In Plain View (4 page)

He peeled open the sides of the bag and forced himself to think in the impersonal terms of work. “Male patient…mottled skin…obvious lividity.” Painting the picture for the dispatcher in the ER gave him time to reach down inside, open the rough, buttonless shirt and attach the cardiac monitor electrodes.

“Lead one—flat line.”

Had she gotten a call too?

“Lead two—flat line.”

“Roger. Stand by,” the dispatcher said.

The only personal effects the sheriff’s team had located on the scene were those fucking magazines. It was hard not to hit something just thinking about it.

There had to be a cell phone. He held his phone cocked against his shoulder, pulled off the electrodes with one hand and snaked the other hand down into the bag, along the body. It was cold already. There were damp patches where fluids had started to settle. He felt the change of texture and temperature through the thin casing of latex over his hands.

Nothing.

The phone wasn’t the only thing missing that could get him into trouble.

“Everything all right back there?” his driver called out.

“Fine.”

He had to find the sample bag. Everyone was watching him now. Thinking the worst. No matter how hard he tried to explain, to fix things, it never seemed to be enough. Nothing else could go wrong now or more people would get hurt.

She didn’t know what she was getting into. He was not going to let her fuck everything up now.

The face lying before him wore a contorted grimace of pain and bruising.

He wasn’t supposed to touch the body but he couldn’t stop himself. He pounded down with both fists, hard, center of the chest, right over that guilty heart.

What did you do? What did you do, you dumbass farmboy?

“Hey! Whoa, what’s going on back there? We’re one minute away, man. Captain’s going to be at the other end. Don’t freak on me now.”

“Okay. I’m okay.”

There was no peace in death on that face. Only pain. And hatred.

Gently, he laid his hands on the face. He massaged the mouth, the jaw, the brow. He tipped the head and smoothed the expression.

At last, the face appeared peaceful.

He would do whatever he had to do to fix it, to smooth it over.

Everything was going to be fine. Just fine.

He zipped the bag shut slowly, so there was almost no sound at all.

3:52:34 p.m.

It took forty-two minutes for Ainsley to drive me to the house that once belonged to my sister, Angelina O’Hara.

Jenny was waiting, sitting on the doorstep hunched by the bulk of her backpack, fiddling intently with her shoe. She’s the kind of kid who looks like she’s made of hollow straws and toothpicks, all held together by wire bread ties. Everything about her was either stiff or sharp.

I swear, we couldn’t have been more than twelve, thirteen minutes late, at most.

“This is where you live?” Ainsley asked.

“Yeah.” A squat, yellow-brick ranch house was not my idea of heaven either.

“Who’s that?” Ainsley asked.

I had a sudden flash of the Boy Wonder reporting back to Uncle Rich all the details of my life story. Definitely not. Not before I signed the paperwork anyway.

I popped the van door open but didn’t get out. “You’re mighty curious, aren’t you? Let’s add research to your job description. Go back to the station and make some calls. See if you can find out why Sheriff Curzon hates us. I’d guess he’s worked with the press before. See what you can find out. Then call the police station just before five. If they still won’t ID the body, get a name on who owns the property where it was found. We ought to try to set up an interview first thing tomorrow. Early light would be nice. Call me at home later so we can set a schedule, but plan on picking me up around seven-A. You got my cell number?”

“Yeah. I got it.” He sounded distracted. Or maybe it was pissed. Sensitive boy. Wasn’t like I ordered him to pick up my dry cleaning.

“Oh, one more thing. Push my bike into the dock, would you? Night air isn’t good for Peg.” I slammed the door behind me. “See ya.” I followed the van as it backed down the driveway, walking all the way out to the road so I could empty the mailbox.

Jenny never picked up the mail; Jenny never went near the road.

Three months ago her single mother—my only sister—was the hit part of a hit-and-run. She died.

Fucking boondocks.

I got the call between flights on my way to a natural disaster in Mexico—earthquake? Killer bees? Hell, I don’t even remember. I got off one plane and onto another, and just that fast, the life I had was over. My new life consisted of a thirty-year-old ranch house, a ten-year-old Subaru station wagon and an eight-year-old niece. Jenny.

The school counselor told me it’d be a big mistake to move her right now. Said Jenny needed stability. Same house, same school, same friends. So, here I am in the no-man’s land of the Chicago ’burbs. Harbor of White Flight. Republican stronghold. Protestant heaven. Journalist hell.

News flash: Jenny wasn’t all that happy with me either.

I crouched down next to her on the concrete step. “Been sitting here long?”

She shrugged and continued staring at her shoes.

“Sorry I kept you waiting.”

No answer. She leaned over and poked the tip of her shoelace into one of the lace holes.

“I got the job. That’s why I was late. We don’t have to move or anything. For now.”

Thank goodness I had enough cash stashed away, I could afford to sit on my ass with her for the summer. Neither of us was in any shape to detail a life plan more complicated than dinner and the TV guide. But I’d told her from the beginning that couldn’t last. Besides the money, I needed to work. It kept me in circulation.

It kept me from going insane.

Jenny finally tossed her head at me,
oh?
and her purple plastic barrette unsnapped. A curtain of fine, brown hair, straight as her mother’s, drooped in front of her face.

“Guess we should get you a key or something,” I offered. “So this doesn’t happen again.”

“Kids aren’t supposed to have keys,” she mumbled to her shoe laces. “Kids are supposed to have somebody.”

“Right.”

Our after-school routine was loosely based on her mother’s plan of operation. We ate a snack, watched cartoons together, then she tackled homework while I ran through my weight program. Today, I scrapped routine. I threw the kid a bag of chips and went straight down to my darkroom to work, eager to see how my shots would develop.

I had turned a portion of the basement into a work area as soon as I’d arrived. One small window had to be blocked off, but there was running water and plenty of space to hang prints to dry. I tied lines to plumbing pipes, bought myself some heavy-duty shelves and a shop table at the local hardware store. Boom, I was in business.

Jenny hung around the first time I printed a roll. But she didn’t like the smell of the chemicals, which meant I usually had my privacy in the darkroom. Another bonus. Sometimes the hardest thing about coming to live with Jenny was simply having her around all the time.

People are funny. If somebody said go into a damp, smelly basement and sit around for a couple of hours, it’d sound unpleasant to most, but I always felt refreshed after time in the darkroom. There’s a certain level of concentration that must be maintained, steps that happen in a certain order, and in the end if you do it right, you get something beautiful.

Some people do yoga. I do photography.

Photographing a death scene is a special challenge. There are very few shots that will play as acceptable for prime time, although the boundaries of acceptable have expanded in the last few years. I got everything through two baths and hung to dry when I heard a knock. The shot with the firefighter was a beauty.

“Come on in.” I was hunched over the table, checking a wide shot with a jeweler’s loupe. There was a flare showing up in some of the shots that irritated me.

“I’m hungry, Aunt Maddy.”

“Oh, right.” I pulled myself away from the flare problem and cracked my neck. “What time is it?”

“Almost eight. You missed Scooby-Doo and SpongeBob.”

“How many commercials?” I asked.

“Forty-two. Thirty-six promos.”

If the kid was going to watch television, she’d better know what she was watching. Whenever she watched regular TV, I made her count. “That’s a lot of commercial time.”

“Old Navy is having a sale.”

“Ah.”

Jenny slid in next to me as I hunched over proof sheets searching for flares. She looked up at the drying prints. “What is that?”

I jerked upright and had one of those
whoops! Is this a fuck-up?
moments. The smallest possible answer was, “These are the pictures I took today.”

“Is that guy dead?”

“Yeah.”

She stepped close enough to the photo I thought her nose would touch the paper. “Did he kill himself?”

“Yeah, he did.” The guy had a rope as thick as my wrist hanging from around his neck; what else could I say?

“Why?” she whispered.

I guess I’d been holding my breath because the first sound I made was a whoosh of air. “I don’t know. I guess he was sad.” I knew that wasn’t right, wasn’t enough, so I tried adding, “Very, very sad.”

She turned her nose toward me and stared long enough I counted three blinks.

“Hey Jen, I need to run these downtown to a guy.” I tried diversionary tactics. “Wanna get a hot dog for dinner?”

“Chili dog?”

“Sure.” I gave her my best happy chuck on the arm, feeling like I’d dodged a bullet. “Be right up—you go grab my bag.”

With a snap, I grabbed the picture Jenny had nearly pressed her nose against. It showed the flare as well, but not in the same spot. I set two prints beside each other and realized the flare wasn’t crap on my lens. It was something in the photo, something catching light in the open second-story window of the barn.

Making pictures is a fairly complex operation. A million tiny details, a million choices that contribute to the final product. Most of the choices are things I don’t even think about any more, things happening so fast I don’t remember half of what I see. I crouch to shift the horizon. I frame so the picture will fit into a TV screen’s rectangle. I put the light behind me.

With the sun slanting in above the van’s roof, the lens recorded something my eye had missed—the flare of light on glass in a tiny, double comma. Because I’d spent plenty of time over the last five years taking pictures of soldiers on the job, it happened to be just the sort of flare I’d recognize.

Binoculars.

Somebody had been watching from the barn.

11:17:09 p.m.

By the time her aunt was asleep, it was really dark everywhere. But Jenny didn’t mind.

Lots of other kids were afraid of the dark.

Jenny knew for a fact that Lindsay still slept with a light on, because she’d slept over once last year when they were still friends. That was a long time ago.

Jenny didn’t need a night light anymore. Night wasn’t bad. In fact, she liked it.

She stood in her doorway and listened. Her heart was pounding so hard it hurt to swallow.

Before the summer, before everything was different, she’d loved her house: the chair she always sat in to watch TV, the wall where her mom hung her pictures from school, even the bathroom, where the heater vent was right beside the toilet and in the winter it blew warm air on her cold feet when she woke up. Whenever Jenny walked in the door of her house, she always felt right.

Everything was different now. Her chair was lumpy. Aunt Maddy had put her stuff in Jenny’s bathroom, like her toothbrush and this thing called a tongue scraper that was double weird and totally gross. Jenny never had time to warm her feet anymore. She had to hurry up, so her aunt could have her turn. The house didn’t even smell the same, because her aunt hated the smell of Pine-Sol and bought new cleaner that smelled like oranges and made Jenny sneeze.

Jenny looked up and down. The hall returned nothing but a long, black silence. The pounding in her chest began to pass. Here in the dark, she felt safe. Invisible, she could breathe. She could finally do the thing she most wanted to do, the thing she craved through the whole long, bright day.

She tip-toed up the hall, sticking close to the wall where the floor didn’t creak. Outside the guest bedroom where her aunt slept, she stopped again to listen.

Quiet.

Jenny held her breath as she passed the door. Her aunt’s bare foot hung off the bed, her face turned away toward the wall.
Your aunt had big shoes to fill,
her mother always said and it was true. Aunt Maddy had big feet.
That’s why she’s bigger than life.
Jenny wasn’t really sure what that meant, until Aunt Maddy came to stay. Her feet weren’t the only big part. She was so tall she bumped the light over the couch almost every day. And she had a big voice, too. She yelled in the car at the other drivers, she yelled when she talked on the phone, sometimes she even yelled at the TV. Loud.

The last door in the hall was Mama’s. It was closed, as usual.

Jenny slipped in and shut the door behind her.

At last.

With a pillow and lap blanket off the bed, she crossed the last threshold into Mama’s big square closet. There was a place deep in the back where she’d cleared away all the shoes, and Mama’s long skirts and dresses nearly dragged the floor. Snuggling back against the wall Jenny let the clothes brush against her face, her mother’s scent, her mother’s softness surrounding her. She closed her eyes, breathing in, in, in.

Mommy, Mommy, Mom-me.

Sometimes everything didn’t feel as bad when you were awake in the dark.

For a while, Jenny worried that Aunt Maddy would take it all away, all her mama’s things in the bedroom. She never did. She just put her suitcases in the guest room and that was that. It was kind of weird, actually. Her aunt had like, no
stuff.
Except the weights and the camera junk in the basement.

Jenny sunk deeper into the pillow and pulled the blanket around her shoulders. It wasn’t usually so cold in the closet. Tonight, it felt cold.