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“Address of residency,” the sergeant says.

I can only imagine what the sergeant must be thinking. Wouldn’t an innocent man have asked for an explanation already?

Or maybe the sergeant couldn’t care less. Maybe he’s just waiting for my information so that he can type it into the blank spots on his computer screen.

Why didn’t I take the time to read the arrest warrant? There I was, marching out of the house with a righteous stride, and now I don’t know the first thing about the charges against me. I feel like I’ve leapt off the end of a sturdy dock onto a frozen pond, and the ice is cracking all around me.

The sergeant is waiting.

“I’d like to make a phone call,” I say.

“Address.”

I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Now the sergeant finally looks at me. He raises his eyebrows.

“Thirty-four Sycamore Court,” I tell him, starting the gears of the justice machine turning again.

I know that Clark Falls isn’t Boston. It can’t be more than fifteen degrees outside, the local bars won’t close for three more hours, and I have no frame of reference in the first place, but still: it must be slow in here for a Friday. Except for me and the desk sergeant, the intake area is bright and vacant.

A plate of crumbs and candy sprinkles sits in a puddle of red cellophane on a nearby table. There’s a spindly artificial Christmas tree standing cockeyed in the corner; colored lights blink a few times, chase each other around the frazzled branches, then blink again.

I follow the faint crackle of radio chatter to a glass partition labeled
Dispatch,
where a young woman wearing a bulky holiday sweater and a radio headset sits behind a shoulder- high console, working the controls. I hear Officer Mischnik joking around with somebody down the hall. In a moment, I see him emerge with a foam cup in one hand, steam curling around the rim. He pauses to chat up the dispatcher through the glass.

Sitting here, hands cuffed in my lap, robotically answering these questions about the mundane nuts and bolts of my life, it strikes me that, on the right side of things, this is just a place where people work. They come here for a while and go home again. In between, they joke and eat cookies and earn paychecks.

There’s no way to get comfortable in this chair. The desk sergeant pokes at the keys and squints at his screen. Hard steel gnaws at my wrist bones. I forgot to put on gloves before I stalked out of the house, and my hands are freezing.

I’m on the wrong side of things.

This is happening.

•    •    •

The officer who catalogs my personal belongings has a gun-metal crew cut and a faded gray Marine Corps tattoo on one leathery forearm. He tells me I shouldn’t get too comfortable— I might not be staying.

Apparently, they’ve been having problems with the heat in parts of the facility; it’s an old building, twelve beds and a drunk tank, used primarily to hold people who are waiting to bond out, sober up, or appear before a judge. If the housing area goes on the blink, I’ll be transported to the county facility on the north edge of town.

I tell him that I doubt I’ll get comfortable. If he hears me speaking, I wouldn’t know.

They say that time crawls behind bars, but I wouldn’t know that, either. My jail cell doesn’t have bars. It has a steel door with a small square window, shatterproof glass threaded with wire. There’s an oblong slot in the door at about waist level; beneath the slot is a gray metal tray. Bolted to the wall is an iron cot with a thin vinyl pad that smells like disinfectant. Bolted to the floor is a small steel toilet with half an inch of blue fluid in the bowl.

Time could be speeding right along for all I know, because the old cop with the Marine Corps tattoo took my watch. Along with my wallet and cell phone. My photo and fingerprints.

It doesn’t matter. Lying on my hard cot in my quiet cell with my arm draped over my eyes, smelling the stuff they gave me to wipe the ink from my fingers, I can’t muster the will to care what time it is.

At my request, I’ve been shown a copy of my arrest warrant, along with the sworn affidavit detailing the charges against me.

The charges include two counts of producing pornographic images of a child. According to the arrest affidavit this constitutes a class C felony, punishable by not more than ten years’ imprisonment. I am charged with one count of promoting the
pornographic images of a child, a class D felony, punishable by not more than five years’ imprisonment. I am subject to a grand total of not more than $200,000 in fines.

By now, my computer has been confiscated from my office at home. My credit card, bank, telephone, and Internet account records have been subpoenaed. I expect that the party at our house is probably over.

The child named in the affidavit is Brittany Seward, our next- door neighbor. Our friend Pete’s thirteen- year- old daughter. Our friend Melody’s stepdaughter.

I wanted to know.

At some point, there’s a hard rap on the door, followed by a muted jingle of keys. The lock tumbles, and the deputy in charge of the housing area steps inside my cell. He’s a young horse of a guy, soft around the middle, with flaky red blotches on the backs of his hands. I don’t remember his name.

“Visitor,” he tells me.

I draw a breath and sit up slowly. My joints are stiff, and my head is pounding. Have I been sleeping? I don’t even know. “What time is it?”

“Depends where you are,” a second voice says. “Here it’s 11:18 p.m. Which gives us just under twelve minutes before your legal visitation hours run out.”

The man who enters my cell has the look of someone who has practice being pulled out of bed. He’s shorter than the deputy but taller than me, somewhere in his fifties, casually well- heeled. He’s wearing an expensive- looking suede overcoat, sweatpants, and cross trainers. He stands with his hands in the pockets of the overcoat, a brown leather messenger bag on one shoulder. “You’re Paul?”

“Yes. Hi.” I’m not sure what to do with myself, so I stand up too. “I’m Paul.”

“Douglas Bennett.” The man who apparently is my attorney
takes half a step and extends a gloved hand to me. “Nice to meet you, Paul.”

I shake his hand. The glove is soft leather. “Thank you for coming. I—”

Bennett cuts me off with a nod. “We’re all set, Deputy. I’ll be fine now.”

“I’ll leave the door open,” the deputy says.

“That won’t be necessary, but thank you.”

“The door has to stay open.”

“Like hell it does.” Somehow Bennett makes this sound nonconfrontational. “If the counsel room weren’t a walk- in deep freeze I’d be able to counsel my client there.”

“I can’t help the heating system, Mr. Bennett.”

“Of course not, Officer Gaines. We’ll just have to make do. Now, I’ve been through the metal detector and you’ve searched my bag, so I think we’re covered.”

Deputy Gaines seems unsure how to handle this. “I need to check with the lieutenant.”

“Maybe that’s the best course.” Bennett’s smile remains perfectly collegial. “There must be some kind of waiver for me on file somewhere. Look under B for Ballbreaker.”

Gaines purses his lips, debates a little longer, then sighs like he doesn’t need the grief. He steps out, pulls the door shut behind him with a clang, and stands post outside the small window.

When we’re alone, Douglas Bennett turns to me. “Warren Giler called me at home. Our kids go to St. Vincent’s together, and I’ve handled all three of his DUIs.”

Under normal circumstances, I’d probably find some grain of amusement in this information. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t be talking to Douglas Bennett in a jail cell half an hour to midnight a week before Christmas.

“I’m grateful,” I say, meaning it completely. “Thank you again. This is… I can’t even tell you.”

“Had better nights, I take it?”

“You could say that.”

Bennett offers a commiserating grin. “I spoke briefly with
Sara on the phone. How are you doing? Have they treated you okay so far?”

Compared to what? “I guess so.”

“Any problems?”

“Apart from the bogus felony charges, you mean.”

This earns a chuckle. “So you didn’t do it, then.”

I can’t stop thinking about the way Pete and Melody Seward’s porch light extinguished at the sight of me. “No.”

“Terrific. We’ve got that part out of the way.”

Bennett unshoulders his satchel and gestures to my cot. I sit down eagerly. I’m ready to hear every word Douglas Bennett has to say. He takes off his gloves, unbuttons his coat, and sits down on the edge of the cot bolted to the opposite wall, four feet across from me. Under the coat, he’s wearing a Western Iowa University hockey jersey. I didn’t even know we had a hockey team.

“The first thing,” he says, “is to get you out of here.”

“Yes, please.”

“Now the bad news. You’ll have to spend the night.”

Before he’s finished that sentence, I feel the strength run out of my shoulders.

“Not what you wanted to hear, I know. The judge didn’t allow for bail on your warrant, which is a load of horseshit, but I’ll address that at your arraignment in the morning.” He unzips the satchel, reaches inside, takes out a yellow pad and a glossy black pen. He uncaps the pen with his teeth and parks the cap on the butt end. “So. A couple things. Sara tells me we don’t have any sort of prior record to contend with, which is good.” He looks at me. “Is it true?”

“Yes, that’s true. Like I told the detective, not even a parking ticket.”

“Nothing floating around from the wild and crazy days? Something that your wife wouldn’t know about, maybe?”

“My wild and crazy days were never all that wild and crazy.”

“Fair enough.” He makes a note. “How about the two of you?”

“Sorry?” For one crazy moment, I actually think he’s asking about me and Brit Seward. “How do you mean?”

“Everything okay at home?”

Of course he’s asking about me and Sara. I pause, maybe a beat too long.

In truth, these past weeks haven’t been the greatest stretch in our nine years together, but Sara and I have been over rough spots in the road before. We love each other. We have a good marriage. Douglas Bennett looks up from his notepad and waits for me to say so.

I admit to him that there’s been some stress lately. I consider delving into reasons, but the reasons seem irrelevant. Or maybe, deep down, I’m aware that the fault is primarily mine, and I’m too embarrassed to admit it. Or maybe I just don’t like the thought of watching a man I just met scribble our reasons on a yellow notepad. “Normal ups and downs, I guess.”

“Hey, I know all about the normal ups and downs. Be lieve me.”

“Sara knows I wouldn’t do a thing like this. She knows that.”

“That was my feeling when I talked to her.” It’s almost as if Bennett suspects how much I want to hear that. He moves on. “You own your home?”

“We closed the papers in July. That’s when we moved here.”

“From Boston.”

“That’s right.”

Beneath the words
No Record
he scratches down the word
July.
“Sara told me that you’re on a lecture contract at the university?”

“She accepted her job contingent on spousal consideration for me.” Truthfully, with the move to Clark Falls I’d looked forward to spending the academic year unemployed. Then one of the assistant professors in the English department drove her car into a drainage culvert on Labor Day weekend, an act that put her in a pelvic brace for the semester. The late- hour shuffle dealt
me three sections of composition and a seminar on the Lost Generation, which happens to fall in my area. “They offered the contract in September.”

“When does that contract end?”

“It just ended.”

“Are you contracted for the spring term?”

“No.”

Bennett scribbles some more and caps his pen.

“Okay,” he says. “We’re a little shaky in the ties- to-community department. Obviously no fault of yours. And I don’t know yet what kind of evidence the county prosecutor will produce to substantiate these charges.” He pauses a beat, glances at me briefly, and says, “If anything comes to mind on that front, feel free to educate me.”

Will produce,
he said. Not
might.
Not
try.

They don’t do it this way unless they have something,
he seems to be saying. The implication is clear enough, but I don’t know what to say in reply.

Bennett doesn’t wait. “Last but not least, we’ll be in front of a judge who has what you might call a leniency disorder. Not to mention young teenage daughters of her own. Emphasis on
her
own.” He waves his hand. “But don’t worry about that, I’ll get your bail set. Our job tomorrow is to get out of there at a fair price.”

“Wait a minute.” It’s as if the floor tilts beneath my bunk. “Are you saying there’s a chance I might
not
get bail? Is there … is that a possibility?”

“Anything’s a possibility, Paul. But it’s not going to happen.”

“Let’s say it did. What would that mean?”

“That would mean you’d get to put on a powder- blue jumpsuit and ride a bus out to county lockup until your next court date. But like I said, it’s not going to happen.”

“Could you say that last part again?”

“Say what again?”

“That it’s not going to happen.”

“It’s not going to happen.”

I was wrong. Hearing him say it again doesn’t make me feel better.

Bennett smiles. “I know your needle’s in the red right now, but I’m pretty good at this, so I want you to try not to worry. The thing to do is take it all one step at a time. Okay?”

I exhale, long and slow. Rub my eyes. Nod weakly.

“Good. Tomorrow is Saturday. On Saturdays, felony cases and misdemeanors are arraigned together, felonies first. Which means we’re in court at eight o’clock sharp. I’ll be here in time for us to meet and go over our game plan. Let’s call that Step Three.”

I raise my head and look at him.

“Step One starts now.” He repacks his satchel and stands up. “Sara told me that you’ve been having trouble with your neighbors. Is that right?”

“No,” I say, louder than I mean to. But we’re finally getting to the part that matters, and I want to make things clear. “One of our neighbors. That’s what this is all about. His name is Roger Mallory, and he’s saying… Christ, he’s got Brit Seward telling the cops—”