“No,” he pressed his glasses up his nose. “I didn’t know the door was unlocked. But it’s okay.”
She nodded toward the blankets and food on the coffee table. “You got a visitor?”
“My sister,” he said. “She has the flu.”
“That’s a drag.” Detective Reed glanced at the police officer behind her. “What happened to your face, Botts?”
Warren touched his cheek. “Slipped. In the shower. I used a different kind of cleaner this week and I guess I didn’t realize it was so slippery. I didn’t rinse enough.” He was talking too much. Obviously lying.
Inhale, exhale.
“Well, I’ve got a couple things to clarify. And seeing as I’m here, you know. Trying to manage the skirmish outside.” She took a step into the room, pulled out her notebook. “Okay if I come in?”
“Ah. Yes. Sure. Of course.”
“Lot of people pissed off out there.”
Warren nodded. Blinked hard several times. Pressed his glasses up his nose again. He had to stop touching his face, and he slid his hands into his pockets.
“There are things bothering me, Botts.”
“Bothering?”
“Your neighbour. Directly across from you. Mr. Wilkes.”
Warren closed his eyes, pictured it. The fabric and springs stretched so that the man’s body was only inches from the cement floor. He thought about the force needed to extend those springs on Wilkes’s lawn chair. Force was proportional to the distance.
“You listening, Botts? Says he seen Amanda Fuller at your home. More than once. Sitting on your step last Friday afternoon, in fact.”
“Oh.” Warren felt his throat tighten. His glasses were sliding, bit by bit, down his nose. He resisted the urge.
“Is that an accurate statement? Was she at your house?”
Leaning against a chair, he jiggled his left leg. Detective Reed was not looking at him, but examining everything in the room.
“Seems you’re slow to answer, Botts. Do you know Wilkes was my next-door neighbour as a kid? He’s come up in the world now, since those days, but damn, he used to rat me out to my mother time after time. Eyes like a hawk, that guy. Reliable, too. He says he saw you two having a heated conversation. Then he witnessed an embrace.”
“Yes,” he mumbled. “She was here.”
“Well. That’s interesting news. And you chose not to share that?”
He shook his head slowly, knowingly.
“Why was she here, Botts? Why would a grade eight student be making teacher house calls?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know why. She just was.”
Detective Reed smiled, mouth open, teeth showing. “In this circumstance, ‘I don’t know’ is not an acceptable response. Try harder.”
“She was — she was —” He pressed a hangnail against his lower lip, the sharp point stinging him. “She was here three times. Maybe four. I came home from work and she was sitting on the step. Once she was inside my house. Right there,” he pointed to the couch, “petting Stephen. I sometimes forget to lock the door. She came in. I talked to Ms. Fairley about it. You can ask her. When I came home, she only stayed for three minutes. I told her not to come back. I tried not to hurt her feelings. I tried to be kind.”
She wrote something on her notepad, then took another step into the room, stared at him, held his gaze. “Exactly how’d you try to be kind, Botts?”
He felt his cheeks begin to pulse. He hated how she kept repeating his surname so forcefully. A suggestion in her tone. He coughed, straightened his back. Stopped his leg from jiggling. “I listened. I just listened to her.”
“What’d she say?”
“I told you already.”
“Refresh my memory, Botts.”
“She was worried about her grades. Angry about her father. He’s on a beach somewhere, she said, selling coconut monkeys. Angry about having to change homes. She had a nice house before, one of those historic homes near Main Street. She didn’t like her new one. Lots of things.”
Detective Reed unwrapped a candy, spit the gum from her mouth into the cellophane, flicked the ball onto the messy coffee table. Then she pushed the candy into her mouth. “Shifting gears for a moment,” candy clinking against her teeth, “I heard the call you made. After you saw Amanda hanging from that tree.”
“I.” Hand to his nose. He could smell artificial cherry.
“How about we give it a listen?” She pulled a small recorder from an inside pocket, pressed a button with her thumb. Warren’s voice filled the room. High-pitched and anxious.
“I’m so sorry.” Heavy breathing. “I didn’t mean it.”
She snapped another button, and his voice stopped. The police officer behind her scowled, shook his head. “Sounds like you dropped your Adam’s apple there, Botts.” Loud crunch, candy smashed. “That’s quite a confusing statement to make, isn’t it? You’re sorry. You didn’t mean it. Can you clarify that?”
He looked down, could resist no longer. He adjusted his glasses, lifted them twice. “There’s nothing to clarify.”
“Nothing?”
“I was overwhelmed.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Overwhelmed.” For a moment, he closed his eyes, imagined the cube-shaped room flipping outward, and instead of being on the inside of the die, he was standing on one of the faces. All he had to do was shuffle backward, and he would tip over an edge. Detective Reed would stay on the six, and he would slip ninety degrees onto the four. No longer facing each other, a right angle between them.
“Botts?” She continued to crunch, pulverizing the sugar in her mouth. “You got my attention.”
He could not share that he had seen her, ignored her, even though her presence so early on a Sunday morning was strange, unexplainable. He could not admit he was annoyed rather than concerned. Irritated that his quiet morning was disrupted. His toast was burnt. Greasy butter on the toe of his slipper. He could not share that when he discovered she was hanging, he rushed toward her, but stopped. Was unable to approach her. He was a coward. He was a small useless boy, trapped inside a man’s body. He wanted to cover his eyes, his ears, and tried to believe that if he could not see her, she was not there.
“You in there, Botts?” Detective Reed shook her head. “Come out, come out wherever you are.” Singing.
“I’m sorry.”
“There will come a time when you need to be straight with me.”
She moved the tip of her shoe back and forth over the floor in front of him, as though she were erasing a drawing in the sand. Warren watched the muscles in her lower jaw, flexing, relaxing, flexing. One thousand, eight hundred, and eleven seconds had passed since she entered his home, but he recognized there was a large margin of error in that number. Counting large digits one by one took longer than a single second. “I’m trying.”
“I’m sure you are. Mind if I take a look around?”
Warren’s heart crept up into his throat, but he nodded. “But don’t disturb my sister, okay? She’s got the flu. A virus.”
“Yeah, yeah. You said.”
Warren watched Detective Reed stepping around his house. Peering here and there in the living room, wandering through the kitchen, pulling open cupboards, rifling through old newspapers, shoes scuffing over the linoleum at a predictable rate. Then there was silence. He knew Detective Reed had stopped moving. His heart rate increased, thump, thump, thump, and saliva pooled in his mouth as he was unable to swallow. He heard her whistle, then, “Well, lookie here,” and he knew exactly what she had found.
Moments later, she re-emerged, a satisfied expression lighting up her face. Her hand was inside a thin yellowish glove, and she was holding the pile of drawings, nipped near the edges.
“Found these in plain sight, Botts. Just lying there. I’d guessed you’d be a better housekeeper tha
n that.”
“Th-th-th-they’re not mine.” He pushed his glasses up, the skin on his cheek was pulsing.
“Warren Richard Botts, I’m placing you under arrest on suspicion of the murder of —”
Warren heard nothing else. Detective Reed’s words were trapped in individual bubbles, and they did not burst near his ears. White noise flooded his mind, and he tilted his head. He was only dreaming. The feeling of metal on his wrists, the tightening clicks were imaginary. No one was gripping his upper arm, escorting him from his house without jacket or shoes.
How did he end up in front of his house? Cameras flashing, people yelling. Detective Reed, eyes bright and wide, opened the car door, and as he eased into the back seat of the cruiser, she placed a confident hand on his scalp, pushed him down ever so slightly.
Another whoop of the sirens, and the car pulled around. Warren stared out at the crowd in front of his home. Wilkes was in front, jeering at him, waving goodbye with one hand. Fat fingers rippling as though he were playing a piano. Then, behind Wilkes, he saw another familiar face. Evie. The brightest girl in his class. In the glow of the street lamp, her face appeared puffed and shiny. As though she had been crying.
[35]
I was in a festive mood.
I wore navy pants and a pale blue dress shirt, and even buttoned it up to the collar. Not once did I complain about the tightness around my throat. While I waited, I watered the tree and organized the few gifts. I squirted icing onto the faces of gingerbread men, giving each of them a surprised o for a mouth. I strung stale popcorn on a thread. I even cleaned the toilet. When I could think of nothing else, I watched out the window. My behaviour reminded me of Button, except that I was calm. Perfectly calm. My heartbeat, my breathing, my steady hands. When the doorbell finally rang, I swung open the door, and offered a warm holiday greeting to my blossoming aunt and her charming fiancé.
Okay. Just joking about that last part. But I did open the door.
My aunt stomped onto the rug, shook snow from her shoulders, her hair. “Jesus it’s coming down, isn’t it? Roads are freaking treacherous.”
“I like it,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s cause you’re a kid and don’t got to go nowhere.”
“No, I like it because the snow makes everything look clean. All the dirt is disguised.”
My aunt sighed, dropped two boxes, silver wrapping, onto the bench. “Do you want to argue with me, Kiddle, or do you want to be useful?”
Argue, of course. “Useful, of course. You may give me your coats?”
“Hear that, Harv? Oh, so formal! We got ourselves our very own mini-butler.”
Grunt.
The odour of cigarettes and perfume billowed in my face as she squirmed out of her nubby winter outerwear and dropped it in my arms. Larva gave me his, too. Heavy black leather that smelled like fecal matter. I could not decide which scent was worse.
As I slung them over hooks, I heard her say, “Harv, darling? My shoes? I — I can’t even lean over, my skirt is so damn tight.” Then I turned to see Larva on bended knee, unzipping her leather boot, sliding it from her heel. How gallant!
“Thank you, dearest. You are theee best.” She was practically chirping, and the sound of her voice made vomit pop up in my throat.
“Come on in.” I could faux-chirp with the best of them. “I’ve got a fire going.”
Hand on her pregnant hip. “You got a fire going? Now, how’s that happen?”
“I don’t know. I just did it.”
“Well, your mother shouldn’t be letting you handle fire at your age, now, should she?” Newfound Parenting Expertise? Check! “Harv-sweets? Can you go take a look? Make sure the house isn’t about to burn down?”
“On it.”
“I have some skills,” I said, obviously annoyed.
“Skills don’t matter.” Then she said to me with practised words, “Your Uncle Harvey is exhausted, Kiddle. I don’t want you being no trouble. I know Christmas is all about the young’uns, and that bullshit, but keep your noise down, no crawling over the furniture, making a racket with your toys, bugging Harv to play with you. You know the drill.”
A racket with my toys? Bugging that loser to play with me? The drill? She had me confused with Button? Who, I imagined, would already be sitting on the asshole’s foot, arms and legs velcroed around his leg.
“I think,” I offered in my gentlest, most accommodating tone, “I can manage that.”
“Good.” She brushed past me, and even though she was barely pregnant, she already kept her right palm against her lower spine, adopted the slightest waddle into her step.
I followed her, waited until she was seated on the couch next to her beloved.
“How are you feeling?” I inquired, my head tilted, hands cupped.
“You know what, Kiddle? Just perfect. Top of my game. Top of my game. Right, Harv?”
“Would you like an extra cushion for your back?”
Snuggling into Larva, she said, “Nope. I got all the cushion I need.”
“Cushion’s getting fatter with all the Christmas parties.” The loser yawned, scratched his stubble.
“Oh wow, Harv. Your eyes are so bloodshot.” Then, to me, “Plows couldn’t keep up with the snow last night. He was out until dawn.”
“Impressive work ethic,” I said. “Would anyone like a beverage?”
She leaned forward. “What has gotten into you? One minute a butler, and now you’re a waiter. All you need is the fucking bow tie.”
I smiled, lifted my eyebrows, sang, “It’s just such a happy day, isn’t it? Christmas together with family.”
“I bet Kiddle’s excited for the baby,” she said to Larva.
“Doubt it.” He yawned again, hands making no move to cover his mouth.
Though I wanted to place a toothpick vertically in his gaping gob, I ignored his boorish behaviour. “Did anyone decide on a beverage?”
“A beer,” Larva burped. “Cold.”
“A juice for me,” my aunt twittered. “Well, maybe with just a splash of something. Just a hint of a splash. Do you think, Harvey? Is that okay?”
“Makes never mind to me.”
“No never mind.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing. Kiddle? Just a splash, okay? A generous splash.”
“You got it.”
Then, as I was walking away, “And tell your mother to get her ass out of the kitchen and come say hello to her glowing sister.”
“She’ll be right there.”
When I returned to the family room, drinks on an enamel tray, my mother was perched on the edge of the coffee table, discussing the winter storm, the size of the turkey, then complimenting my aunt on her complexion.
As a good server should, I waited for an appropriate break in the conversation, then handed out the beverages.
“Thanks, Kiddle,” my aunt said as she gripped the oversized glass full of sugary fruit cocktail. “I am constantly thirsty growing this little thing.” Fingers drifting across her abdomen. “Drinking for two!”
I watched as she lifted the glass. “Merry Christmas, everyone,” and she brought it to her bright red lips.
“Yes,” I breathed.
She took a sip. A second sip. She smiled at me. I smiled back. Even crinkled my nose.
There. I had dropped the figurative stone into the figurative bucket. Parts of my contraption were starting to move, shift, marbles rolling, elastic bands snapping, yardsticks lowering. I could feel momentum building. This time, though, the outcome was unpredictable. Uncertainty was part of the fun.
[36]
Warren opened his eyes. He was alone inside a damp cage. A fluorescent light flickered above him, and everything was cast in grey: the walls, the ceiling, the ledge of a narrow window. The room reeked of sweat and urine, and when he lifted his
head, he saw he had fallen asleep on a striped mattress without a sheet. Sandpaper blanket still underneath his hip. He had not wanted to touch the blanket, as his fingertips were stained with ink.
Last night he had spoken to a lawyer. Someone young and hyper in a cheap suit, dry white lips, dilated pupils. Warren had tried to explain the errors, the misconceptions, that he was with Nora that evening. No, he could not recall the movie they were watching. No, he was not certain what time she left. The lawyer’s mouth was open while Warren spoke, as though his response was already prepared. Nothing Warren was communicating would change that. He had spoken rapidly, then, about a forthcoming bail hearing, no criminal record, that Warren was a professional.
Warren sat up, leaned against the cement wall. His throat was sore, and he pushed his glasses up with the back of his wrist. He counted the seventeen bars in front of him, and then started identifying as many prime numbers as he could remember. It did not help. He was worried about Beth. She had certainly woken up, and he pictured her wandering around his house, calling his name. He would have to talk to her about the phone call from Sarie. But not yet. He was unable to absorb the thought himself.
Warren closed his eyes again. A faint hum of a motor started outside, and though he knew it was too close to winter, the sound reminded him of a lawnmower. He remembered a time when he was a boy, he came to a slope near the back of his house, and he had to mow a hill. Instead of pulling the machine, he pushed. That morning it had rained, and when he slipped on the damp grass, the running machine rolled back over his sneakers, his legs. He felt shock, spikey tingles in his feet and hands, and then the mower choked, went silent.
Warren had lain still, sipped shallow breaths. He was afraid to move, afraid to shift the machine, and though he felt no pain, he was afraid to see the condition of his feet, his limbs. Could the motor start up again by itself?
Only a moment or two had passed, before nine-year-old Beth bounded up over the horizon with her small bag of “equipment” in her fist. She crouched beside him, tugged the drawstring on her bag, and reached in. Pushed a sugar cube into his mouth. “Eat that,” she said. “You’re suffering from dismay.” Then she gripped the side of the mower and flipped it. “Watch out, Warsie.” A piece of elastic from the cuff of his gym pants snapped off the blades and flew outwards.
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