In Plain View

asked, while punching buttons on the dash to fire up the heat.

“How’s this?” I curled my hand into a fist and shook it lightly.

“Hey! Look, kids, it’s Feisty the Snowman. Where to first?”

I resisted the smile, but his silliness struck a spark that the car’s heat built into warmth. “Let’s go back to the school.”

We drove in silence. Curzon didn’t even need directions.

What is it about the inside of a car at night? He was watching the road and I was looking out the window, eyes burning for a glimpse of purple jacket. The car wrapped a cave of safety around us. I was too worried about Jenny to resist-the comfort or the intimacy.

We cruised the neighborhood, stopping anywhere I could think Jenny might have walked so I could get out and shout her name. I saw at least two other police cars slowly driving around, which pleased me at first but gradually sent the anxiety creeping up, up, up. A lot of people were looking.

Where the hell had she gone?

“So. Only you and your sister in the family?” Curzon’s tone was an injection of calm.

“Just the two of us.”

“What neighborhood you from?”

Neighborhood, parish, high school-I gave him all the standard Chicago-locator coordinates, answered every question and more. I don’t usually talk so much. Must have been the car.

“Can we follow the bus route?” I asked. “Maybe she tried to walk home that way.”

“Good idea,” he said. “I’ll go back to the school and we’ll start from there.”

I did a couple head rolls and shoulder drops. With every zap of the police radio, I twitched. Curzon was right of course; we needed to be systematic. Systematic was taking too damn long.

“Tell me about this story you’re working on. Why’d you ask me about Samaritan law?”

It was hard shifting my brain to thinking about work, shifting tectonic plates hard. I wasn’t sure whether to call the result a headache or a headquake.

“I think somebody may have seen Jost at the tree. Setting up. Doing the deed. The whole thing.”

“He did it by the side of the road,” Curzon pointed out matter-of-factly. He flicked a glance my way. “You feeling all right?”

“Great,” I said, with one eye closed. “Don’t you think that’s weird?”

“What, the tree? No. He picked a tree on his daddy’s front lawn.”

“Okay, classic protest suicide-look what you made me do. But the more I’ve talked to people, the weirder that part seems. Amish people don’t do protest, much less suicide. And wouldn’t he have gotten the same effect if he did it in his apartment and wrote a note? So why the tree? What was he thinking?”

Curzon slowed to a stop at a yellow light. “You’re asking, what did he get by doing it in that tree?”

“Exactly.”

Curzon’s cell phone rang. He answered, “Sheriff.”

Time stopped. The street light was red.

Still red.

My night vision dissolved. All the grays of the shadows around us went black. In the distance, car headlights flashed and turned away.

Red.

“Yeah, got it. Tell them five minutes.” He snapped the phone shut with a flick, dropped it into the space beside the gear box. “They found her.”

“She’s okay, right?” Don’t bury the lead, you sadist.

The answer was hard to hear over the sudden blare of his siren.

“She’s alive.”

8:47:59 p.m.

I doubt it took us three whole minutes to get to her. Curzon drove like a bat out of hell. I was numb enough to admire the bright streak of lights we passed and the sensation of gentle compression into the Audi’s butt-warming leather seat.

As soon as he turned onto Orchard Road, I knew where we were going. Past the flashing yellow, where the edge of a golf course became a cemetery, lay the Prairie Path-an old railroad route that had been turned into a safe path for pedestrians, bikers, joggers. The Path crossed the busiest part of the road here. Cars against people.

I’d been to see the place myself several times this summer on my late-night jaunts. It was the spot where my sister died.

A squad car, wigwag lights flashing, and an ambulance were parked perpendicular to the road. Curzon pulled in next to the police cruiser. I had my door open before he’d even geared all the way down.

The night air near this narrow patch of woods had cooled faster; my breath fogged out ahead of me. I pushed between the cars, hands in my jacket pockets, cold and nervy to the core.

Trees and ancient bushes blocked most of the light around us from the houses. I could hardly see where I was walking. Dry leaves were heaped ankle high in the ditch. The crunch of my feet hustling toward the clump of emergency people was inappropriately silly.

“Jenny? Where is she? What happened?”

The cop got in my face. The paramedics were so busy they didn’t even look up.

“She’s alive.” He came toward me hands wide. “She’s unconscious. They need to know if she has a drug problem.”

“A what?” Someone moved, I could barely see her legs. “She’s eight years old!”

“Easy.” The cop body-blocked me.

I would have shoved him aside if Curzon hadn’t come up behind me and put a solid hand on my shoulder, calming, restraining. I’m too big for that move to work most of the time. It caught me off guard.

“I’m on it,” Curzon assured the guy. “Let her through.”

I shoved past the junior cop, took two steps and suddenly, I could see everything. The paramedic reaching for a hypodermic. Jenny’s face-so white it was hard to believe she was alive. Her closed eyes smudged with dirt or something darker. Leaves blanketing the edges of her body. She looked so tiny, something the wind could carry off, like the rest of autumn’s refuse.

“Oh Lord,” slipped out.

Curzon was talking and the paramedic was saying something, and all I could hear was my one, single thought: no.

She was dead. My sister was dead.

I see. I can see it now.

Memories began to flip on the screen in my head and I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.

Stop. Stop it. My sister’s in her crib, holding on to the rail, screaming. My parents may, or may not hear her. The TV is on and they are screaming over the sound of music and gunshots and other happy voices. I’m not allowed to get my sister out of her bed. I watch her face, wetter and redder by the moment. She isn’t looking at the door, she is looking at me.

My stomach curdles. I walk the long hall, one foot at a time…um, baby’s crying?

Get back in your bed!

The pain is fast and sharp, but gone quick as a doctor’s needle. One fight ends. My father slams a door on his way out. My mother goes to the baby. I lie on the rug listening to commercials until my nausea is gone. I’m so calm, I’m invisible. I float back to my bed and…

My father laid out, dead this time, in his box. My mother is somewhere, speaking to strangers. My sister stands beside me. She is crying. This time her head is down. There is a line of white scalp where her hair parts. It is exactly the same color as the streaks her tears make on the front of her uniform blouse.

She fumbles for my hand-half my height, almost half my age-and in her face, I see all the sorrow I should feel