Sam hesitates. “I wasn’t sure anyone else would.”
With his arm over the seatback, Poloniak cranes around to pursue it. “Do you know of anything else? She tell you anything else?”
“No. She’s always bruised up. I thought it was from hoops. She’s such a physical player.”
Woods clears his throat. “You think there might have been sexual abuse as well?”
Sam meets Rick’s father’s glance in the rearview mirror. “All I know was she was scared of him and he didn’t like her getting calls from boys. I always had to pick her up and let her off out of sight of the house.”
Poloniak drums the back of the seat with his fingers. “This girl, she gets around, Sam. She parties a lot. You don’t think maybe a guy who’s practically her stepfather might be sort of frustrated with his girlfriend’s daughter running around? He might try to exert some discipline?”
Sam’s laugh is rusty. “Discipline? You should see her face. What’s left of it.”
“All right, Sam,” Woods says soothingly, “nobody’s excusing the son of a bitch. We’re just investigating. Trying to get a picture of what’s been going on.”
The house at the end of Depot Street is still empty, the door slightly ajar as Sam left it. While the cops pick their way around the debris inside, they make him stay in the backseat of the cruiser. The neighbors peek out of their houses and then they put their winter gear on and come out and stand around, staring at the cop car and at Sam, who sinks lower in the seat. Woods comes back to make the radio calls that put a serious investigation into motion. As Sergeant Woods takes him up the walk into the house, Sam hopes the neighbors are noticing he is not in cuffs.
Everything is just as he left it.
It hits him she’ll need some clothes and her books and uniform, her high-tops and Walkman, from this house she should never have to go into again.
“She’s going home with me. Be all right if I get clothes and things for her?”
“Better not disturb anything yet,” Poloniak advises.
Woods peers into Deanie’s bedroom. “Sam’s already walked through the broken glass. We’ve taken the Polaroids of the bedroom, Chief. I think Sam can take her books and some clothes. I’ll keep an eye on him while he does it.”
Crunching glass with every step, Sam collects her backpack and duffel onto the cot with her high-tops. Rick’s father stands in the door, tracking his every move. The drawers of the dumppicked dresser in the corner yield up the meager assortment of her ragbag wardrobe—so little of it. He recognizes all the pieces. It hits him how little she has. When he’s stuffed it all into the duffel with her high-tops and her uniform and books and swept in a handful of tape cassettes and another handful of makeup, there’s nothing much left besides some rolling papers and matches and candle stubs—her coat on a nail driven into the wall, her bathrobe on the back of the door. He takes them both.
This room of hers is nearly as horrible as the cubby in the Mill—worse, with those frigging creepy mirrors. Her belongings are as pathetic as a refugee’s. It occurs to him now that she made a style of holes and rags because that was what she had—turned them in into a kind of sarcastic joke by flaunting them. That mirror mind of hers. Clothe herself in holes, scalp herself for a hairdo, ornament herself with tattoos, jewel herself with ugly slavechains.
As he withdraws from the room, he catches a glimpse of himself in a fragment of mirror still clinging to the wall. He feels a sudden jolting nausea.
“The cartoon,” he says.
Sergeant Woods looks at him quizzically.
“The one she did on the wall at the Mill.”
“I’ve seen it,” the cop says. “Checking the place out.”
Sam looks at him. Sergeant Woods returns a direct and candid gaze.
“Look again,” Sam says. “Look again.”
Depositing her things in the truck in the hospital parking lot, he glances toward the building. In the Emergency Room reception area, visible through plate glass, Poloniak is claiming a clear plastic bag with the clothes cut off Deanie in it. It hits Sam this really is a legal matter now. They’re all going to be up to their asses in cops, lawyers and Department of Human Services social workers. Courtrooms and judges. Evoking all the emotional baggage of his own childhood, it makes him want to puke.
He turns back to the truck and reaches for his duffel to find his Walkman. Something clanks underneath the gym bag. He fishes out her waist and crotch chain rig. He holds it a moment, thinking. She had it wrapped around her hand and wrist like a weapon. The doctor said Tony Lord lost an eyelid and maybe the use of the eye—from flying glass? Did Deanie hit the mirror with the chain? Or use the chain directly?
Slowly, he tucks it into a jacket pocket. His chest feels tight and his eyes are dry and hot. Right this minute, Tony Lord is comfortably stoned on legal narcotics. Clenching and unclenching his fists, Sam leans against the truck, fighting the urge to prescribe a full dose of the chain in his pocket to good ol’ Tony—feed the motherfucker the whole length of it, link by link, jam his throat full of it.
In the ER, he draws it out and hands it to Woods. “She had it wrapped around her fist.”
Woods dangles the chain in front of Poloniak. “What do you think, Art?”
Poloniak jerks back his head. “Better hold on to it.”
It goes into another plastic bag.
Assuming a gargoyle hunch in the plastic chair in the waiting room, Sam closes his eyes and seals out the world with the noise in his headphones. He feels his cells thickening, petrifying, on the ledge of waiting. Like a fallen archangel condemned to this plane of time, he curls his toes inside misshapen, threadbare high-tops, his oversized hands and
