Over Tumbled Graves

by Jess Walter

  “It was a crazy day,” he said.

  She shrugged. “I saw the news. Nothing you could do.”

  Somehow that made it worse. “Whatcha reading?” he asked. He didn’t like reading himself, but he loved hearing about what she read.

  She flopped the magazine over so he could see the title—something about Victorian houses. She’d always wanted one, instead of this rancher. “You all right?”

  “Tired.” He slumped against the wall. “Debbie, I’m really sorry—”

  “It’s fine, Alan.” The way she said his name, it felt like a low, flat kick.

  He walked toward the bedroom, undressing. “How was Staci’s conference?”

  “There’s some stuff on the table.”

  Dupree peeked in first on eleven-year-old Marc, balled up in his NFL covers, his hair a tumble of straw. Staci, who was six, slept with her mouth open, a flowered jumper and white sandals carefully laid out at the foot of the bed for tomorrow. Dupree stood in the doorway for some time before moving toward the bathroom.

  He leaned against the shower wall and let cool water cascade down his back. He closed his eyes and saw the bodies, hands and feet, the darkening of flesh, the branches spread over most of the corpse but not all, as if whoever killed those girls wanted to leave a little bit of them showing, wanted him to see the money in their hands.

  The riverbank was etched into his eyelids. He opened his mouth in the shower to try to get rid of the taste and the smell—of choke-weed and transient camps, of rotting flesh. He leaned against the wall, letting the water roll over him, and woke with a jolt, like snapping awake behind the wheel or at his desk, every muscle tensing after a disconcerting split second of sleep. He shook the water from his head like a dog and turned the shower off. When he left the bathroom a few minutes later, he wasn’t surprised to find Debbie gone from her bar stool, the light out in their bedroom.

  10

  Caroline expected more from death. Whether it came from some soaring movie soundtrack or the reverie of some childhood funeral Mass or just the tangled anxieties of her own subconscious, she had always imagined dying would at least offer some substance, some tangible feeling she could share with others who witnessed a long, slow death—“Ah, sure, I remember death.” The sense of a spirit passing on, perhaps, a lightening, a change in the atmosphere of the room, a kick to the head—however it came, she expected it to feel like something.

  She had been in Sergeant Lane’s office, enduring a lecture and suspension about bashing Thick Jay’s head into the fireplace, when she was paged by the hospital. She called on the lieutenant’s phone and reached her mother’s doctor, who began explaining the same thing that the nurse already had explained. Caroline’s mother’s body had had enough and was shutting down.

  The sergeant was grim and understanding; he had no idea her mother’s condition was so serious. He told her he’d talk to the chief, explain her behavior in the context of her mother’s illness. Caroline just nodded. When Sergeant Lane offered to have someone drive her to the hospital, she surprised herself by accepting.

  In her mother’s hospital room the doctor spoke into his fist, concentrating on a spot a few feet from Caroline and choosing his words as if they might pick locks. “I talked with your mother about…what sort of…measures she wanted…employed…at this stage…”

  “I know,” Caroline said. “She didn’t want you to do anything.”

  The doctor nodded and continued speaking with great care. “If you would like…we could still try…moving her home…and have hospice…attend.”

  “Is there time for that?”

  “She’s made a…drastic decline the last two days…” For the first time, he met her eyes. “I don’t think so…no.” She looked back over at her still mother. The doctor patted her on the hand and left the room.

  Caroline leaned back in the chair and took in the sterile sanctity of her mother’s hospital room, lights dimmed, door closed. The nurses had put Caroline’s mother on her back again, no longer worrying about the bedsores they’d battled for the last month. They’d unhooked the oxygen machine as well, and even the morphine IV drip. For the first time that spring it was just Caroline’s mother lying there, her breathing irregular and raspy, as if she were drowning in dust. Caroline leaned across the bed and held her mother’s face in her hands, pressed their foreheads together and felt her mother’s weak breath on her own face. When she had drifted out of consciousness four days before—for the last time, it was clear now—Caroline had been flooded with all the things she wanted to say. Now all the words seemed dried up, and all she wanted to do was lean across the woman’s bed and hold her, feel the mix of things that made up her mother—bone and flesh, humor and cunning, the warmth of her mother’s lap. During the last part of the illness Caroline hadn’t had time to feel sorry for herself, only empathy for her mother, the desire to somehow lessen her mother’s pain. But now she imagined life without this person; for the first time Caroline felt worse for herself than for her mother.

  Maybe her mother was gone already, leaving behind only reflexive breath and smoldering synapse. Or maybe she was still in there, dreaming her front porch, a cup of coffee, a romance book, Caroline stretched out on the porch steps beneath her, scolding her about this bit of gossip, that bit of cattiness, even as she covered her own half smile.

  Caroline whispered, “I love you, Mom,” her voice quavering, and then let go of her mother’s face and fell back in the chair next to her bed. She supposed all the other things had been said. What good are faded compliments and moments of understanding, the things between people? Did they have some weight? Or were they gone the moment they were uttered, lost in the moment of conception, the finale of seem?

  The doctor had told her it might be twenty-four hours, even thirty-six. Habit could prop up even the frailest human body. Fifty-eight years of breathing and circulating and thinking didn’t turn off like a toggle switch. She could last days, her body recollecting itself and taking one more charge up the hill. Or it could be hours. No matter; Caroline had decided she wasn’t going to leave the hospital until it was over. She curled up in the hospital chair, holding her mother’s hand and rocking slowly.

  Caroline was shocked when she realized that she was asleep, in a dreamy haze somewhere, unsure if her eyes were open now or closed, wondering if the awareness of sleep meant she was awake. She couldn’t hear or see anything, but maybe there was nothing to hear or see. She felt for her mother’s hand and that’s when her eyes snapped open, when she saw her mother’s fingers drooped, wrist curled over the edge of the bed, and knew that her mother was gone.

  She felt cheated by the moment; no rising, no change in the atmosphere of the room, no brush with transparency. Her mother was just gone. Caroline walked into the hall. She checked her watch. Two-thirty in the morning. Exhausted, Caroline had slept six hours. The nurse wasn’t at her station so Caroline picked up the phone and tapped in a long-distance number.

  A woman answered sleepily. “Mmm. Hello.” Caroline’s stepmother.

  “Ramona? Is my dad there?”

  “Caroline?”

  “Is my dad there? I told him I’d call.”

  “Sure. Just a minute.”

  She heard whispering, the shuffle of covers, her father clearing his throat. “Caroline?”

  “She’s gone, Daddy.” And with that the tears burst forth in gasping sobs that shook her violently, that echoed up and down the carpeted hallways and brought a nurse from another room.

  “Caroline?” Her father’s voice was small on the dangling phone. “Caroline, are you there?” Caroline handed the phone to the nurse and slumped to the floor of the nurses’ station, her arms over her head, eyes closed, rocking with every sob. The nurse talked to her father for a moment and then hung up the phone, helping Caroline to her feet. They walked to the end of the hall and to a patio overlooking the city. They stood until Caroline felt the control returning, stopped crying and took a breath.

  “I
need to call my brother,” Caroline said.

  “Not now. There’ll be time.”

  Caroline nodded.

  “I’m going to go in and have the doctor look at your mother,” the nurse said.

  “Can I stay out here?” The nurse said yes and when she was gone Caroline walked to the edge of the balcony and leaned out over the railing into the blackness, feeling the cool wind on her face, stinging where her tears were left to dry in the creases of her eyes. A few cars trickled along the freeway and the streets of downtown, people going home from bars, trudging off with strangers, going to bay at the windows of old flames. Traffic at two-thirty in the morning is the flow of desperation.

  Beyond the freeway was the river, a seam through the city, coming straight into downtown, then splitting and curling around Canada Island and Riverfront Park, through the falls and the dam, then beginning its slow meander west. Caroline thought about Burn, still out there somewhere, and remembered the way their hands had connected in the split second before he died. She opened and closed her hand, stared at it. She felt more connected to the young drug dealer, and wondered if she’d done as much to save her mother. The tears came again, silently this time, curling over her cheeks and falling.

  And then Caroline understood that death did have a specific feeling and why she hadn’t recognized it before. It was actually familiar, something revealed every day in glimpses of strangers, in solitary walks along the river, in moments of quiet, the realization that, for all the people we surround ourselves with, in the end, we go over alone.

  11

  IN LOVING MEMORY

  Theresa Marie Mabry

  Born: August 9, 1942

  Passed on: April 30, 2001

  Beloved Mother and Friend

  “Behold, I show you a mystery;

  We shall not all sleep,

  but we shall all be changed,

  In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye…

  and the dead shall be raised

  incorruptible,

  and we shall be changed.”

  —I Corinthians 15:51–52

  Private graveside service to follow. No reception.

  PART II

  MAY

  A Game of Chess

  12

  The chair she sat in was a throne of leather and dark-stained oak, more imposing than the person encased by it, a plump, dark-haired white woman who tapped a pen on the frame of her bifocals as she peered at the form Caroline had filled out. At the end of each page Vicki Ewing looked over her glasses, and then back to the next page.

  “You left the emergency contact line blank.”

  Caroline had stared at that line and thought about her mother. Dupree flashed in her mind too. But she said, “I have a boyfriend. Joel Belanger. Same address.”

  Dr. Ewing scribbled in the line and then removed her glasses and looked up at Caroline. “You left this whole section blank, too. Where you were supposed to describe the problem…your anxiety…”

  Caroline stood and removed a paperback medical textbook from the bookcase near the door. She checked the worn spine, then held it up. “Looks like you’ve read some of these.”

  “Some of them. We were talking about your problem.”

  “I don’t think I have one.”

  “Oh, good. Makes it an easy day for me, then. But, since we’ve got another forty minutes, why don’t we talk about why you’re here.”

  Caroline thought a moment. “I’m here because my sergeant doesn’t think a woman can handle the pressure of being a detective.”

  “Can you?”

  “I smacked a guy’s face into his fireplace. I guess that was uncalled for.”

  “And that was last month? The day your mother died?”

  Caroline nodded. “Three weeks ago. What’s with that chair?”

  Dr. Ewing turned slightly in the huge leather chair. “My father was excited to have a doctor in the family. I’d get rid of it but I’m always afraid he’ll just drop in.”

  Caroline looked down at the textbook in her hand, which was open to a page on kleptomania. She looked around the office and smiled. “Professional services. That’s funny. Anyone ever come in to get their taxes done? Or to get a wart removed?”

  Dr. Ewing smiled. “No.”

  “So the only service you provide is brain repair. That’s just one service. Shouldn’t it be called professional service?”

  “I consult with various law enforcement agencies on criminal behavior and victim anxiety…and I repair a brain or two on the side. I think that qualifies as plural. Now, please. Sit down.”

  Caroline did, and the session went faster than she would have guessed, the doctor more easygoing and funnier than she expected. They talked about Caroline’s terrible month of April. Thick Jay was becoming a minor pain in the ass, claiming he’d had vision problems and dizziness ever since “the attack.” In the newspaper, the police chief characterized what happened as “a suspect becoming entangled with a detective,” but Jay’s lawyer was talking about filing a claim against the city. The prosecutor was hoping to package a light plea bargain of his drug-dealing charge with the dropping of any potential claim. Thankfully for Caroline, the prosecutor was refusing to deal on the child abuse charge at all, so even if Thick Jay got a deal on the drug case he’d still do time.

  Caroline had been suspended for a week—time she used to mourn her mother anyway—and had received a letter of reprimand in her file indicating she violated the department’s “use of force policy.” She got the sense that if her mother hadn’t died that day, they might simply have fired her. But in all honesty, her mother’s death had nothing to do with her rough treatment of Thick Jay.

  “Do you really believe that?” Dr. Ewing asked.

  Caroline suddenly felt sleepy. Twenty-one days since her mother’s death and still she had trouble sleeping for more than an hour or two at a time, as if she were still trying to reach out, to catch her mom in the act of dying. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “If it was someone else, I’d assume the two things were related. But all I was thinking about was how that guy hurt that baby. I just wanted to hurt him.”

  “Any children yourself?”

  “No.”

  “You talked about a boyfriend…”

  “He’s a little younger than me, but I wouldn’t call him a child.”

  Dr. Ewing laughed. “That’s not what I meant…how much younger is he?”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with my mental health.”

  “Five years younger?”

  Caroline shrugged and smiled at the floor.

  “Ten years younger?”

  “Okay,” Caroline said. “My boyfriend is six. He’s in first grade.”

  Dr. Ewing checked her watch and looked up genially. “We’re five minutes over. We’ll talk about your boyfriend next time.”

  “We’re having a next time?”

  “You don’t want to come back?”

  “If they wanna pay me to come in here and girl-talk with you…well, fine. But quite honestly, I don’t know what the point is. I mean, no offense…”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “…but I don’t need it. I had a tough month at work and my mother died. That’s it. End of story. You want to know if I resent my father for leaving my mom? You bet. Do I worry that I’m getting older and will never get married and have kids? Every day. Am I burned out busting kids with dime bags of pot? Like you can’t believe. But I’d be crazy if I didn’t feel those things. Don’t you think?”

  For a long minute, Dr. Ewing stared with a half smile. “You went after a suspect who was handcuffed and lying on the floor. You hit his head against a brick fireplace. That’s not the kind of thing police officers are supposed to do.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  They were quiet again and then Dr. Ewing stood. “Be patient, Caroline,” she said. “You know, sometimes it takes two sessions to repair a good brain.”

  13

  Figure
450,000 people in the greater Spokane area—counting from the city of Coeur d’Alene in the Idaho panhandle to the college towns of Cheney to the west and Pullman to the south and the town of Deer Park to the north. If roughly half those people are female, that leaves you with 225,000 males, half of whom would be between sixteen and fifty-five—the potential age range for a serial killer.

  Dupree spun the notebook to face Pollard and Spivey. “That leaves 112,500 potentially viable suspects,” he said. Pollard looked over Dupree’s figures as if they were the work of a lunatic, but Spivey copied down the numbers in his own notebook. Dupree turned it a little more to accommodate him.

  “Let me get this straight,” Pollard said. “You want to interview a hundred thousand guys?”

  “No. I’m just sayin’ that in a city this size, it would be feasible.”

  “Feasible.”

  “Maybe feasible is the wrong word. But the way we’ve been doing it isn’t much better. Three weeks and we’re still chasing phone tips and going over field interview cards. Screw that. Let’s make a file on everyone. A hundred thousand suspects.”

  Pollard looked as if Dupree were speaking French.

  “Look,” Dupree said, “a serial killer can’t operate in a city too much smaller than Spokane. When’s the last time you heard of a serial killer in a small town? After the first murder, ol’ Andy’d trudge down to the barbershop, grab that weird Floyd the barber, and haul him off to a cell with Otis, and Aunt Bea would bring him sandwiches. In a big city, your suspect pool might be a million. A hundred thousand guys sounds like a lot, but if we get ten detectives doing ten a day? Shoot, in a hundred days we’d solve every crime in the city.”