Tim Jr. looked away with false disinterest. 'Oh.'
Merci squeezed the washcloth over his head and Tim smiled up at her.
'Awchie is not in the hospital?'
At twenty-seven months of age, Tim's new favorite thing was to be negative and contrary. He loved to defy Merci, even when it was counter to his self-interest. He loved to say he didn't like things that he clearly did. Loved to ask questions that contradicted information he was just given. Over and over and over. Merci enjoyed it: Tim's first taste of the power of no. His other new thing-this had started a few months ago-was that he was developing sudden deep interest in people who seemed far from his daily experience. For instance, the ranch manager who occasionally worked in the Valencia grove that surrounded Merci's house. His name was Rodas, and Tim, after meeting him once, still asked about him constantly. Or Tad, who ran the breakfast house Merci occasionally took them to on Sunday mornings. Or Paul Zamorra, who had come over to the house a few times-though never with Kirsten.
Tim's new passion was Archie Wildcraft. Just the night before, she had told Tim a little about what had happened. She always tried to talk to him as a young person rather than as a toddler, for reasons she wasn't completely certain were good. Something to do with giving him a realistic sense of the world and what happens in it. Mainly, she just figured that if he asked how her day was, he deserved a halfway accurate answer. Not that she got graphic about things, and there was plenty she just left out. She always tried to explain things in gentle ways, ways that wouldn't harden or frighten him.
Archie got hurt in the head and went to the hospital And his wife is now all gone.
'All gone' being the term she applied to Tim's father, Hess. A bit more of her heart crumbled away every time she had to use it.
Last night, after Merci's first long day on the Wildcraft property Tim had asked many questions about Archie. This morning he'd asked more. After lunch, when Merci had called Tim, as she did almost ever day, he'd asked immediately if Awchie was in the hospital. For reason that Merci clearly understood, her son had fastened his interest to man he knew almost nothing about and had never met.
Which is exactly what his father was.
Whatever, thought Merci: better than asking about the moronic toy and junk food he saw on kids' TV.
'Awchie is all gone?'
'No, Archie is okay.'
'Is all gone?'
'Is okay.'
'Awchie is… a car?'
'He's a policeman.'
'Is not a policeman?'
'Time to get out of the tub now, Tim. Let's get out.'
Clark, her father, heated up the night's dinner while Merci sat a the table with Tim. It was an old farmhouse with a big kitchen and this time of year they left all the windows open in the evenings to take in the cooling air. A black cat jumped onto Merci's lap and she petted it once, then set it down on the squeaky old floor. They had six or eight cats but Merci could never remember their names. She liked them in a general rather than an individual way, as she did most human beings. And likewise found them annoying more often than not.
She had the newspaper open in front of her but no interesting crimes had made the pages this day. Out of curiosity she checked the business section for the B. B. Sistel activity. The ticker symbol was BBS and it was even at fifty-three and three-quarters dollars a share on the NYSE.
'What chances are the doctors giving him?' asked Clark.
'Apparently he's stabilized. So that makes him extremely critical rather than hour-to-hour.'
'Where did it lodge, exactly?'
'I don't know. It's all just yellow goo to me.'
'Goo?' asked Tim.
'Goo,' said Merci. 'Your brain.'
'Oh.'
Clark pulled a baking dish from the oven, his ropey arm lost in a huge mitt. Merci thought of Lee Kuerner and his bass fishing. She wished her father had some hobby he loved, some passion, even for something as silly as fishing. The only thing that seemed to matter to him anymore was being useful.
'If it damaged the left side of his brain,' he said, 'the right side of his body might be impaired. You know, one side of the brain controls its opposite side of the body.'
Merci thought about this. She could see the B volume of the encyclopedia open in the cookbook holder. Clark liked to think of himself as helpful in her work.
'That bullet could take away his memory,' he said. 'Or his math skills, or his ability to see colors or to reason deductively. Anything.'
'I wonder if it can lodge in there and not really do any damage.'
'A lot of brain matter goes unused.'
'The doctor said that they might not even try to remove it. That would be riskier than leaving it where it is. I thought the lead would dissolve and kill you, but that's not a big problem. The leads in paints can kill you but not the lead in bullets. That's a surprise.'
'It has no feeling, the brain. They can operate on it with the patient sedated but awake, carrying on a conversation. They'll do that they're near the speech area. If the guy starts talking funny, they back off.'
'Big of them. What's for dinner?'
'Chicken.'
'That moron Dawes brought in Al Madden to check my work. Say he wants the evidence properly handled this time.'
He looked at her steadily. 'Dawes took advantage of you to make a splash for himself. What he said about you was really about himself.
It never failed to astound her that her father defended her side in an action that brought shame upon himself and disgrace to two of his friends. And it wasn't as if the whole miserable thing had come as surprise: both Merci and Clark had known that if she testified to the grand jury, Clark's head would roll. Over something that had gone down thirty-three years ago, she thought. Thirty-three years ago: prostitute with secrets, powerful men frightened for their careers an their families, a deputy forced into doing the unspeakable. And a soft spoken gentle man who closed his eyes to what he knew was going on. Clark. What was it he had said? I knew there was blood on my hands, but I didn ^f t know how much.
'Moron?' asked Tim.
'It's a person who is not very smart,' said Merci.
'A person who is very smart?'
'Never mind,' she said. The idea of Tim obsessing about Ryan Dawes curdled her nerves.
'I'm not going to put my soup on my head,' her son said thoughtfully.
'Very good, Tim. That's excellent.'
Clark checked something steaming in a pot, stirred it with a big wooden spoon, then set it back on the stove. The kitchen smelled of roasting sage and chicken. It was warm so Merci held up her hair. Tin took one look at her and slid off his booster seat, claiming that he'd be back. Tim loved missions.
'Did you get any fingerprints off the gun?'
'Wildcraft's. He came back with GSR, too.'
'Could the lab match the gun to the bullets in his wife?'
'They could and they did.'
'And you said the gun was registered to the deputy?'
'Dad, you know exactly what I said.'
'Her blood on his clothes?'
'Gel cooking, jury out.'
Tim sprinted back into the room with a small elastic hair band in his hand. Merci took it with a smile and got her heavy dark hair up off her neck. He climbed into her lap.
'Looks bad for him, doesn't it?'
