Special Topics in Calamity Physics (60 page)

"And why do you say that," Sergeant Harper asked. Her voice was dull and low, a combination of rocks and oboe. (And that was how she asked questions, not bothering to hoist up her voice on the end.)

I repeated, for the most part, all that I'd told Officer Coxley in the Sluder County Hospital Emergency Room.

"I don't mean to be rude," I said, "or disrespectful to your-your systematized process of upholding the law, which you've been doing for years, probably quite effectively, but I don't think Officer Coxley wrote down the specifics of what I told him. And I'm a very pragmatic person. If I
thought
there was even the slightest chance of the suicide ruling being true, I'd accept it. But it's not feasible. First, as I said earlier, someone followed us from the camping ground. I don't know who it was, but I heard him. We both did. And second, Hannah wasn't in that kind
of
mood.
She wasn't depressed—at least, not at
that
moment. I'll admit she had her moments of being down. But we all do. And when she left me, she was acting very sane."

Sergeant Harper hadn't moved a muscle. I became acutely aware (particularly from the way her eyes gradually drifted away from me before being jerked, by a certain emphatic word of mine, back to my face) she'd seen my type before. Housewives, pharmacists, dental hygienists, banking clerks, undoubtedly they'd all come to plead their cases, too, with their hands clenched, their perfumes rancid, their eyeliner skid-marking their eyes. They sat on the edge of the same uncomfortable red chair I was sitting on (which made woolly nonfigurative prints on the back of one's bare legs) and they wept, swore on a range of Bibles (Today's English, King James, Illuminated Family Edition) and graves (Grandma's, Pa-paw's, Archie who died young) that, whatever the charges against dear Rodolpho, Lamont, Kanita Kay and Miguel, it was lies, all lies.

"Obviously, I know how I sound," I tried, attempting to iron the twinges of desperation out of my voice. (I was slowly gathering Sergeant Harper didn't do twinges of desperation, nor did she do pangs of longing, worries to distraction or hearts broken beyond all possible repair.) "But I'm
positive
someone killed her. I know it. And I think she deserves for us to find out what really happened."

Harper thoughtfully scratched the back of her neck (as people do when they vehemently disagree with you), leaned to the left of her desk, pulled open a file cabinet and, narrowing her eyes, removed a green folder an inch thick. The labeled tab, I noted, read #55O9~SCHN.

"Well
' she said with a sigh, slapping the file on her lap. "We
did
account for the person you think you heard." She flipped through the papers— photocopied, typewritten forms, too small a font for me to make out—until she stopped on one, glancing through it. "Matthew and Mazula Church," she read slowly, frowning, "George and Julia Varghese, two Yancey County couples, were camping in the area at the same time as you and your peers. They stopped at Sugartop Summit around six, rested for an hour, decided to continue on to Beaver Creek two and a half miles away, arriving around eight-thirty. Matthew Church confirmed he was wandering the area looking for firewood when his flashlight went dead. He managed to make his way back to the site around eleven and they all went to bed." She looked at me. "Beaver Creek is less than a quarter of a mile from where we found her body."

"He said he saw Hannah and me?"

She shook her head. "Not exactly. He said he heard deer. But he'd had three beers and I'm not sure he knows what he saw or heard. It's a wonder he didn't find himself lost, too. But you probably heard him wandering around, crashing through the brush."

"Does he wear glasses?" She thought about this for a moment. "I think he does." She frowned, scanning the paper. "Yes, here it is. Gold frames. He's nearsighted."

Something about the way she'd said that particular detail,
nearsighted,
made me think she was lying, but when I sat up imperceptibly and tried to glimpse where she was reading, she closed the file quickly and smiled, her thin, chapped lips pulling away from her teeth like tinfoil off a chocolate bar.

"I've been camping," she said. "And the truth is, when you're up there, you don't know
what
you're seeing. You came across her hanging there, am I right?"

I nodded.

"The brain dreams up things to protect itself. Four out of every five witnesses are completely unreliable. They forget things. Or later on, they think they saw things that weren't there. It's witness traumatization. Sure, I'll consider witness testimony, but in the end I can only consider what I can see in front of me. The facts."

I didn't hate her for not believing me. I understood. Because of all the Rodolphos, Lamonts, Kanita Kays and Miguels and other delinquents she caught red-handed wearing dirty underwear, watching cartoons, eating Cocoa Puffs, she assumed she knew everything there was to know about The World. She had seen the bowels, the guts, the innards of Sluder County and thus no one could tell her anything she didn't already know. I imagined her husband and daughter found this frustrating, but they probably tolerated her, listened to her over a dinner of sliced ham and peas, all silent nods and supportive smiles. She looked at them and loved them, but noticed a chasm between them, too. They lived in Dream Worlds, worlds of homework, appropriate office conduct, unspoiled milk mustaches, but she, Fayonette Harper, lived in Reality. She knew the ins and outs, the tops and bottoms, the darkest, most mildewed corners.

I didn't know what else to say, how to convince her. I thought about standing up, knocking over the red chair and shouting, "This is a veritable outrage!" as Dad did when he was at a bank filling out a deposit slip and none of the ten pens at the Personal Banking Counter had ink. A middle-aged man always arrived out of the blue, zipping, buttoning, tucking in shirttails, palming wisps of antenna-hair off his forehead.

Sensing my frustration, Detective Harper reached out, touched the top of my hand, then abruptly sat back again. It was a gesture intended to be comforting but one that came off like putting a nickel in a casino slot machine. You could tell Sergeant Harper didn't know what to do with Tenderness or Femininity. She treated them like frilly sweaters someone had given her for a birthday that she didn't want to wear, yet couldn't throw away.

"I appreciate your efforts," she said, her whiskey-colored eyes seeing, looking, observing my face. "You know. Coming out here. Trying to talk to me. That's why I decided to see you. I didn't
have
to see you. The case is closed. I'm not authorized to discuss it with anyone but immediate family. But you came here out of worry, which was nice. The world
needs
nice. But I'll be straight with you. We have no doubts about what happened to your friend, Hannah Schneider. The sooner you accept it, the better."

Without saying anything more, she leaned across her desk, picked up a blank sheet of white paper and a ballpoint pen. In five minutes, she drew four tiny detailed drawings.

(I've often thought back to this moment, perpetually awed by the simple brilliance of Sergeant Harper. If only everyone, to prove a point, didn't resort to pushy words or aggressive action, but quietly took out a pen, blank paper and
drew
their reasons. It was shockingly persuasive. Unfortunately, I didn't notice this treasure for what it was, and didn't think to take her drawing with me when I left the station. Hence, I've had to draw my own approximations of what she sketched, so meticulously that, intentionally or not, what she'd drawn actually looked a little like Hannah

"These here are the kinds of marks left on a body when you got a murder," Sergeant Harper said, pointing to the two sketches on the right side of the paper and glancing at me. "And you can't fake it. Say you decide to strangle someone. You'll leave a mark on the neck that's straight across like this one here. Think of it. The hands. Or say you use a rope to kill 'em. Same thing. Most of the time, it comes with bruising too, or fractured cartilage 'cause the perp'll use more force than necessary due to adrenalin."

She pointed to the other two drawings on the left.

"And this over here is how it looks when someone does it suicide. See? Rope's an upside-down V from the hanging position, the rope being pulled up. Usually there's no evidence of a struggle on the hands, fingernails or neck unless he had second thoughts. Sometimes they try to get out of it because it hurts so bad. See, most people don't do it right. Real hangings, like in the old days, you had to fall straight down, six to ten feet, and you cut straight through the spinal cord. But your average suicide, he'll do it off a chair with the rope tied to a ceiling beam or a hook, and he'll only fall two or three feet. It's not enough to sever the spine so he chokes to death. Takes a couple minutes. And that's how your friend Hannah did it."

"Is it possible to murder someone and have an upside-down V?"

Detective Harper leaned back in her chair. "It's possible. But unlikely. You'd have to have the person unconscious maybe. String them up that way.

Else take them by surprise. Be a trained assassin like in the movies." She chuckled, then shot me a suspicious look. "That
didn't
happen."

I nodded. "She used an electrical cord?"

"It's fairly common."

"But she didn't have an electrical cord when I was with her."

"She probably had it in the pouch around her waist. There was nothing in it but a compass." "What about a suicide note?" "Didn't leave one. Not everyone does. People with no family usually don't. She was an orphan, after all. Grew up at the Horizon House, a group home for orphans in New Jersey. She had no one. Never did."

I was so surprised I couldn't immediately speak. Like an unexpected result in a Physics lab, this ruthlessly canceled out all I'd believed about Hannah. Of course, she'd had never told us anything about her past (apart from a few anecdotes, dangled like sausages in front of hungry dogs before snatching them away), and yet I'd assumed her childhood had been teeming with sailboats, lake houses and horses, a father with a pocket watch, a mother with bony hands who never left the house without her Face (a childhood that, funnily enough, overlapped my own mother's in my head).

I hadn't pulled such a past out of thin air—had I? No, the way Hannah lit cigarettes, put her profile on display like an expensive
vahze,
chaise
-
longued over everything, the way she idly picked out words for sentences as if choosing shoes—these details hinted, however loosely, she'd come from a privileged background. There was, too, all that rhetoric she'd droned on about at Hyacinth Terrace —"ft
takes years to overturn this conditioning.
I tried my whole life."—
words symptomatic of "Waiting Room Righteousness," but also another one of Dad's phrases, "Bloated Plutocrat Guilt," perpetually "slipshod and short-lived." And even in Cottonwood, when Hannah had slipped into the Country Styles Motel, Room 22, after Doc, one could just have easily assumed she was entering a La Scala opera box for Mozart's
Cost Fan Tutte
(1790), so straight her spine, so heiressesque the angle of her chin.

Sergeant Harper took my silence for grudging acknowledgment. "She tried it once before, too," she went on. "The exact same way. Electrical extension cord. Right in the woods."

I stared at her.
"When?"

"Just before she left the home. When she was eighteen. Almost died."

Harper leaned forward so her big face hovered six inches from mine.

"Now"
—she leaned in another inch, her voice raspy—"I've told you more than enough. And you got to listen. Time and again, I've seen innocent people get ruined by these things. And it's no good. Because it's not them that did it. It's between that person and God. So you got to go home, get on with life, not think about it. She was your friend and you want to help her. But I'll tell you, plain as day, she planned it all along. And she wanted the six of you there for it. You understand me?"

"Yes."

"Someone who would do that to innocent children isn't worth getting worked up over, understand?" I nodded. "Good." She cleared her throat, picked up Hannah's file and slid it into the filing cabinet.

A minute later, Dad and I were walking to the car. Heavy sun drooped over Main Street, made it a compost heap of mushy shadows falling off the hot cars hunched along the curb, and the spindly parking signs, and the bicycle dead on its side, chained to a bench.

"Everything's fine now, I trust?" he asked merrily. "Case closed?"

"I don't know."

"How did Big Red treat you?"

"She was nice."

"You two seemed to have a rather tantalizing conversation."

I shrugged.

"You know, I don't think I've ever seen a woman so obscenely orange in all my life. You suppose her hair naturally sprouts from her head that precise shade of carrots, or do you think it's a special kind of peroxide rinse one buys in the hope that it will temporarily blind people? A deliberate police weapon for her to use against the dissolute and depraved."

He was trying to make me laugh, but I only shaded my eyes and waited for him to unlock the car.