Stray Narrow

by Jerusha Jones

  Sheriff Marge always looks tired. But today her awkwardly slumped form—still stiff in the middle due to her ballistic vest—and elbows plonked heavily on the table in front of her presented a new low in that characteristic. I assumed she hadn’t slept overnight. The Styrofoam cup of coffee in front of her wasn’t going to cut it, but I didn’t have anything more substantial to offer her. I’d sent our brown-bagged snacks upstairs with Burke that morning, and I assumed they’d been devoured in short order.

  Unless…I pulled my phone from my pocket and fired off a quick text to Frankie.

  After directing Burke toward a metal folding chair opposite from Sheriff Marge, I stepped up to the long counter and began the requisite preparation of a packet of hot cocoa. I made one for myself too, needing the sugar boost and dopamine hit.

  I kept glancing over my shoulder at the pair of them, thinking the sooner we could get this over with, the better. But Sheriff Marge was silent and seemingly engrossed in studying the tendrils of steam that wafted off her coffee while Burke was hunched in his chair, hands wedged under his thighs while his feet swung freely, only the tip of one shoelace actually dragging on the black and white tiled floor, and his profile wholly obscured by his mop of hair.

  He was so small. So very small.

  I hurried, and noisily slid out a seat for myself after depositing the cocoas on the table.

  Sheriff Marge cleared her throat and clicked a button on a small black gadget that she’d propped in the middle of the table—an altogether different type of centerpiece.

  She rattled off all our names as the people present and the date and time.

  Then she heaved a great sigh. “Burke,” she said steadily, gently, “we found your cabin today, and packed up most of your things. You had a lot of books up there.”

  To that, Burke nodded, and he peeked up at her from under the fringe of hair.

  “You dad was a professor?” she queried.

  Burke nodded again.

  “Son, please answer audibly.” Sheriff Marge pointed at the eavesdropping gadget. “This thing is pretty good, but it can’t hear silent.”

  “Yeah,” Burke whispered.

  “How long had you been living up on Gifford Mountain?”

  “Since I was eight,” he whispered.

  I nudged the cup of cocoa closer to him, worried that he hadn’t even acknowledged its existence yet when edibles usually had such an extremely short shelf life in his vicinity.

  “About two years and three months, then?” Sheriff Marge prodded.

  My eyes widened. It sounded like she knew Burke’s birth date, to be so precise. And about the instigating factor that had prompted Burke’s father to flee civilization.

  She just shook her weary head at me with a faint trace of an exhausted smile. Not now, she was sending out on our merged wavelength, don’t ask me now.

  My body language must’ve been easy to read. I bit my lip and leaned back in the seat, pretending I was comfortable when all my muscles were screaming to fidget. What else did she know?

  “So you were holding the fort for your dad?” Sheriff Marge continued, not really waiting for Burke’s reply to the previous question—not necessary, I supposed, when she already knew the answer.

  Burke nodded again, silent. But then he ventured, “You saw her, didn’t you?” And he was gazing steadfastly at the worn and weary woman across from him.

  It was Sheriff Marge’s turn to nod. “She was still there. We’re taking care of her now.”

  “I tried to,” Burke whispered. “But she was—” His little body spasmed and a haunted expression gripped his features, turning those big mineral eyes into fathomless, ageless depths of sorrow.

  I scooted over and wrapped an arm around him.

  “She was dead,” he finished simply, leaning against me.

  Then he was burrowing into me, clinging desperately, giant hiccuping sobs racking his little body.

  I had an armful—a lapful—of devastated boy, a lead anchor of grief that was sinking into my own soul. I had no barriers against this kind of pain, and I realized I was shedding my own tears into his hair.

  “Did you know her?” Sheriff Marge persisted a minute later, after she’d slugged her coffee, removed her perpetual reading glasses, and dragged her fingers across her eyelids before resettling the glasses. She was resolute. This had to be done—the questioning.

  Burke shook his head, his face mashed against my collarbone. I wasn’t letting go of him for anything.

  “The witness is shaking his head in the negative,” Sheriff Marge murmured for the benefit of the recorder. “When did you first see her?”

  “When she got out of the pickup truck. With those two men.”

  Sheriff Marge shifted. It was subtle, but Burke’s answer disturbed her. Was it not what she’d been expecting? And his words reminded me of that non-sequitur question he’d asked earlier—if bad people always went to jail. Had he been testing to see if he could trust Pete and me with the dreadful knowledge he carried?

  “Did she seem afraid, worried?” Sheriff Marge asked.

  Again Burke rubbed his head against my collarbone as he reclined against me. I was going to get a groove there. “Not at first. But later, yes. She screamed.”

  “Okay, Burke,” Sheriff Marge finally uttered, after the horror of his short comment had sunk in. “I want you to tell me everything you saw and heard that day, from the very beginning. We’ll go slow, and you can think about it. I’m hoping that if we do it this one time, you won’t have to worry about it ever again. But I need your help to catch those men. Can you do that for me, and for the lady who was killed?”

  She was holding his gaze solemnly across the table, and it was like two ageless depths had met their match. I was the lone spectator and witness to their grave agreement when Burke finally rubbed his head the other way on my collarbone—up and down.

  CHAPTER 12

  Pete came in a few minutes later, the wrapped sandwiches I’d asked Frankie to order in his hands.

  Dennis Durante, the owner and pseudo-chef of Willow Oaks, a vineyard and wine-tasting facility on the banks of the Columbia River that also happened to house a wood-fired oven and small restaurant, was doing the catering for the wedding reception. He’d been in and out of the museum all day, getting things set up, so I’d hoped he’d also be able to provide us with a little extra sustenance on short notice. He’d come through with flying colors.

  Surprisingly—or maybe not—Burke was able to devour a sandwich while also providing the gruesome play-by-play of that day on Gifford Mountain. That day the woman had been killed. As though his stomach was made of iron.

  Mine wasn’t, and I only picked at my pastrami with provolone, sprouts and creamy dill aioli on sourdough while still cradling the ravenous boy in my arms. Pete had settled beside me, with his free arm resting along the back of my chair.

  Pete smelled tired—a strange combination of pine sap and fresh air and sweat and car exhaust and a plastic-y odor, like the fumes put off by a new tent—or maybe that’s the peculiar scent of body bags. I shuddered, and his hand clamped warmly on my shoulder. We certainly made a bizarre picture of a family unit, the three of us.

  But the boy on my lap was already demonstrating inexplicable resilience, keeping up his end of the hard bargain he and Sheriff Marge had agreed upon.

  “Black,” he replied, his mouth full. “The pickup was black, a Dodge Ram, with a tiny gold pinstripe running down the whole length and no tailgate.”

  Have I mentioned that Burke misses nothing? That fact was apparently just as true eleven days prior as it was in that moment, as he recited pristine details with ease. He’d provided the date and a very close estimate of the time when the pickup and its occupants had intruded into the peaceful valley where he’d been patiently waiting for his father to return.

  Sheriff Marge was scritching madly in her notebook, also ignoring her sandwich, as though the recorder wasn’t fully reliable and that somehow seeing Burke�
��s testimony in blue ink would make the clues line up in logical order in her mind.

  “Old? Dented?” Sheriff Marge prompted, and in so doing described about ninety percent of the vehicles in Sockeye County.

  But Burke shook his head. “Pretty new. Dirty on the lower parts because it’d been driven on logging roads, but shiny above the splatters, like it’d been waxed or something.”

  “Washington plates?”

  Burke had to think for a moment—I felt his little rib cage expand against mine with a deep breath—then he said, his voice smaller. “Yes, but I don’t know the number.”

  Sheriff Marge squinted at him briefly, as though testing his veracity, then returned to her vigorous note taking. “No problem. Tell me about the people inside the pickup.”

  “Two men and the…and the…lady,” he finally said.

  “What were they talking about?” Sheriff Marge was artful in her verification, sliding in second and third questions that didn’t seem tedious but served to confirm or clarify his earlier statements.

  “Hiking. How beautiful it is in the forest. The lady was learning to navigate with a compass.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “They went around to the back of the pickup to get their gear, and the men—well one of the men grabbed her arms and pinned them against her side, and the other man forced a loop of cord over her head.”

  Pete had warned me—a little—about the mode of death, but Burke’s simple, and necessarily brutal, explanation—because the act was unspeakably brutal—still shocked the breath out of me. It’d been so fast, so unexpected. If I was surprised, no wonder the as yet unnamed lady had been. At least she hadn’t suffered unduly, if I could even think such a thing about murder.

  But Burke’s next words stomped that wishful, euphemistic idea right out of my mind. “Then the men got back in the pickup, and drove really fast.”

  “They dragged the lady?” From her tone, I could tell Sheriff Marge already knew what came next.

  He nodded.

  And the cord had been thin—not a rope—so her head, as Pete had told me, was nearly severed with the sudden, slicing force. If Burke hadn’t been on my lap, I might’ve made a dash for the restroom and lost the little bit of sandwich I’d eaten. As it was, I swallowed down the rising bile and concentrated on the tickly locks of Burke’s hair that were brushing my neck.

  Burke had seen this in real life—in real time, and I was the one falling apart with only what my imagination could supply. I hugged him closer and squeezed my eyes shut against the onslaught of images of a woman being yanked off her feet by the neck.

  To my great relief, Sheriff Marge changed direction with her next questions. “What did the men look like? Did you hear either of them refer to each other by name?”

  “No names. I don’t even know the lady’s name.” Burke kept coming back to her—and why wouldn’t he? He was just a little boy, but a strong protective nature would be key to his development into a man. So how could this event not scar him for life? I didn’t want to think about the ramifications of that.

  “The guy driving had a big belly that made his clothes tight, and he was wearing a camouflage down coat and those slick pants that are waterproof. The other guy was in jeans and dark-blue coat with a zipper up the front,” Burke said.

  “Shoes?”

  “Boots. Both of them.”

  “Gloves?”

  Burke nodded. “It was cold. They were dressed for the weather.” An understatement, surely, but his matter-of-factness reminded me of the survival mode he’d been living in for the past couple years.

  “Was the lady dressed for the weather?”

  “Yes, but they took some of her clothes off—after.”

  “Explain that part to me,” Sheriff Marge requested gently.

  Burke’s little voice became strained. “She was wearing those waterproof pants too, and they pulled them off. She had those black legging things, skinny ones that are tight, on underneath...the kind that came to just below her knees.”

  To my furtive relief, Burke clearly wasn’t familiar with ladies’ unmentionables, but his description sounded a lot like high-tech long underwear. A prerequisite for responsible backwoods hiking in January. The lady had been no dummy.

  “They took off her coat too,” Burke was whispering, “and a down vest she had on underneath that. But they left her long-sleeve T-shirt on.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, and his words became even more muffled. “They had to take off her boots too, and her socks just kind of fell off while they were doing that. Stripes. She had striped socks on. I used to like striped socks, but my last pair got too holey, and even Dad couldn’t darn them anymore. He told me that if I unraveled the rest of the yarn into bits, the birds would take it to cushion their nests in the spring.”

  Why couldn’t I breathe? Yet again? These snippets of Burke’s life, the deprivation but also the seeming care that had gone into his experience, as though his father had been molding him somehow, grooming him for his future life, and loving him intensely all at the same time. That would be my job now—Pete’s and mine, if Burke agreed to it—and I was mentally staggering under the magnitude of the responsibility.

  Pete’s hand shifted, up under my hair, and he kneaded the back of my neck. Clearly, my panicky thoughts were stamped all over my external expression as well.

  “Tell me about the men’s faces,” Sheriff Marge suggested. “What color hair did they have, and could you see their eye colors?”

  “The driver—the big guy—he had dark brown hair under his cap and a mustache and beard that went like this—” Burke drew a line along his own upper lip and down around to his chin and back up with his finger, indicating a goatee. “His eyes were brown, and he had white marks on his face, right here—” This time Burke raised both of his forefingers and pressed them horizontally across the top of his cheekbones just beneath his eyes. “Like maybe he wears sunglasses all summer so the rest of his face is permanently browned except for those spots.”

  Again, I was floored by the minute specificity of Burke’s recollection.

  Sheriff Marge grunted with apparent satisfaction as well. “And the other guy?”

  “I couldn’t see his hair because he had his knit hat pulled down farther, and lighter eyes too—I don’t know what color. He was maybe a little older than the other guy, and thinner, and shorter, but strong, because the lady tried to get away from him, and he wouldn’t let her go. I think he was the boss.”

  Sheriff Marge’s brows shot up above the rims of her reading glasses. “What makes you say that?”

  Burke shrugged against my chest. “He was bossy. Told the other guy what to do.”

  So simple—and so universal. That innate sense of resistance to being bossed around. I wasn’t sure we even had another word for it in English, since bossiness—and the abhorrence of it when applied to ourselves—is so well understood.

  But Sheriff Marge had premeditation on her mind. “Did they act like they knew what they were going to do? Or did they stumble around a bit, figuring things out? Did either of them swear or get mad at the other?”

  “They knew exactly what they were doing,” Burke whispered. “Like they had a plan. Only the lady was surprised. They didn’t talk about what they were going to do next; they just did it.”

  It all seemed so remote. And yet so real. How do you guard against something like this? How do you raise a shield around the ones you love so they never have to experience moral atrocity? I was powerless to do anything but squeeze Burke tighter.

  Sheriff Marge’s next question was quiet, and felt like an afterthought, although it clearly wasn’t. “Did they see you?”

  Burke took a long time to answer. “I don’t think so.”

  “But you’re not sure?”

  He shook his head. “The bossy guy was sure staring, right at the spot where I was hiding. Some of the bushes lose their leaves in the winter. I couldn’t be sure he didn’t see me throu
gh the branches.”

  That’s when I knew. It wasn’t hunger or loneliness that had driven Burke to set out on his own, to abandon the cabin he called home, the place where he’d promised to serve as caretaker for his beloved father.

  He was afraid for his life.

  CHAPTER 13

  Sheriff Marge’s phone rang, jolting me past that paralyzing realization. She snuck a glance at the caller ID and pushed to her feet. “Gotta take this,” she grunted, and ambled out into the hallway, the equipment on her duty belt jutting out around her broad hips.

  I angled an arm around Burke and pressed the stop button on the recorder. The silence in the room was oppressive, interrupted only by the whooshing ticks of the refrigerator’s compressor. I felt like I was encased in resin—inert, ineffective, a prime specimen of the aftermath of catastrophe, preserved for future generations to marvel over, a warning to take heed while they still had life in their veins.

  Pete reached out and ruffled Burke’s hair. “I heard you were helping Mr. Hagg clean his office.”

  The look on Burke’s face was priceless—and so incongruous with our current situation that I nearly burst into tears. Happy tears, relieved tears, I think, but my emotional barometer had been haywire lately.

  Because his grin was a blast of sunshine in the gloomy room. We hadn’t turned on the overhead lights, instead relying on the daylight filtering in through the window. But that source of illumination was rapidly dwindling, and I noted new white specs floating down from the pewter-bellied clouds outside.

  “More like tunneling,” Burke giggled.

  Actually giggled. Like a kid.

  Pete locked jubilant gazes with me for a second, then said, “I suppose you could go back upstairs and help him some more. We’ll head home in a bit, though.”

  And just like that, Burke slid off my lap and made a beeline for the door. Just like a normal kid.

  I stared at Pete.

  “For everybody’s mental health,” he murmured. “If Sheriff Marge needs more information, we can go over the facts again tomorrow. But right now…” He clapped a hand on the back of his neck and shook his head slowly.