light. Heavey tried to see what he saw, with a visitor's eyes. The alligator float drifting in the pool, the safety-netted tram
poline, the T-ball stand, the swing set, the three matching electric cars.
"Guilty as charged," Heavey said.
"What's that?"
"Spoiling three boys. We tried not to, but I guess it's having all our kids in one shot. Treating them equally."
"I was just thinking how private it is here. The land between the homes."
"Summer leaves make it more so. Why?"
"Nothing's missing, right?"
"No, not a thing. The boys would know, believe me. If one doesn't have something that the other two have, it's Armageddon."
Heavey followed Maddox's eye back to the house. Three orange heads ducked below the sill of the upstairs den window. His boys loved to play spies.
Maddox moved toward the house alongside the approximate foot trail. Grass grew sparsely around the foundation, despite Heavey's repeated attempts at seedingsomething about drainage, too much sand in the soil.
Maddox used his beam on the ground. Right outside the boys' bedroom, he illuminated what could have been the toe half of another imprint. As from someone standing on the balls of his feet.
Maddox sized up the window while Heavey, alarmed, watched his reflection in the glass. "All right if I ?"
"Go ahead," said Heavey, and Maddox cupped his hand over his eyes, careful not to touch the window as he peered inside. Heavey explained, "We knocked down a wall to make one big room so all three boys could be together."
"Your boys sleep with a night-light?"
"A desk lamp, dimmed low."
Maddox kept looking. "And you're sure it was a woman you saw?"
"Yes. Back a couple of weeks ago now."
"If it was night, how did you know it was a woman? Could you see her face?"
"Here's what it was. I heard something outside, or maybe just felt something was wrong, one of those parental things. I came down to check on the boys, and as I open up the door, I can see something moving outside the window. Running away. I tripped over toys, getting to the window just in time to see her disappearing into the trees. Dressed all in black, thin, with long dark hair."
"A black dress?"
"No. More like a sweat suit or something."
"And sneakers."
"Apparently."
"But it could have been a man in a wig."
"WellJesus Christ."
"It couldn't have been?"
Heavey became flustered, unable even to consider it. "What I saw was a woman."
Maddox turned his flashlight beam at an angle to the window. He breathed onto the cooling glass, his warm breath revealing a few smudges and handprints. But all boy-sized.
"Neat trick," said Heavey.
Maddox turned and ran his beam over the yard to the forest, inside which it was already night. "This person ran into the trees. Where?"
Heavey showed him. Maddox skimmed his flashlight beam over the ground, but browned pine needles and last autumn's leaves obscured any footprints. "Boys play army in here," said Heavey. "I don't know if I'd build a house on the edge of a forest again. You have kids?"
Maddox shook his head, looking back at the house, then circling to the right, just inside the perimeter. He kept checking the house, maybe looking for a good view of it from the trees.
Heavey said, "Real sorry to hear about your mother. She had a fall?"
"She had been sick for a while. Her lungs. Medication made her unsteady."
"Stairs?"
"Bathroom floor."
"Most dangerous room in the house. I lost my mother two years ago this September, to viral pneumonia. I was the baby of the family. Your mother was insured?"
"Enough to cover the burial."
"Good for her. I tell you, most people around here, they've either forgotten or never learned how to plan for the future. They got no cushion in their lives. Living day to day."
Maddox found a good vantage point on the house, almost in line with the sneaker treads heading past the skateboard ramps. He scoured the ground with his flashlight beam, toeing at the soft forest floor. Heavey thought he saw something illuminated, white and small.
Maddox became very still, focusing his beam on this tiny object. Not as thick as a smoked-down cigarette butt, unless maybe it was the hand-rolled kind. It seemed important until, suddenly, with his hiking boot, Maddox scattered whatever it was back among the dead leaves, clicking off his light.
10
ZOO LADY
THE UPSTAIRS DOORBELL rang a fifth time, and Horton and Glynda scrambled back onto the front windowsill to scratch at the glass. Norman howled in despair from his pillow bed, unable to get up due to his leg splints. Felicia, the lamp-shade-collared beagle, fretted back and forth along the kitchen floor, trot-trot-trot, while Carlton, one of two skinny exracetrack greyhounds, sat up on the tea-rose-colored sofa and rhythmically sniffed the air. Belouis, a three-legged Canadian hairless, rolled onto his back on top of the refrigerator and caterwauled.
Penelope and Vernon would tear down her already shredded curtains unless somebody answered the front door. Miss Beverly shushed them to no avail, finally turning down Bill O'Reilly and shuffling through the living room to her door. She didn't realize she was barefoot until she was already out on the old black-and-white diamond tile of the entranceway, squeezing through with only two catsLucinda and Raoulescaping.
She hated her damaged feet, her blunted toes and the perpetual bruising over the arch. The town knew her only as the Zoo Lady, foster mother to a menagerie of abandoned and rescued animals, but in her former life, she had been a dancer, and a great one. She had owned apartments in both Manhattan and Paris. She had hoofed on Broadway, and never in a chorus line. She had toured all of Europe, declined marriage proposals from four separate men, and once dined with a prince. She had danced for George Balanchine and with Gene Kelly. She had affairs with two movie stars, only one of which she regretted.
It was a policeman, and he had seen her there, and it was too late to go back inside for her shoes now, not with all the yipping and scratching at the door behind her. Impossible to keep a pair of slippers with all the gnawers in the house, which was why she stored her $750 orthopedic shoes in the refrigerator. A crazy-lady thing to do, she realized, but better that than allow them to become two very expensive chew toys.
If this young gentleman was the one who would someday break in and find her gone on to her final reward, he would also discover, along with the shoes, her last will sealed in plastic in the freezer. And her two-volume autobiography, neatly typed on four reams of rose-scented paper, light on scandal but heavy on a life of accrued knowledge, Part One in the meat drawer and Part Two in the crisper.
She had once read a newspaper story about an elderly shut-in found a week after her death, her hungry cats feasting upon her body. In fact, Miss Beverly thought that would be quite all right with her. She never had a little baby of her own to feed. She only hoped she tasted good enough.
She was not surprised to see a policeman at the door, nor foolish enough to ask why. She had considered herself fortunate, after a decade of declining health and ruinous investments, to find a landlord sympathetic to her animal ministry. Of course, Mr. Sinclair could little afford to complain, given that he had been compelled by law to disclose his probationary status as a convicted child molester to all prospective tenants. So the rent was low and her infirm pets tolerated.
She pulled open the front door just a few inches, so that no one would escape into the night.
No, she answered the policeman, she hadn't seen Mr. Sinclair at all today. Though she had heard his footsteps earlier, upstairs. But nothing for a few hours now.
He seemed angry, yet paid her the courtesy of politeness, which was not often the case anymore. People today felt justified in their anger and their right to broadcast it around.
He was handsome enough, in an American way. She could still notice these things. She hoped he would be the one who would eventually find her.
"No, no message," he said, stepping back for another look up a
t Mr. Sinclair's black-curtained windows. "I'll stop back some other time."
11
FROND
FROM THE OUTSIDE, the Gas-Gulp-'N-Go looked like a bait shack with two old-fashioned fuel pumps in front. Inside, it didn't look much better. Nightcrawlers in Styrofoam cups of soil were stocked next to the butter and cream in the back coolers. The newly repealed Massachusetts blue laws meant that the liquor cabinet was no longer chained on church day. The Gulp was the only place in Black Falls where you could buy your milk, bread, newspaper, cigarettes, lottery, booze, and porn. A startling amount of porn, shrink-wrapped magazines and boxed VHS movies pasted with happy-face stickers to cover offending penetrations while leaving the rest of the image intact.
