by Candice Fox
“I found a syringe back there once,” she said, her lip curled in disgust. “I was walking McKinley back there, you know, along the stream. And there it was. Cap off and everything. I’ve heard junkies frequent the place. That there are drug deals, maybe.”
“Oh.” I looked concerned. “Well, it could have washed up the creek. You never know. We haven’t substantiated anything about drug deals at the bar yet.”
“It’s so dangerous,” she said distantly. “I hate junkies. If you want to waste your life, don’t try to waste mine, too. I could have stepped on it and caught who knows what. Or the dog might have stepped on it. Or some kids playing in the—”
She caught herself. Looked at me, her eyes wide.
The foot, once again firmly in place.
“It’s…” I struggled for words, my face growing hot. “It’s fine, Lila.”
“Oh, no.” She put her hands to her mouth. “I didn’t mean—”
“I get it.” I smiled. “It must be awkward.”
“So awkward,” she sighed with relief, leaned forward. “I don’t know how you stand it. It’s like a big fat elephant, following you around the room, everywhere you go! It’s like when someone’s got a huge scar down the middle of their face and you don’t know whether you should mention it or not. You know what I mean? I’m rambling now. I should stop. It’s just, I feel bad for you. I didn’t know who Amanda Pharrell was the other day or I’d have probably felt the same way when she came to question me. Her being a murderer—that’s even worse, isn’t it?”
I had no words.
“I guess that’s why you guys hang out, right?” She winced. “Safety in numbers. Everywhere you go, people know who you are. What happened. Or didn’t happen! I mean. Oh. I’m so sorry.”
I stood, folding my notebook shut. “Thanks for your time, Lila. I’ll let you know if anything else comes up.” I tried to hold a smile as I made for the door. She walked me out, hanging her head the whole time in shame.
I stood in the street and looked up at the canopy, tried to breathe. I made a promise to myself that if I was going to do one thing that day, I was going to work on the investigation I was hired to without my past getting in my way. Without someone getting distracted by the huge scar down the middle of my face that no one knew whether or not they should mention. I trudged to the middle house in the row and knocked again, but again no one was home. I was exhausted by the time I reached the furthest property, a run-down house with a warped roof ticking in the heat of the day.
Something brown and furry scampered away into the long grass as I approached the front door. I could hear a television playing loudly inside. I knocked and it switched off, and a woman answered. She was rotund and dressed in a pink cotton nightie sprinkled with little black flowers. She observed me for a few seconds without speaking, tugging at the already stretched collar, exposing her fleshy upper chest.
“Oh, I’m sorry.” I looked at her bare feet. “I seem to have caught you at a bad time.”
“No you haven’t.” She smiled, exposing yellowed teeth. “Come in.”
I paused, seeming to have lost my grip on the situation, the order of things. I glanced toward the road.
“I’m, uh. I’m Ted Collins. I’m here with the investigation into—”
“Come inside! I’ll get you a drink!”
One witness who couldn’t ignore who I was. One witness who didn’t seem to care at all who I was. I was in a fairy tale, the wolf going door to door, threatening and friendly in turns, uncovering secrets and trying to decipher riddles.
I entered the house, skirted a heap of damp newspapers in the hall, walked cautiously into the cluttered living room. There was no telling which television had been blaring the show, as four old-fashioned ones in wood-veneer boxes had been stacked in a tall tower before a window covered with a sheepskin comforter. On a low table before an armchair covered in quilts, an army of ants was slowly dismantling a pile of yellow corn chips. I was sweating profusely within seconds, the blankets over all the windows creating a bubble of heat expanding beneath the ceiling.
The woman walked to the fridge and poured me a glass of chocolate milk in a scratched plastic glass. I held it thankfully, not willing to do much more. As she turned and went back to her armchair, I stood rigid in the doorway. There seemed to be nowhere for a guest to sit unless they were willing to brush stuffed toy animals off the many low side tables or perch on the top of a stack of sewing magazines.
“I was wondering if—”
“You can sit down if you want,” she said. She gestured to the carpet at my feet. I glanced down the short hall to the front door, trying to decide how best to get out of the quicksand of a situation I found myself in.
“Do you know anything about the murders at the bar behind this property?” I asked. “A couple of nights ago, there were some shootings. I believe police have come and chatted with you, but from what I’ve been told you haven’t really, uh. You haven’t been willing to say much.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?” the woman asked. Avoiding eye contact, I noticed a stack of envelopes on the floor in the corner. They were addressed to Ms. Mona Wallgreen.
“You’re Ms. Wallgreen, is that right?” I asked. “Were you home on the night of the shootings?”
“I don’t leave here very much,” she said brightly, taking one of the remotes beside the chip bowl covered with ants. There were five of them. I looked around for the fifth TV. A puzzle piece missing. “I don’t have a boyfriend. I could go out on dates if I had a boyfriend. We could go to the movies and hold hands.”
I decided I was underqualified for interviewing Mona. I went to the kitchen doorway, putting my glass of chocolate milk on the edge of the sink.
“Mona,” I said. “I’m going to go. I’m running late for an appointment. But I might send back another officer. I hope you’d be willing to—”
The click of a gun. I froze, my hand on the glass, half my body in the living room, half in the threshold of the filthy kitchen. The sound was unmistakable, yet it didn’t make sense in the absurd environment in which I stood. I tried to convince myself that Mona had simply turned the television on, my hand still frozen on the glass, ants wandering up from the sink top toward my fingers. As I let the glass go and turned slowly back around I saw that Mona had a gun pointed right at me. A huge chrome magnum revolver, a Desert Eagle, I thought, though I could barely look at it, the terror was so fast and heavy in my chest. Mona held the gun out from her body like a practiced gunslinger, her flabby arm outstretched.
“Bang, bang!” She smiled. I jolted at the words, sweat now pouring down my body beneath my shirt, making the fabric stick to my back.
“Mona,” I said gently. “Is that thing loaded?”
She still had the remote in one hand. She turned the television on without looking at it. I half expected the “Do You Feel Lucky?” scene from Dirty Harry to come on. She had this calm, cheerful look to her face. But a portly man with a shiny bald head was simply reading the economic forecast. Mona put down the remote and picked up another revolver from the table on the other side of the armchair, out of my view. Another revolver, a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson. She pulled the hammer back and pointed the two guns at me.
“Mona,” I said, trembling. I was having flashes, not for the first time that week, about what an investigation into my murder would entail. Whether anyone would ever even bother prosecuting this woman for it. Whether Kelly would come to my funeral. “Please put the guns down.”
“Watch this,” she said. I braced for impact, a slug in the guts or chest, tearing through bones and organs. But instead, the barrels of the guns flipped. She twirled the two revolvers on her index fingers expertly, her tongue wedged between her lips, giving each a dozen or so spins before jamming them simultaneously down the sides of the armchair cushion as though inserting them into holsters. I watched as she quick-drew them again, spinning them out to aim them both at me, then spinning them back into the imaginary holsters.
“Pretty cool, huh?” she asked.
I nodded. She performed the trick a couple more times, sending shocks of fear down my body whenever the aim of the guns came up to me, her greasy hair waving at the sides of her plump face as her body worked the weapons. She pointed the guns at the television sets, pretending to pop off rounds at her reflection in the gray glass. “Pow, pow, pow.”
In time, I inched over and asked her as softly and calmly as I could to hand the guns to me. She did, and I clicked their barrels open.
They were fully loaded.
I stood in the sun outside Mona Wallgreen’s house for a couple of hours giving the story of what had happened inside to hostile, uncomfortable officers of every level while her property was searched. Sweeney arrived and heard my tale, taking furious notes to back up her recording. Mona had given permission for her property to be searched, so a warrant wasn’t needed. But I got more and more uncomfortable with the situation as officers began bringing clear evidence bags out of the house and loading them into the back of a truck. There were dozens and dozens of guns. Inside the house I could hear Mona mumbling and shuffling about as she directed the quietly shocked officers to another cache of weapons, and then another, and then another. She had long, antiquated rifles and sawn-off shotguns and small, ornate derringers with ivory handles. The officers coming in and out of the house kept exchanging flabbergasted looks with one another, wondering, it seemed, when the collection would end. The guns were coming out from beneath couches and down from on top of shelves and from behind lumps of meat in the freezer that appeared to have been there for decades.
“Two of my officers came and visited her the other day,” Sweeney said. “And she gave them nothing. Wouldn’t let them in. And Amanda said she had the door slammed in her face. But you”—she squinted at me—“she let you right in? Why?”
“I think she might have liked the look of me,” I said uncomfortably. “There were hints about the position of boyfriend being available.”
Sweeney wiped her mouth, and I couldn’t tell if she was stifling a laugh or not.
“What do we know about her?”
“She’s Mona Wallgreen.” Sweeney flipped a page of her notebook. “Forty-seven. She was being cared for by her father until he passed away a couple of years ago. That’s all anyone really knows. I assume the guns were his. We’ll have to run them all, see where they came from.”
“Right.”
“What do you think?” Sweeney glanced toward the trees through which the Barking Frog stood. “She goes over there wanting to perform her gun show and pops them both?”
“Would explain the money on the roof,” I said. “Doesn’t look like Mona needs or wants cash.”
“Doesn’t explain how she knew to lie Keema and Andrew on their bellies, hands clasped behind their heads. That’s classic law-enforcement behavior, directing them to do that.”
“Maybe.” I shrugged. “Maybe we’re assuming too much. Maybe they just got down and did that. Instinct. Something they’d seen people do in the movies.”
“Hmm.” Sweeney nodded.
“Although I reckon we’re up to about thirty guns come out of that house so far,” I said, watching a pair of officers trying to fit the magnum into an evidence bag. “And not a single nine millimeter yet.”
Sweeney’s chief arrived, and after a brief hello to Sweeney, ignoring me, he wandered into the house. Mona came out the front door, accompanied by a short patrol officer, and bent at the waist, pointing to something under the house. The officer looked weary. I felt his pain. There was a lot of paperwork ahead for these guys.
“I’m, uh.” I debated whether to step in or not. “I’m getting a little worried about this.”
“About what?”
“The search.”
“Why?” Sweeney glanced up at me. “She gave her permission.”
Mona had indeed acquiesced to the search after I’d suggested to her that it was a good idea to let officers in. As her imaginary boyfriend, she’d taken my word.
“But she’s clearly got some mental problems.” I gestured toward Mona in her pink nightie. “The defense will argue she couldn’t give consent for the search and anything you find will be tossed out. I’ve seen it happen.”
“Oh.” Sweeney nodded. She looked vaguely embarrassed. “Of course.”
“If you find the murder weapon now, you risk it being—”
“I get it, Ted. I get it,” she huffed. Her chief wandered back over, and Sweeney straightened like a soldier coming to attention, her lips taut.
“I think we should halt the search,” Sweeney said before her chief could open his mouth. “There may be an issue with Ms. Wallgreen’s capacity to consent to a search. It was a mistake to go in. I’m going to give the order to pause here, and we’ll get an emergency warrant rushed through.”
“Right,” Chief Clark said. “Exactly as I was about to say. The woman looks like she’s lost her bloody marbles. I’ll tell the guys inside, and you can spread the word out here.”
Sweeney nodded and went to the officers near us to spread the message. I went along with her, feeling guilty.
“Pip,” I said and caught her arm when we were out of earshot of the others. “I didn’t mean that to sound patronizing.”
“No, no,” she sighed. “It wasn’t patronizing. It was correct. I just wish I’d known it myself. I’m just out of my depth here.”
“I spent most of my time as a cop completely out of my depth,” I said. “I think it’s in the job description. You’re fine, Pip. You’re right where you need to be.”
She laughed a little and rubbed my arm, taking off to continue stopping the search. I don’t know if she really believed me.
Getting home was a relief. Dale wasn’t there. I’d let the geese out before I left and they had gathered in the shade under the porch. I crouched before them and Woman hissed at me in greeting.
“I nearly got shot dead today by a crazy shut-in with cowboy skills,” I told her. “What did you guys do?”
The geese waddled out from under the porch, inspired by my presence, and started pecking at the lawn. Woman walked with me behind the main group, listening while I updated her on the Barking Frog case. We came to the wire fence and stood for a while side by side, man and goose, looking for signs of danger on the surface of the water. When we found none I went to the little tub of goose food I kept on the porch and unclipped the lid, filled a cup with the mixture of grains, pellets, and dry grass. The geese mainly lived on the fresh grass of my lawn, but this mixture kept them fat and happy, and it was a good tool to get them to go where I wanted them to if I had to herd them back into the playhouse or up onto the porch quickly. I shook the cup and they came waddling toward me as fast as they could, all except Woman, who wasn’t so easily driven into a frenzy. As I walked the cup of mixture back down to the lawn, I saw Dale Bingley appear from around the side of the house, sweaty like he’d been out walking in the heat.
We said nothing. The crackling tension of the night before wasn’t there, but I knew it could swell to cyclonic levels in an instant. He stood beside me as I scattered the lawn with the mixture, the geese huddled before me, pecking and sifting through the grass.
“Do they have names?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, clearing my throat. My face was reddening. “But they’re not. Uh. I mean, I’m the only one who lives here so I named them things only I really understand.”
He stared at me.
“That’s Squishbird,” I admitted, pointing to a bird. “She always used to end up squished in the huddle when they’d sleep at night beside their mother. Sometimes all the other birds would pile on top of her, covering her completely.”
“Squishbird,” Dale said. I thought I marked the tiniest flicker of a smile at the corner of his mouth. This was humiliating.
“Bitey Bulger.” I pointed to another bird. “Like the gangster. Whitey. Whitey Bulger.”
“He bites?”
“Not
hard.” I put my hand out. As usual Bitey rose up and started biting the side of my hand and wrist, snapping my fingers in short, tugging nips. “He’s always done it. I don’t know why. Maybe it feels good.”
Dale watched as the bird returned its attention to the grass. I looked at the cup half full of mixture in my hand.
“Here,” I said. I put a hand out. Dale stared at the hand. I waited. Our long shadows in the morning sun were sentient on the grass before us.
Dale put his hand, palm up, on mine. I tipped some mixture onto his palm. He crouched, and the birds flocked to his hand, long necks shivering with excitement, ducking and pecking at the mixture in turn, great gobbling beakfuls.
I thought I heard Dale laugh.
Dear Diary,
I walked to Penny’s front door with the dog in my arms like a fairy-tale peasant come to put an offering before the queen. I remember the feel of her, warm and struggling against my chest, a young dog who just wanted to explore the new sights and smells of the front of the house. I thought she’d have plenty of time to do that. I thought I was bringing her to where she’d belonged all her small and miserable life, the pencil drawing of the dog made real as though by magic.
Penny’s mother, Andrea, opened the door, and it all went wrong in a matter of seconds.
“I live next door,” I explained after the initial smiling pleasantries, the white dog licking my ear. “I know this is a bit weird but my … my sister owns this dog here, Princess, and she’s taken off to England with her husband. I know your daughter—Penny, is it?—I know she’s wanted a dog for a while now, so—”
“I’m sorry.” Andrea shook her head once like she was struggling to understand. Her expectations of what I’d come to the door for turning, flipping. “What’s going on? Your sister…”
“My sister’s abandoned this dog.” I laughed, and knew it sounded forced. Tried to reel it back. “She’s kind of dumped it on me. She’s in England now. She went with her boyfriend. Her husband.”
