Troopers had beat me to the site. The younger of them was throwing up at roadside. The senior one approached me.
'You'd be the sheriff.'
'Deputy.' We exchanged names, shook hands.
'Just a bunch of kids. Don't make any sense at all… Yo, Roy! you done over there?' Then to me: 'Boy's first week on the job.'
Since it was the interstate, they'd do the paperwork. I'd be left to notify the families.
'Gonna be a long hard night,' Trooper Stanton said.
'Looks like.'
'That yours?' he said, nodding towards the fire truck that had just pulled up. Benny waved from within. All we had was a volunteer department. Benny in real life worked at the auto parts store just down from city hall. He'd been through EMT training up at the capital.
'Sure is.'
Took us better than two hours to clear the scene. Almost 3 a.m. when I knocked on Principal Glazer's door. I was there just under a half hour, then passed on to Jennie's parents, to Dan Taylor's father, Pat Pope's mother.
Sheila Pope lived in a trailer park outside town. She came to the screen door in a threadbare chenille robe, wearing one of those mesh sleep bonnets. It was pink. When I told her, there was no response, no reaction.
'You do understand-right, Mrs. Pope? Patricia's dead.'
'Well… She was never a good girl, you know. I think I'll miss her, though.'
That night I got back to the office not long before Don Lee showed up to take day shift. I made coffee, filled him in on the MVA, and headed home. In the rearview mirror I saw June pull into the spot I left.
A lazy, roiling fog lay on the water as I came around it to the cabin. One of the sisal-bound kitchen chairs on the porch had finally come apart. I suspected that the possum sitting close by may have had something to do with that. Maybe as a trained officer I should check for traces of twine in its teeth. I went in, poured milk into a bowl, and set it out on the porch.
She was never a good girl, you know. I think I'll miss her, though.
That's what a life came to.
Years ago, back when I had such arrogance as to think I could help anyone, I had as a patient a young woman who'd been raped and severely beaten while jogging. It happened near a reservoir. Every time she lifted a glass of water to drink, she said, it was there again. Of the attack she remembered nothing at all. What she remembered was being in ER just after, hearing caretakers above her talking about brain damage, saying: She'll only come back so far. I'd help her up from the chair at session's end. A well-mannered young man, her fiance Terry, always waited for her in the outer room.
Restless, turning as on a spit, I sensed a shadow fall across me and opened my eyes to see a possum crouched in the window. Possums are wild, they are resolutely not pets. But this one wanted in. I opened the window. The possum came in, sniffed its way down the bed, eventually fell asleep beside me. Not long after, I fell asleep myself.
J think Til miss her, though.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Outside, inches away, a face leaned in close to the plateglass. Soon it loomed above our table.
'Trooper Rob Olson,' he said without preamble. 'We spoke earlier.'
'Right.'
'Okay if I turn the town over to you? Sheriff's been pulling more weight than he should, I don't really want to buzz him on this. When I signed on, I never counted on clocking this much time. Now the wife's threatening to change the locks.'
Trooper Olson slid something across the table.
'What's this?'
'The beeper.'
'We have a beeper now?'
' You do, anyway,' J. T. said.
'Wear it in good health,' Trooper Olson said.
By this time we were sitting in Jay's Diner over scrambled eggs, sliced tomatoes, and toast, complete with the little rack of bottled vinegar and oil, ketchup, steak sauce, and pepper sauce. Neither of us had been in the mood for dinner-type food.
'More coffee?' Thelma asked. Near as I could tell, she was here any time the diner was open. Hard to imagine what the rest of her life might be like. Which was odd, the fact that I didn't know, given what I knew about so many other lives hereabouts.
Both sides of the booth, we nodded.
'So you're on vacation.'
'Only because they made me take it.'
'And with nothing better to do, you figured What the hell, I'll track down the old man.'
'Like I say, never got the knack of normal pastimes. I'd been thinking for some time about looking you up. Wasn't sure how you'd feel about that.'
Nor was I.
'No one back there?'
'A guy, you mean?'
'Anyone.'
'Not really. Handful of friends, mostly from the job.' She glanced up to watch a new arrival, eyes following him from door to booth. Not from around here, you could tell that from the way he looked, way he moved. She saw it too. 'I'm good at what I do, very good. I put most of myself into the work. Until recently that seemed enough.'
'And now it's not?'
'I don't know. And most of all I hate not knowing.'
'Maybe you just inherited a little of your mother's restlessness.'
'Or yours.'
Come home to roost, as they say around here. Probably didn't bear too much thinking, what other prodigal chickens might have shown up, for J. T. or for her brother Donald.
I set my cup down and waved off Thelma's query, via raised eyebrows, as to another refill.
'I have to thank you for what happened back there, J. T. But I also have to ask why you're here.'
There was this strange energy to her, this sense of contained intensity in everything she did. It was in her eyes now, in the way she canted forward in the booth.
'I wanted to meet my father,' she said. 'It really is that simple. I think.'
'Fair enough. How much vacation's left?'
'I'm still in the first week.'
'Any plans?'
She shook pepper sauce onto her last piece of toast and made it disappear. Good eater.
'Tell the truth, I've started thinking maybe I could hang out here. With you. If you don't mind.'
'I think I might like that.'
'Done, then.' She reached across to spear my last piece of tomato with her fork.
J. T. was half asleep as we drove to the cabin. When we came to the lake, she opened her eyes and looked out the window, at the water shimmering with light. 'It's like the moon's come down to live with us,' she said. Despite protests I got her settled in, insisting she take the bedroom, and to the sound of her regular breathing called Val. I hadn't had a phone at first or wanted one. Working with Don Lee pretty much demanded it, though. So I had one now. And I had a pet, Miss Emily the possum, gender no longer in doubt since she'd recently given birth
