the plastic could be seen there. He photographed both – transfer mark, D-ring.
‘Got to put the car back before the rain,’ his father said behind him.
‘A minute.’
Sometimes load markings could also be found on the belt latch plate, but here he could not see one on the driver’s side, and on the passenger side he could only see a very faint marking that might have been a manufacturing effect. Inconclusive. He crawled into the back seat, which had only lap belts – no D-rings, and therefore no possibility of transfer marks. He checked the latch plates, but there were no indications of loading. He returned to the front passenger-side belt and looked at the transfer mark there one more time, felt its texture, turned it in the light. He let the retractor take the belt back. He stood out of the car. ‘Dad,’ he said.
Side by side they put hands on the damaged sheet metal and leaning and straining they rolled the car back. His father slid the shed door shut and set the lock, then started toward the toilet. He said, without looking around, ‘I’m sorry that your friend is dead. I liked him.’
‘I’m going to get going.’
‘Find what you wanted?’
Ellis didn’t answer. His father turned to look. ‘I need to think,’ Ellis said.
‘You always did.’
They watched the weed-infested fields and the sky, which darkened further, the reaching, dark cloud masses now advancing with visible speed. A wind pressed, died, then renewed violently. Ellis put his notes in a back pocket and stood hesitating. Odours rose of dust, manure, mud. His father sat unperturbed on his toilet. A piece of paperboard went by bouncing and spinning, and the wind took dust off the fields and streamed it through the air, making Ellis squint and blink. He wasn’t sure of what he was seeing until it had come halfway across the fields: the leading edge of the rain, perfectly defined, a curtain in the air, and below it the field turned black. The sight of this vast motion held Ellis until, although it seemed to be very slowly crawling over the open fields, the rain suddenly hit him with heavy cold droplets. A gust soaked the length of him. He squinted at his father – at times in the past he’d been convinced that the root problem of his life was that his father loved Christopher more than himself. But perhaps his father in his self-pity was right, and everything could be explained by errors of incompetence.
Then his father looked at him through the rain and howled, cheerfully, like an ape.
Startled, Ellis ran.
In the minivan, his father was visible through the windshield, radically distorted by the water moving on the glass, glowing in his white shirt. He remained atop the toilet and his white arm waved high in the air, like a captain committed to going down with the ship. Ellis waved, but his father almost certainly could not see the gesture. He backed the minivan to the road. The wipers flopped water aside but could barely keep up. The muddy gravel road spattered into the wheel wells. He drove slowly and watched the road and wanted to watch the gravel stones in the road, to watch each drop of water on the windshield – he did not want to think about the transfer mark on the passenger belt of his brother’s car and its meaning.
Abruptly he cleared the rain. Traffic moved densely on the interstate. Now the afternoon sun, which had stood over his right shoulder in the morning, stood again over his right shoulder. He powered the windows down and air entered clamorously.
Boggs would have seen the same thing. It meant that a second person had been in the car. Who?
He didn’t know that it had been Heather.
He followed the paired doors of a semi-trailer for miles and miles. At a certain distance from the rear of the trailer, he could glimpse the heavy-lidded eyes of the driver in the jittering side-view mirror.
The police report didn’t say anything about a second person in the car. Why would the second person have been covered up?
He discovered that he had passed his exit. To keep driving – to drive and drive and drive – seemed simple and enticing. World passing without consequence. But he took an exit ramp and turned back.
On the night of the accident he had assumed that Heather had been a passenger in Christopher’s car, until her father told him that she had been at the gas station.
If she had been driving -
The front seat of the
He manoeuvred through roads and turns, returning. He carried his notes and cameras into the house and went to the computer to pull up a reference website – the designed distance between the wheels of the 1970 Fairlane was within a half-inch of the distance that he had measured on the driver’s side of his brother’s car. That distance had not been altered by the collision: the dash had not been pushed back toward the seat. Rather, the seat had been slid forward, for a driver shorter than he was, or Christopher had been.
He looked through the police report again, for any suggestion of a second occupant. There was none. An officer that Ellis did not recognise had signed the report. It did note that Heather’s father had been first on the scene. Certainly he had been there, because Ellis had seen him. Perhaps he had not been able to author the report because his daughter was involved. But surely he had had input.
Ellis called the police station at Coil. A woman’s voice told him that the officer who had signed and filed the report had died several years ago, of a heart attack, only months after his retirement. The woman’s voice caught, and Ellis murmured condolences.
He took the police report and his notes and cameras to the minivan and put them into the glove compartment and locked it. Why did he feel so ungainly as he moved? As if the earth were teetering under him. He returned to the living room. He sat.
If other explanations existed for the evidence on the seat belts, those explanations did not rise to mind. Typically in such cases he would have talked to Boggs for a fresh perspective. Boggs had known all of this. He had seen the same evidence. What had led him to it? Something Heather said, perhaps. It would have been like him to decide to investigate some small contradiction in whatever she had told him about the accident. Or, just curiosity.
If she had been driving the car, why hadn’t she told him? The question was critical, and Ellis tried to focus on it. Of course she had held some of herself from sight; in the nature of their affair a lot had been obscured. Yet he thought he had understood her, essentially, if not entirely. Perhaps he had been wrong. What had he known of her relationship with Boggs? She’d said little about it. But he had not asked. She had said that her marriage was a mistake that she blamed on herself. And what had she meant by that? He had no idea. How, after all, had she come together with him? He had been someone other than Boggs, and he had desired her, and she had felt herself linked to him by – what?
Rain again, darkening the windows, thrumming on the roof, sloshing in the gutters. He watched a droplet work slowly down a windowpane, the shift of the light it held. He tried to think what he should do, of confronting Heather – an idea like a balloon at the end of a string, he pulled it toward himself, then it rose a short distance away again.
He sat in the living room until late, waiting, listening to the air conditioning turn itself off and on. The rain had stopped. The hour when Heather usually returned went by and in agitation he checked the windows whenever a car passed. Finally he went to the toilet, then lay down and curled on the hard tile of the bathroom floor.
Eventually he stood again and went upstairs to the bedroom. Startled, he stopped – a shape lay in the bed.
At the sound of his step she shifted a little. ‘Love,’ he said. ‘You’ve been here all this time?’ he asked. She was silent. ‘Where is your car?’
‘It broke down,’ she said. ‘The engine just stopped.’ Her hand, lying atop the bed sheets, opened and closed. ‘I got it towed, and then I was late and stressed. I couldn’t face school, not another day of it, so I took a taxi home. I thought you’d be here.’
He understood that she was frightened of him, and that she had been for some time now.
‘Where were you?’
‘I’ve been in Coil,’ he said.
That night he lay gathering a hatred of Boggs. He could not believe that Boggs had not envisioned this course of events.
He lay beside her until morning, then he said, ‘I have to show you something.’
Her station wagon was already repaired – an ignition coil replaced. They retrieved it, and then she drove. He was struck by the fact that she almost always preferred to drive. The route to the interstate through familiar end-
