few minutes, then got into his own car and both of them pulled away. The three of us at our picnic table were silent for a bit.
Then Beth Ann looked at Garner and said, 'You cocksucker.'
'You keep your damned mouth shut,' he said to her. 'Just remember what I told you, and keep your damn mouth shut.'
Garner stood then and stalked away toward his car, which he couldn't drive away in because I had him blocked.
'Could you move your damned car?' he said.
Chapter 59
BEFORE I MOVED M Y CAR, I reached in and took the keys out of Beth's. When Garner was gone, I walked back to the picnic table, sat across from her, and put the keys on the table.
She didn't speak. Neither did I. We listened to the steady sound of traffic from the pike. A burly woman in pink shorts and a white T-shirt walked a very small fuzzy white dog near us. I smiled at the dog. The dog paid me no attention.
'What do you see in him?' I said after a while.
Beth Ann looked at the table and shook her head.
'He's kind of soft and dumpy,' I said. 'But he's very annoying.'
Beth Ann shook her head again. It might have been disagreement. It might have been regret. The white dog accomplished its mission on the small plot of grass, and the burly woman took it away. She was wearing some sort of sandals with elevated soles, and she walked with a lumbering wobble. From my inside coat pocket I took a copy of the photograph I'd found in Beth Ann's freezer and placed it on the table in front of her, next to her keys. She looked down at it without any reaction for a moment. Then she said, 'It was you,' and turned the photo facedown on the table, and put her face into her hands and moaned. I didn't say anything. No one was near us. I sat, quietly listening to the traffic and the wind and the occasional scraps of conversation that the wind brought us from people as they walked to their cars. The cooking smell from the restaurant was strong.
'You have it too,' she said finally.
'Too?' I said.
'He has a copy.'
'Garner?'
'Yes.'
I sat back. It wasn't that I couldn't think of questions. I thought of too many, and they were all jockeying for position. With her face still pressed into her hands, Beth Ann said, 'It's not what you think.'
'I think it's a picture of you naked with Jared Clark when he was even younger than he is now.'
She kept her face in her hands and shook her head again.
'Oh, God,' she said.
While she was contemplating whatever ruins she saw in the palms of her hands, I got my questions sequenced.
'Garner has a copy of this picture?'
Face in hands, she nodded.
'How did he get it?'
'He ... he's so weird,' she said. 'At night, sometimes he goes through the school, searching lockers.'
'What lockers,' I said.
'Student lockers, faculty lockers. I don't know why. He said he was making sure there were no drugs or guns or anything.'
'You believe that.'
She shook her head.
'What do you believe?' I said.
No hurry, plenty of time, ask all the questions, keep the strands straight, one strand at a time.
'He's sick.'
'And it excites him to prowl?'
She nodded.
'Did he find this picture in your locker or Jared's?' I said.
'Jared's.'
'And what use has he put it to?' I said.
She kept her face in her hands.
'What use?'
'Is that what you see in him?'
