“Dad, Dad, what happened? Did you get to dig up the dead lady?”
“Dennis!” his mother snapped. “You’re supposed to be in bed. Your father had a long night at work.”
Dennis rolled his eyes. His mother was so stupid. His dad said so all the time.
“Yeah, they dug her up,” his father said, pulling a beer out of the refrigerator and popping the top.
“Was she all rotten? Was she a skeleton? Was she all hacked up with an axe?”
“Dennis!” his mother said again, her voice a little higher and a little louder than the last time.
Dennis ignored her, keeping his eyes on his father. His uniform was rumpled, but not dirty. He should have been dirty if he had dug up the dead body himself. He probably supervised. He was too important to have to dig up a dead body himself—even if he probably wanted to.
Dennis would have helped if he had been allowed to stay. But his father had lost his temper at him for being in the way and had sent him home.
Dennis had been really angry about it, but then he got to ride home in a squad car with another deputy, and that had been pretty cool. His dad didn’t let him get into his squad car. He didn’t want Dennis to mess something up, was what he had said the first two thousand times Dennis had begged to play in the car. The two-thousand-first time Dennis had asked, his dad had lost his temper. Dennis hadn’t asked again.
“No, she wasn’t,” his father said, popping a couple of Excedrin from a bottle on the counter. “We put her in the hearse and they took her to the funeral home.”
Dennis’s mother scurried back and forth from the refrigerator to the stove, banging pots and muttering under her breath as she hurried to heat up a pork chop. His father picked up the cigarette his mother had left burning in the ashtray on the table and took a drag on it. The television on the counter was showing a guy spray-painting his bald spot.
“Mendez wants to call in the FBI,” his father said to no one in particular. “Prick.”
His mother said nothing.
“Why don’t you want the FBI, Dad?” Dennis asked.
“Because they’re a bunch of pricks—just like Mendez.”
“He’s a spic prick,” Dennis said, proud of his cleverness.
His father gave him a look. “Watch your mouth.”
His mother wheeled on him. “Dennis, go to bed!”
She looked like her eyes were going to pop out of her head, like in a cartoon when one character had his hands around the throat of another character, choking him.
His dad turned on his mother then. “Cook the damn food! I’m hungry!”
“I
He looked at her like he was just now seeing her for the first time since he had walked in the room. His face twisted with disgust. “You couldn’t wear something better than that?”
Dennis’s mother grabbed her old blue bathrobe together just below her throat. “It’s the middle of the night. Was I supposed to put on a dress and makeup?”
“I’ve been at a murder scene all night. You think I want to come home and look at
Dennis’s mother reached up and shoved a big messy chunk of hair out of her face and behind her ear. “Well, I’m sorry I’m not up to your high standards!”
His father swore under his breath. “Have you been drinking?”
“No!” she exclaimed, looking shocked. “Absolutely not!”
She yanked the frying pan off the burner, dumped the pork chop on a plate, and all but flung it at the table. “There. There’s your fucking dinner!”
His father’s face turned purple.
His mother’s face turned white.
Dennis turned and ran for the stairs. Halfway up, he stopped and sat down, grabbing the balusters and peering through them like he was behind bars. He couldn’t see much of the kitchen, but he didn’t need to. A chair scraped across the floor and thudded as it tipped over. A pan slammed against the top of the stove. A glass broke.
“Here’s my fucking dinner?”
“I’m sorry, Frank. It’s late. I’m tired.”
“
His mother started to cry. “I’m sorry!”
There was a silence then that made Dennis more nervous than the yelling. He jumped a little when his father emerged from the kitchen, his expression dark, his hands on his hips. He turned and looked straight up at Dennis.
“What are you looking at?”
Dennis turned and ran up the stairs, stumbling twice, trying to go faster than his legs could possibly manage. He ran into his room and into his closet, pulling the door shut behind him and hiding himself under a pile of dirty clothes.
He lay there for a long time, trying not to breathe too loud, trying to hear over the pounding of his pulse in his ears, waiting for the door to fly open. But a minute went by and nothing happened. Then another minute . . . then another. . . until finally he fell asleep.
8
Wednesday, October 9, 1985
“I can’t believe there was a murder and you didn’t call me!”
“I had a few other things on my mind,” Anne said.
They stood outside the door to the kindergarten room, on the patio near the sandbox where half a dozen of Franny’s charges were busy with toy dump trucks and shovels and buckets.
Fran Goodsell, her best friend. Thirty-nine, cute as a button, irreverent as he could be. She should have called him, she thought now.
Franny had a way of turning situations upside down. He would have somehow found a way to distract her from the horror of what had happened. He would have said something outrageous, made a completely inappropriate remark, found a way to give her a lighter moment.
That would have beat the hell out of lying awake all night, seeing every detail when she closed her eyes: the mangled hand reaching out of the ground, quietly begging assistance to rise up from the shallow grave.
“Don’t you watch the news?” she asked.
“Of course not,” he said, offended by the very idea. “There’s nothing good on the news.” His eyes went wide as he was struck suddenly with a possibility. “Did they interview you? Oh my God. I hope you weren’t still wearing that outfit you wore to school yesterday. You looked like a novice nun.”
True to form.
Anne gave him a look. “No, I wasn’t on the news, and thanks for the fashion advice, Mr. Blackwell.”
“Well, honestly, how do you expect to attract a man, Sister Anne Marie? Image is everything.” Fran’s image: preppie with a twist. Today he wore khaki pants and Top-Siders, and an orange bandana at the throat of his blue buttondown oxford.
“I don’t expect to attract a man at school. Who is there to attract? Arnie the janitor?”
“Mr. Garnett.”
“I’m not interested in having an affair with our married principal.”
“His wife is sleeping with her yoga instructor. He’s as good as divorced, that’s all’s I’m saying,” which he said with an extra-thick Long Island accent.
Franny was originally from Boston. Number fourteen of fifteen Goodsell children. Irish Catholic to the tenth
