Frank stepped out of the car and looked around. The yellowish light of the few surrounding houses died away before it reached the edge of the lot, and it was as if this vacant field rested in a darkness which it had itself conceived and which no mere human light could penetrate. He could feel that darkness like a heavy robe across his shoulders. It hung all around him, more dense than air, a thick black shroud.
He walked slowly to the very edge of the lot. Brown weedy grasses inched their way over the edge of the cement walkway. Frank reached down, pulled a single drought-stricken blade from the ground and put it into his mouth.
As he looked out over the lot, he could sense the route the man had taken as he straggled through the bramble with Angelica’s body in his arms or over his shoulder. The same briar that had scraped her ankles now grabbed at his trousers as he moved out toward the center of the field. In his mind, he could hear the heavy breath of the man who carried her, hear the whisper of his body as it plunged through the bramble, the thud of Angelica’s shoe as it dropped from her foot to the ground.
He stopped and looked down at the ground. Her shoe had been found exactly where he stood, and for a moment he stared at the ground beneath him, as if trying to absorb some vibration from its depths. But the hard, littered earth gave nothing back, and after a moment he moved on through the thickening brush until he stood once again over the shallow ditch where Angelica’s body had been found. He stood very still and looked all around him. The lot was so bleak and abandoned that it gave everything around it a deeper, more intractable bleakness. To the left a squat, rust-colored warehouse stood in the faded light of a single streetlamp. It was built of plain, yellowish brick and half its black-painted windows had been broken. It seemed to lean to the left, as if it were sinking slowly into the ground. At the rear of the lot, a group of unpainted wooden tenements, half of them boarded up and abandoned, groaned in the summer breeze. One of them drooped forward, as if ready to collapse, and the single light that shone from its second-story window seemed to stare at Frank with a half-closed eye. The other surrounding blocks were almost entirely leveled. On one, nothing but a cinderblock church remained, and on the other was nothing but a dilapidated auto parts store.
He glanced back down to the place where Angelica’s body had been found. He could still see it lying before him, the legs bent slightly at the knees, one arm slung outward from her body, the other tucked neatly at her side. It was as if the imprint of her body still remained like a stain on the ground, and as he looked at it, he could imagine that whoever had brought her here had not picked this spot by accident. It seemed to have been chosen for its ugliness, for the ways its ugliness further humiliated and offended Angelica.
For a while, Frank remained in place, hoping that something would come to him, some idea that the physical evidence alone could not provide, an intimation, however faint, which could nonetheless serve as a kind of guide. But in the end, he felt nothing but the cold reality of Angelica’s death, and he turned around and walked slowly back to the car.
All the lights were blazing in the house when Frank got there, but that did not surprise him. Sheila had kept them on more or less continually since Sarah’s death, as if tragedy were some sort of marauding jungle beast which a campfire could keep away.
“I expected you a little earlier,” she said crisply as she opened the door.
“I have a new case,” Frank told her.
“So Alvin said. A young girl.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know how it happened yet?”
“A little. Not much.”
She nodded quickly, then stepped out of the door. “Well, come in,” she said.
Frank walked directly into the living room, but he did not sit down. It did not feel like his house anymore.
Sheila walked to the fireplace and pressed her back up against it. She wore a plain blue dress, slightly wrinkled, and her hair hung in a disheveled tangle at her shoulders. She looked drawn, as if she’d been sleeping badly.
“I’ve decided to leave Atlanta,” she said.
“All right.”
“I’m going to sell the house.”
Frank said nothing.
“I thought I’d give you the first chance to buy it.”
“I don’t want it.”
Sheila’s eyes darted away, as if in rejecting the house they shared together, he was once again rejecting her. “All right, then,” she said stiffly, “I’ll sell the house and give you half the money.”
“I don’t want the money,” Frank said.
Sheila looked at him disapprovingly. “You look like you could use a new suit.”
“I don’t want the money, Sheila,” Frank repeated.
“You could buy yourself a new place,” Sheila said.
“I like where I am.”
“Renting that place on Waldo? You like that? Frank, it’s a slum.”
“You’ve never been there.”
“Alvin’s described it.”
“Alvin has his own way of looking at things,” Frank said. “It may not always be the best one.”
“Well, he told me about it,” Sheila said. “And when I think that we could still be living …”
“No,” Frank said flatly, and watched as she turned away to face the hearth.
“I didn’t mean to get into that again,” she said softly. “I always promise myself that I won’t get into that, and then I do.”
Frank struggled to smile.; “So, where are you moving to, Sheila?”
She eased herself around to face him. “Back home.”
“Fort Payne?”
“You seem surprised.”
“I am … a little.”
“I don’t see why,” Sheila said. “I never liked Atlanta, Frank. I never wanted to come here.” There was a fatal accusation in her voice. He had taken her where she didn’t want to go, and after that, one disaster had led to another, until there was nothing left between them but the memory of disaster.
“You going to buy a place of your own?” Frank asked.
“Not right away,” Sheila said. “At first, I’m going to stay with Papa. He needs looking after, you know.”
He tried to smile again. “I wish you luck, Sheila. I really do.”
She glared at him with a sudden fierceness. “You son of a bitch,” she hissed.
Frank walked to the door. “I’ll spread the word about the house. Somebody in the department might want it.”
Sheila marched to the sofa and slumped down on it. “Save yourself the trouble,” she said bitterly.
Frank opened the door and glanced back at her. For a moment he wanted to find some way to ease the bitterness between them, to draw her softly back—not as a wife, for that was gone forever—but as someone he had loved more deeply and for a longer time than he would ever love again. But it was useless, and he knew it. In the end, there was nothing left but to close the door.
It was after midnight before he got back to the house. Hours of driving through the streets had not helped much. He slumped down on the sofa and turned on the light beside it. He could see his unmade bed in the adjoining room, and its disarray echoed the accusation he’d heard all his life, that he couldn’t finish things, that he drifted along with the flood, with no direction of his own.
The accusation didn’t always seem fair. After all, he’d moved to Atlanta at Alvin’s urging, and for years they’d walked a beat together, two brothers in blue on the gritty, noisy streets. He remembered the pride he’d once had in his uniform, the shining buttons and brilliant silver badge. It had taken him many years to exchange it for the gold shield of a detective, and although Alvin was older, and had been with the department longer, they’d done it the same year. The two brothers in uniform became the two brothers in Homicide, and for several years after that, they’d even worked a few cases together. Then Sarah had died at sixteen, and two years later, Sheila had dropped
