“Well, get the hell in here before I shoot you for real.”
“What we gonna do, Maggie?”
“Get out of those filthy clothes and take a bath and I’ll find you something Gary left.”
* * *
HIS TWO hours were up. Tim Weatherstone stood at the foot of Pillhead Hill and looked up to where the blue lights and the red lights carnivalized the hilltop. His feet had grown heavy, his head dizzy. The thought of climbing that hill felt something like a death. He stood for several minutes, deep in thought. The waters rattled in the creek behind him. An owl hooted in the woods beyond.
It’s over, he thought. I worked for years to get this. And now, just like that, it’s over.
3
THE SHERIFF stood in a small circle with the State Patrol captain, a couple of the detectives from Portsmouth, and a man in a rumpled suit. Weatherstone stood a few feet away and waved the sheriff over. The sheriff looked to the State Patrol captain and the captain nodded, so the sheriff followed Weatherstone to the edge of the circle of lights where they could talk without being heard.
“I’ll turn this in to you,” Weatherstone said. “But not in front of them.” He had already taken the badge off his shirt and now he handed it over. The sheriff took it and stuck it in his pocket. “So you never found him?”
Weatherstone unbuckled his gun belt, coiled the belt around the pistol, and handed that over as well. Finally, he took the keys to his cruiser from his pocket and handed those over. “I’ll send the uniform over.”
“Hold onto it. This is just procedure. It’ll all clear up in a day or two.”
“You’ll have to get somebody to cover my shifts.”
“A day, maybe two. This’ll all go away.”
“I’ll write up my report and send it along.”
“Yes, do that. I’ll need the part about that boy escaping, too.”
“It’ll be in the report.” He nodded toward the circle of men. “Who’s the one in the suit?”
The one in the suit was having trouble standing straight, but no one seemed to notice. He shook hands woozily all around, then pulled a set of keys out of his pocket.
“That’s Miller, the judge, isn’t it?”
The sheriff seemed not to hear the question. “This won’t last,” he said.
“What’s Miller doing here?”
The judge gave a brief, boozy wave to the sheriff and started toward the row of cars lined up behind the house. He stumbled and stalked out of the tent of light to a black SUV at the end of the row. A trooper followed with a flashlight and together they examined fender, door panel, fender, tailgate, fender, door panel, fender, grill. Satisfied, the judge got into the driver’s seat and started the engine.
“Can he do that?”
“He’s a judge, son. He can do what he wants.”
The judge waved briefly to the sheriff, then steered past the circle of men in the wheelhouse lights, and started down the drive. A deputy lifted the yellow band of crime scene tape and he passed under and started down the hill.
“You’ve had a rough night,” the sheriff said.
“Not as rough as some others, I reckon.”
“Rough enough. I’ll get somebody to take you home.”
“That’s all right. I’m not that far.”
They heard the SUV rattle the bridge floor, scratch up the gravel of the lane, then turn onto the road.
“You didn’t see what you just seen,” the sheriff said.
“I didn’t see a judge drive away with possible evidence from a crime scene?”
“You didn’t see what you just seen. Remember that.”
Weatherstone said nothing. The judge worked his gears, first, second, third, all the way up the road.
“When did you want that report?”
“Don’t worry about it. I got you covered.”
* * *
RONNIE WILSON raised his head to get a peek out the window of the car but Edie O’Leary caught him in her rearview mirror. “Ronnie,” she said. “Keep your damn head down.”
Maggie Boylan, riding shotgun, turned and glared. “Stay down where they can’t see you,” she said.
“But there ain’t nobody out there to see me.” In the quick glimpse he got before Edie ordered him down, Ronnie saw pasture to the one side and the moonlit sabers of new tobacco to the other.
“Ronnie, just do what we tell you,” Maggie said.
He sank back into his seat. “I was just trying to see where we were.”
“All you had to do was ask.”
“I did. You and Edie was too busy arguing to hear me.”
“If you keep popping your head up, the jailhouse is where we’re all gonna be.”
“Well, how much further we got to go?”
“Ronnie, we ain’t even come to the highway yet.”
“Well, damn,” he said. “Pour the coal to it.”
Edie O’Leary hit the brakes and the car lurched to a stop and pitched Ronnie off the seat and into the dust of the floorboard.
“Look,” Maggie said. “You duck-brained sonofabitch. If you don’t like the way she’s driving, you can get out right here and hitch you a ride with the Highway Patrol.”
Ronnie pried himself off the floorboards, crawled back into the seat, and lay on his back with his head well below the window line. From there, he had no more than a splinter of a view—some tree branches, some power lines, a patch of cloud illuminated by the moon—and he felt as if he had been stuffed into a box, or as if he had been laid out in an open grave just before they threw down the dirt. His buzz had long ago started to unravel and he was into the jumpy, seasick-on-dry-land, achy, head-bust, all-annoying middle stages of hangover. He dreaded what was yet to come.
Meanwhile, Edie and Maggie argued back and forth. “Kindly and tolerant, my ass,” said Maggie. From there, it was Big Book this and resentment that all the way down the road.
“I hope you all know my girlfriend could be dying while you’re up there talking all that AA shit. She could already be dead.”
But if they heard him, they never let on. Frustrated, he lay back and watched the trees and the power lines and the moonlit clouds roll by.
In a minute or two, Edie and Maggie had argued each other into silence and each of them crowded herself against the car door, as far as they could get from each other and still be in the same car.
Ronnie could stand silence just so long so he said, “Hey Maggie, you know what’s weird?”
“Besides what’s in the backseat of this car?”
“He could have had me, Maggie.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Tim Weatherstone. All he had to do was reach out and touch me. I was in that little run just about down to where it meets the creek and my one leg sunk down in a mud hole so deep I thought I would keep on going to the other side of the earth. I finally hit rock bottom, but there I was stuck like a duck, trying to pull my leg out and that mud was trying to suck the boot right off my foot and then I caught the light from his badge and I just shrunk down and waited. I know he had to see me and I’m thinking all he’s gotta do is stick out the cuffs and I’m done. But he didn’t. It was like he just looked me over and went on because when I looked up he wasn’t there no more.”
“Ronnie, what kind of bullshit are you trying to sell us?”
Something about what Maggie said set Edie off. “There you go again,” she said, which set Maggie off, and then they were at it for the rest of the drive.
Finally, he saw the corner of a billboard and knew they were close. He raised his head ever so slightly and saw, to one side, the golf course, and to the other the cemetery. He slid back down into the seat and let the women argue all the way into the parking lot of the hospital.
* * *
AT AROUND one a.m., James Carpenter finished his rounds and started a letter to his daughter. He doubted he would get a reply—he had gotten no reply to the last three letters—but he thought he might as well
try again. If nothing else, it might get some things off his chest. And it would fill the time. He worked the hospital security a few shifts a week, usually the weekends, and almost always second shift or third, and counted himself lucky to get that. Since he was fired as a deputy and had lost all his appeals, there wasn’t a department for five counties around that would hire him for deputy or dogcatcher.
Hospital security paid the bills, but it was nothing at all like being a deputy. There wasn’t the pay and there weren’t the benefits and the uniform didn’t fit and he struggled, especially when he worked third shift, with the long, boring, flatline hours. But it was a paycheck and in the quiet hours he could read or think.
He dawdled like a schoolboy with a page of paper in front of him and an ink pen in his hand. The police scanner on the corner of the desk lisped out a steady stream of static. By 1:23, he had gotten only as far as the date at the head of the page. By 1:35, he had scratched onto the page, “Dear Emily, I hope this letter finds you well.” And at that, he stalled again.
He raised his ear to the scanner. There had been nothing since eleven p.m. when he started his shift and he expected nothing now, but he liked to listen when he could. He liked to know what was coming—gunshot wound, knife wound, car wreck, saw cut from a lumber mill, saw cut from a chain saw, concussion, contusion, nervous breakdown, a kid who fell out of a tree, a farmer overturned by his tractor, a hunter’s foot mangled by a trap. There might be broken noses, broken ankles, bruised wives, fractured skulls; there might be a hand pierced by an arrow, spitted by a catfish fin, sliced by a tobacco knife, bit by a dog, riddled by a shotgun blast; legs amputated by box car, legs broken by a leap from a jailhouse window, knees blown out and a football scholarship gone up in smoke. There might be overdose by OxyContin, Percocet, moonshine, Valium, tequila, Xanax, heroin, Wild Turkey, or a combination of any two or more. Frostbite; heart attack; stroke; seizure; snakebite; poisonings accidental or suspicious; burns of first, second, or third degree; electrocutions by faulty wiring or stroke of lightning; nerves derailed by methamphetamine.
Every sort of human ruin, lifetime or just a bad night, every sort of human pain, accidental or inflicted.
If he hadn’t seen it yet, he reckoned it was coming.
* * *
AT 1:38, Carpenter scratched onto his letter, “I know we’ve had our differences, but I want you to know . . .” He paused there to consider how to tell her what he wanted her to know, but at 1:39, the scanner began to crackle with word of a multiple shooting out in the county. He dropped his pen and listened hard as the flat, mechanical voice of the dispatcher called on the sheriff and the sheriff called on the Highway Patrol, out to a farmhouse on Russel Gap Road, a house he knew well. There were six, eight, maybe even ten down. This was major. By 1:50, he heard the first of the outbound sirens and the bugles in his blood went with them.
He expected to hear the ambulances rolling back shortly with a load of shot-up people. But by 2:45, none of the ambulances that had bawled out of town had come back. He knew what that meant, so he told triage they could relax. No one was coming.
He made his rounds again. And again, all was quiet in the Morris County Hospital. The newborns were stretching out their small lungs and wailing, the sick were healing, the wounded were mending, and the dying were dying quietly. He looked back at his unfinished letter. He was convinced now that no matter what he wrote to his daughter, he would write it wrong. He balled up the paper and banked a three-pointer into the wastebasket across the room.
Then, at approximately 3:15, he heard the distant squall of a siren. The voice on the scanner told him it was an overdose—the third in a week—and not one of the shootings. By 3:45, the ambulance rolled up to the door of the ER. The EMTs jumped out, rolled out a gurney, plunged the gurney through the ER door, and shot it straight back to intensive care.
Carpenter caught a glimpse of the girl on the gurney as she rolled past. Her face was pale as paper and her lips were blue, but he knew her by the tattoos on her arms and on her hands, by the ring in her brow, by the face he had known since she was a child; he knew her step-dad, a drug-running biker turned preacher; he knew her mother, a feisty, flint-chip of a woman. He knew her stoner boyfriend.
She’s hanging by a thread, he thought, and not likely to make it. By 4:58, her parents arrived. They conferred briefly with the triage nurse, and took seats in a corner of the waiting room where they sat, grave as a pair of headstones.
Carpenter stepped out the ER door and looked around the parking lot and listened. No more sirens. Nothing, no one. He listened for several minutes as the night hawks swept around the arc lamps of the parking lot. He did not know what to make of it all.
At around 5:20, a car pulled into the parking lot. It had barely pulled to a stop before Ronnie Wilson, the stoner boyfriend himself, tumbled out of the backseat and scrambled for the ER door. Close behind came Edie O’Leary and, just after, a muttering Maggie Boylan, glum as dirt, the glare in her eye hard as diamond.
4
IT TOOK Timothy Weatherstone two full days to write his report to the sheriff, for his insomniac pen was slow and it darkened with each page. He wrote, then tore up, and wrote again in the language of reports such as he had learned it in training, that he had received a call while on patrol at 0127 hours and that he had responded affirmatively to the call and, because of the urgent nature of the call, proceeded to the site without waiting for backup and found, held for investigative detention, then, at approximately 0205 hours lost, one Ronnie Wilson, white male, approximately twenty-four years of age and that, at approximately 0247 hours, while searching for said individual, found instead Maggie Boylan, white female, approximately thirty-five years of age, attempting to blow life back into the depressed lung of one Sheila Hacker, white female, approximately twenty-two years of age.
He wrote that he had forgotten, as directed by his immediate supervisor, that he had witnessed, at approximately 0417 hours, in front of several others who presumably had also forgotten that they had witnessed, an individual, white male, approximately forty-five years of age, who approached the sheriff and the ranking Highway Patrol officer on the scene and engaged said officers in conversation and that subsequently said individual, believed to be a judge in the Morris County Courts, drove a family-size, SUV-type vehicle away from the crime scene, in direct violation of state and local law and standard police procedure.
He wrote that he had forgotten, as directed, that he had seen the rich man drive away undisturbed while the poor man was hunted like an animal.
He wrote that he had subsequently come within easy reach of the hunted man but had chosen to let him go, out of an instinct that he did not then understand.
Weatherstone wrote his report, then tore it up and wrote it all again. He wrote for no one in particular, for he never turned it in and the sheriff never asked. He wrote everything he remembered, everything he had done and seen that night. He even wrote that he had walked home, stripped himself of his uniform, flung the pieces of it into the trees and bushes, then stood on his mother’s porch, naked as Job, and cursed the sheriff, Ronnie Wilson, life itself, and the day he was born.
He wrote that, just before dawn, he put on civilian clothes and drove his civilian car to the hospital where he found in the ER waiting room, speechless and bereft, the missing individual Ronnie Wilson, along with several other individuals whom he assumed to be friends and relatives of the aforementioned, now deceased, Sheila Hacker. Collapsed into a chair in a corner the aforementioned Maggie Boylan sat, addled with guilt and grief.
He wrote that all those in the room were raging in grief or stupefied in grief and no one seemed to know what to do next until a woman stood and growled them into silence. She had a braid of long gray hair, a face like a chisel, and a voice with the sound of a gravel truck unloading. “Listen up,” she shouted, then called everyone to stand, come closer, face each other, and take hands in a circle. For a moment, no one moved.
The woman cut a g
lance at the man who had been seated next to her. He rose, slow as a boulder, and limped to her side. After him came Edie O’Leary and the security guard from behind his desk and all the maybe-cousins and friends. “Maggie,” she called when Maggie Boylan held back. “Come on up, Maggie. You’re in this too.” Maggie paused, then shuddered off her resistance and stood with the others and they all joined hands in the center of the waiting room.
The woman then prayed a long, rambling, meander of a prayer full of starts and pauses. She sometimes ran with the words and sometimes stumbled; she lost her words and found them and rolled them over in the gravel of her voice. Tim Weatherstone caught them as best he could and wrote them into his report.
He wrote that she told the people in the circle that she had lost her daughter long before she lost her tonight and that she blamed no one and she forgave all as she hoped she would be herself forgiven.
Do not argue, she said. Do not blame. All we have is one another and this is not a time to argue or to blame.
Nothing in this world will last, she said. Nothing in this world will ever be right.
At this, the woman could say no more. And for a long time after, they all stood together in silence and each held tight onto the hand of another.
Maggie Boylan Page 15
