“Daddy put me in charge. I was just trying-”
“Who the fuck are you people?”
We both turned. He held a 12-gauge shotgun.
“Daddy!” The boy had moved on into the room beside us.
“And what are you doing in my house?”
I looked at Sally Gene, who fed me the name: “Sammy Lee Davis.”
“Just stay cool, Mr. Davis, okay? I’m Detective Turner, Miss Lawson here’s from city social services. We need to talk to you, that’s all, just talk. Why don’t you start by putting the gun down. There’s a lot of kids in here, man. No one wants to see the kids get hurt. William: show your father my badge?”
The boy held it out.
“You’re trespassing.”
Thinking this wasn’t the best time to discuss probable cause and his being at any time open to public inspection as a foster parent, I said, “Well, yes sir, truth is, we are. I can appreciate that’s how it must look to you.”
“You’re the son of a bitch ran off with my wife, aren’t you?”
The 12-gauge went to his shoulder. I have to give it to Sally Gene. She never once blinked, flinched or cut her eyes. He saw it in the boy’s face, though, and turned just in time to take Bill’s riot stick square on the forehead.
“You guys through with your business yet?” Bill said. “It’s getting hot out there and I’m getting hungry. And that goddamn magnolia smells to high heaven.”
Chapter Eleven
Seth McEvoy played quarterback, was a top band member, and had a four-point average. He also, judging from the photo on his computer desk, went with the prettiest girl in town. Kind of kid you hated when you were back in school, couldn’t do anything wrong.
Don Lee came with me. We’d spoken with the boy’s mother downstairs. Seth was busy filling out college applications. All the pictures on his walls hung perfectly straight. The spines of the books in the bookcase behind the door were all flush.
“How come you’re so much older than the sheriff and Don Lee?”
“Mr. Turner’s retired, Seth. He’s agreed to help us out, more or less as a consultant.”
You could see the intelligence in his eyes, the interest. He’d rather ask questions than answer them. He knew about his world. Knew it too well, perhaps. Now he wanted to know about other people’s.
“So what can I do for you?”
“I was hoping you could tell me again what happened.”
“I don’t think there’s anything I can add to what I told the sheriff.” But he went along, forever the good kid, reciting all but verbatim what was in the official report. With time and retelling the story had baked to hard clay; nothing new or surprising was likely to peer out of doorways or corners.
“Sarah stopped because she saw something move.”
“Said she did. You’re gonna talk to her, too, though-right?”
I nodded. “She didn’t scream, anything like that.”
“Unh-unh. She just pushed herself up in the seat and said, ’Seth, what is that?’ I didn’t see anything, but I got out of the car and went to look. After a minute she came up behind me.”
“Was there blood?”
“Not near as much as you’d expect. I remember thinking then how that made it all seem so much stranger. Just that hunk of wood sticking up out of him, and everything arranged so neatly there by him like he was, I don’t know, in his room at home.”
“Were there field mice around, rats, anything like that?”
“If there were, we didn’t see them.” He looked full at me. “Why would you ask that?”
“No real reason. What you do is, you go ahead and ask whatever comes to mind, never mind if it makes sense or not, just trying to get the shape of the thing, hoping it might shake something loose.”
“For you, or for me?”
“I’d settle for either.”
“Interesting.” He jotted something down on a notepad beside him.
“How long have you and Sarah been dating?”
“Sarah and I aren’t dating. We just hang out together.”
“In the driveways of unoccupied houses.”
He started to say more, then shrugged.
I glanced pointedly at the photograph on his desk. “What does she have to say about that?”
“A lot. Pretty much nonstop. But Sarah… Sarah and I have been friends a long time. A lot of the others don’t like her, think she’s weird. But there aren’t many people around you can have a conversation with, talk about the things you think are important. Look, you’re from the city, right?”
“Yeah. But the place I came from’s a lot like this one.”
He nodded.
“Then maybe you know how it is.”
I had no idea what was playing on her CD. I wouldn’t even have known what to call it. It wasn’t like any rock and roll I’d ever heard. And it wasn’t on her CD player at all, as it turned out, but coming directly off her computer.
Music’s the first handhold you lose in growing old, I thought as we made our way down narrow wood stairs to the basement Sarah Perkins had claimed as her own. The stairs were plain, untreated planks set into notches in doubled two-by-fours, heads of ten-penny nails dark against them.
Sarah sat below in a pool of light. The music washed up from below, too, a drain in reverse. To me, it sounded like a slurry of things recorded from nature-cricket calls, footsteps over gravel, apples falling-then tweaked beyond recognition.
Sarah turned in her chair as we stepped onto the cement floor. Years ago, someone had laid in a frame of two-by-fours, started putting up Sheetrock, even tacked up one wall of cheap woodgrain paneling before abandoning the project. Sarah had covered the spaces with old album covers (mostly 1950s jazz), movie posters (a decided taste for horror films) and a hodgepodge of pieces of dark fabric of every conceivable size, shape and texture. Books were stacked against every wall. But mostly the room took its form from the U-shaped desk within which Sarah sat in the midst of three or four computers and as many monitors, along with various cross-connected black boxes, scanners and the like. The huge half-dark, half-bright room was the inside of her head, this the cockpit from which she kept it on course.
Almost instantly, she broke into Don Lee’s introduction.
“How’s Seth?”
“He’s fine,” I said. “You two haven’t seen one another?”
“Our parents won’t let us. Here.” She handed across one of those clear folders with a plastic piece that slips over the edge to bind it. “This should help. And save time.”
Don Lee looked at it a moment and handed it to me. The cover read, in small capitals: INCIDENT OF THE NIGHT OF MAY 14. Then, following a two-line space: AS AVERRED BY SARAH PERKINS. Below that, her address, phone number, two e-mail addresses and a signature.
Inside, with approximate times, was a step-by-step listing of her and Seth McEvoy’s arrival at the subdivision, their pulling into the driveway, her first sight of what she believed to be movement, their investigation of same and subsequent call to the police. She had fixed the times by checking her memory of the music being played against the radio station’s log.
“I have a good ear for music, and excellent recall,” she said.
Oh?
The second page of her report recounted what she and Seth had said to one another, beginning with “Seth,
