way, clean laundry the other, back and forth over the course of the evening while the washing machine pulsed and throbbed in its cubicle off the kitchen and the clothes dryer, which was out of alignment and badly in need of shims under its base-a chore that Tee had been promising to tend to for the better part of five years-sent shock waves vibrating through the floorboards and into Tee's feet. Tee sat in his armchair, long since past noting the hyper agitations of the dryer, and contemplated his wife as she made her periodic passages. In her late forties, she still did not look old to him. Not young, either, but in that limbo of indeterminate age when the wrinkles still added character to the face and not just years, when the skin tone still responded to exercise, but with diminishing resilience, when life itself seemed to be attenuated in a sort of declining crawl that lasted a decade or two before the long free-fall of true age began.
Tee knew that he was in the same stretch of life himself, that he was in fact several years older than his wife, and yet he felt there remained in him a vital flame of youth that he no longer saw in Marge. Middle age might last an age, but it would not last forever, and to Tee's mind his wife was nearin the end of it while he had just begun.
Her hair was dyed an unnatural blonde and cut boyishly short and her neck shaved nearly to the bump at the back of her skull in a fashion that was common to many women of her age. Tee hated it and looked upon it as a signal of defeat. Women who cut their hair that way were giving up, he thought.
He watched her, her thickening body moving heavily and purposefully past him, and thought of Mrs. Leigh's graceful run, her slender, muscled limbs-and hated himself.
The phone rang but neither Tee nor Marge moved to answer it. They knew it would be for their daughter. For the hours from three in the afternoon until midnight it always seemed to be for Ginny. The ringing stopped after the second tone-Ginny never answered on the first ring, it would seem too eager. But this time Tee heard her call out, 'Dad!' from her upstairs bedroom.
'Don't answer her,' Marge said. 'Make her come to you and speak in a normal tone of voice.'
'Dad!' I 'I can't hear you. You'll have to come here and speak to me,' Tee said softly. 'Phone!'
Tee reached for the extension by his chair but let his hand drop when he saw Marge shake her head in disgust.
'How is she ever going to learn if you give in to her all the time?'
Tee lifted his hands as if at gunpoint. 'I didn't pick up!'
Ginny called out, 'Dad!' one more time and then, after a lengthy pause, she walked into the living room. She was dressed, as usual, as if prepared to slide under a car and change the oil. Her jeans and T-shirt were several sizes too large, her shoes were a designer's profitable take on work boots. She was, to Tee, inexpressibly beautiful.
'Phone,' she said. With the door to her room left open, the sound of tortured guitars and electronic instruments filled the house. 'Thank you, darling,' he said, lifting the receiver. The slurred and half-swallowed accents of the inner city assaulted his ear. 'Chief Terhune?'
'Yes?'
'You a hard man to find. Had to do some work to get your number.'
'I'm easy to reach at work in the daytime,' said Tee. 'Don't want to talk to you there, Chief,' said the voice. 'Too many people listening at work.'
'Who is this?'
'Jus' say I be a friend.'
'How about just saying your name, friend?'
'Sumpin' you ought to know, Chief. Sumpin' about McNeil.'
'Officer McNeil?'
'Yeah, Officer McNeil. Dickhead McNeil, ol' Pussy hisself You know who I talkin' about.'
'What about him?'
'Look in his garage.'
'What do I want to look in his garage for?'
'Jus' take a look around there, Chief. See what you see. Maybe you find sumpin' innerestin'.'
'What am I looking for?'
'Depend what you want. Man got a garage like a warehouse, you find whatever you looking for in there. You looking for a man be doing your hos?'
'Who is this?'
'Don't be tellin' McNeil you got a call though, Chief. You want to hear from me again, don't tell ol' Pussy. I can help you out, I can tell you lots of things-if you don't tell McNeil. But first you take a look in that garage. It be worth your trouble, I promise you.'
The line went dead in Tee's ear.
'Is something wrong, Dad?' To his surprise, Ginny was still standing in the archway leading from the living room.
'No, honey.'
'You look worried.'
'It's just business,' Tee said. 'I just hate getting calls at home, that's all.'
She nodded. 'Good.' Ginny smiled at him, the radiant, soul-lifting smile of youth, and Tee felt weak with love.
'How's the homework?' he asked.
'Just about done,' she said, and left as if his question had banished her. Tee wanted to call out to her not to go, that he had not meant it that way. Their moments of communion had become less and less frequent as she made her way deeper into adolescence. He missed her and longed for the close relationship they had once had, even as he saw it receding further and further from him. Marge had less of a problem with it, she tended to be sterner and harder on the girl than Tee, and yet he knew that her mother was the one she turned to in crisis, it was her advice she sought, her comfort she needed more than Tee's. They kept secrets from him, he realized. Sometimes inconsequential feminine things, perhaps larger issues, he didn't know. But he did sense that in the past few years there had grown up a kind of conspiracy against him, a 'Don't tell Dad' and 'We won't bother your father with this' cabal that excluded him and bruised his feelings.
When Ginny's door was closed and the level of noise fell by several decibels, Tee picked up the phone and called police headquarters. He asked when McNeil was next on duty and was told he had the shift starting in the morning from eight to four. He knew that McNeil's wife worked during the day.
He hadn't been invited to the man's house for years. Tee tried to remember if McNeil had a dog.
He waited until he knew that McNeil was nestled into the speed trap on Clamden Road before he set out himself. He drove down the steep hill that led from the town center toward the Merritt Parkway and saw McNeil's car snuggled just off the main road at a spot where the careless driver would have let the gravity of the hill accelerate his vehicle to illegal speed. At the base of the hill Tee turned left and began to weave along the back roads to McNeil's domain. He called the house before he arrived and let the phone ring a long time, assuring himself that Mrs. McNeil had not chosen this day to stay home sick. The walls of the garage were lined with tools, bicycles, chairs, snow shovels, gardening implements, a mattress still encased in plastic, skis and poles, boots, biking helmets, baseball bats, all of the residue of a family life, all of it hanging from hooks or stacked neatly in piles pushed snug against the sides of the building. A yellow slicker hung next to the door leading into the house, a surprising splash of color in the gloomy room. A roll of carpeting next to the garage door cast one of the few discordant notes in an otherwise compulsively neat display.
The carpet appeared too old to save, too ragged and tattered to serve any function that made it worth the storage space-which made it look significant to Tee. He shoved it to the floor in the empty space reserved for a car and unrolled it. Using his flashlight, Tee went over the carpet slowly, running his fingers through the worn fibers. He found nothing and rolled it up and replaced it.
What the hell am I doing? he wondered. Crawling around on a smelly rug, searching for some mysterious clue toto what? 'A man be doing your hos?' It wasn't quite English, but Tee had chosen to think it meant something about Johnny's girls from the orchard. Why? Because he was already inclined to think that way, he admitted to himself Because too many things about McNeil troubled him.
He began a methodical search, tapping for hidden compartments, running his hand along rafters and the top of a storage shelf holding cans of paint, each meticulously marked.- Smelly rug? he thought suddenly. He returned
