The Detective's Garden (2 page)

“I seen other things last night,” his father said.

“Like what?”

“A ghost, I think.”

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Clarke said.

His father said, “I don’t, either.”

“What kind of ghost?” said Clarke.

“A dark thing that hovered above the roof and waited,” his
father said. “It came out of our house.”

“That’s bullshit,” Clarke said. “Maybe you’re losing your
mind.” He paused and his father did not respond. “What was
the ghost waiting for?” Clarke asked.

“It wanted us to run.”

The yellow grass bent beneath a cold wind. Clarke shivered.
Dominick turned and walked back into the old orchard and
gathered fallen wood. He made separate piles for logs and for
kindling. He pulled the lint from his pockets to use as tinder.
He glanced at Clarke sitting on the earth but he didn’t ask for
help. King looked so small in her sleeping bag. Dominick piled
the wood and pulled a lighter from his worn leather satchel.
He lit the tinder. When the fire caught, he rifled through his
satchel for the binoculars and, as the warmth began to rise, he
scanned the ground around his house. The hulk of the wood
pile. The screen door standing open. The thin blur of heat ris
ing from the chimney. Heel prints in the mud of the driveway.

Clarke asked, “Why don’t we just go inside?”

“We’ll head in after your sister wakes,” Dominick said.

Clarke said, “What are you looking for?”

“I’m not sure yet.” He raised the binoculars to glass the
empty road.

“What’re you scared of?” Clarke said.

From the leather satchel, Dominick took a small yellow
notepad, a jar filled with ground coffee beans, his Wharncliffe
knife, a thermos, a can of black beans, an avocado, three heels
of bread, and a tin cup. He put coffee grounds in the tin cup,
filled it with cold water from the thermos, put it on the ground
next to the can of beans, and nudged both into the fire with
his boot.

Behind him, not moving in her sleeping bag, King whis
pered, “I’m up.” She put her arm through the small cinched
hole. She said, “This is great.” Her hand acted like it was grab
bing hunks of air.

Dominick sliced the avocado with the knife. He said,
“Clarke, pull the beans out of the fire.”

“Beans?” King said. She was still in the mummy bag, her
hands making circles. “Is there anything else?”

THE SECOND MAN
drove the dark Suburban down the
county roads. They had risen early from the bland hotel room to
canvas the neighbors. The neighbors’ eyes widened when they
heard that the suited men were with the Federal Bureau of In
vestigation. Each neighbor stood outside a front door without
offering an invitation to come inside. None of them knew a
thing. From the Suburban, Charlie Basin tried to call his wife.
He wanted to ask about his daughter. Between house visits, he
made three attempts, but each time he got only a recording of
his wife’s voice.

The navy-suited FBI men worked their way down Flint
Valley Road. None of the neighbors lived very close to the
Sawyers’ A-frame cabin. The closest house sat a mile from
the cabin they had searched the night before. When they
pulled up outside the nearest house, Charlie Basin said,
“You getting the sense that these people don’t like us?” His
voice was wry.

“What’s wrong with them?” asked the second man.

“Wrong with them?”

“Yeah, they’re rude.”

“They don’t trust us,” Charlie said. “They don’t want to give
up one of their own.” He gestured toward the clipboard in the
second FBI man’s hands. “Who’s this last one?”

“Jon Howland,” the second FBI man read from the clip
board. “Former member of the Central Pennsylvania Militia.”

“He ought to be a lot of help then.”

“Right, he ought to.”

KING WALKED INTO
the stand of trees to pee. The
willow branches whispered against one another. Light filtered
through pine needles. The lemony scent tickled her nose. She
walked fast and farther than she needed to. She rubbed at her
eyes to free herself from the whip of her dreams. The unseen
creek made a noise that sounded like it came from the back of
a throat. She followed the crumbling rock wall to the stacks of
reddish stones that rose upward in broken flues. She picked up
an arm-length branch of oak and stopped to snap off the leaves
and twigs. She swung her staff at low-hanging branches and
a few yellowed leaves tumbled. She began to hum under her
breath. She skipped. A gyrfalcon flashed downward, the light
making its white feathers burn.

When she got back, Dominick pointed toward the A-frame.
“I need you to pack up whatever food you can,” he said. They
walked toward the cabin, their shadows stretched out in long
thin lines before them. They passed through the tilled field
into the long grass that roughed against their pant legs. They
walked in a line. Dominick passed the thermos of water, and he
and Clarke took two conservative mouthfuls. King drank the
rest with rivulets at the sides of her mouth.

Bark peeled like burned skin from the logs of the cabin.
King ran and the porch cracked under her feet. Clarke hurried
after her. Dominick dragged his feet. He stopped five full steps
behind his children. He looked up. No smoke rose from the
chimney. Under his breath, he said, “The fire is out.”

Dominick stood like a stranger at the door to his own house.
His head crooked on his neck, his white face and brown hair
looking just like his children’s. The morning air was as color
less as wet ash.

Clarke reached out for the doorknob and the front door
wheezed open. Near the deadbolt, splintered bark exposed a
pale sapwood. Clarke fingered the broken wood. He turned to
look back at his father and said, “What the hell have you done?”

Dominick took a slow step forward. Only the left side of
his lips moved when he spoke. “Watch your mouth.” With a
sweeping gesture he motioned toward the front door and his
kids crept forward as though time had slowed.

The cabin that Dominick had built had four rooms. The
great room with a cathedral ceiling, the open kitchen with
a bathroom tucked into a small space at the front, and, at
the back of the house, the master bedroom and the kids’
shared room. A bearskin rug sat by the woodstove. Domi
nick’s boots knocked against the hand-planed walnut floors.
Inside, the kids began to live again, their faces to flush, their
legs to scamper beneath them. Quick to their bedroom and
then still as two pillars of stone. Quick to the pie safe. Quick
to the photograph of their father in the desert wearing his
combat uniform and tactical vest and carrying an M4 car
bine. Quick to the kitchen. There King said, “Hurry, Dad,
come here!” She gestured with her hands. She pointed at the
floor.

Dominick’s boots tracked mud. Their mother never would
have let him past the low shoe rack to the west of the door.
He said, “What is it?” but his children did not speak. They
pointed. On the linoleum by the sink, two bright red drops
of blood.

Clarke said, “Are you responsible for that?” His father’s head,
all hard angles, searched back and forth, but King had turned
away from the house’s confusion. She touched her father’s elbow
and Clarke could see the blush of need rising, the child’s hope
for answers that he distantly recognized as his own, too. He
reached up and pushed at the tender place behind his ear until
thought disappeared.

“What’s it from, Dad?” King said.

“Don’t know,” Dominick said. “Nosebleed?” He walked
backward through the great room, looking. Past the deer ant
lers, the collection of ten-points. Past the coatrack hung with
a woman’s red scarf. He stopped by the rough-hewn table. He
spent a long time studying the surface.

Clarke called, “What’d you find?”

Dominick pointed. “Come here,” he said.

The three of them stood together looking down. Their fac
es edged with light from the window. King reached out and
touched the side of the table with a single finger. The shaker
was overturned. Thin trails of salt scrolled in alphabetic shapes.
Whorls and straight lines.

Wasp, read the words in salt, Neck, Broken.

Outside the house, their father’s knees pressed into the
mud and the rotting bulkhead doors to the basement opened.
Warm mildewed air rose and entered their noses and lungs and
was pushed back out of their mouths.

King asked, “What’s happening?”

Clarke asked, “Whose blood was that on the floor?”

Their father used an old blue rag to clean a Beretta pistol
and a scoped Springfield Armory M1A rifle. He cocked the
pistol and held it out and sighted into the distance, then he
pointed the gun toward the ground and pulled the trigger. His
pupils were bright and feverish and the beginning of sun-wrin
kles tightened at the corners of his eyes. His head bowed. His
children looked at the small Latin words, sua sponte, coarsely
tattooed into the dark skin of his neck.

“Why don’t you answer my question?” Clarke said. “Whose
blood was on the floor?”

“I’m not sure,” their father said.

“You have a guess?” Clarke said.

“I do.”

“What is it?”

“I’m not going to tell you,” said Dominick.

“Why not?”

“What you might think of me.”

Dominick sent the kids back to the camp under the hol
low tree. He made trips back and forth between them and the
house. He gathered things and put them in piles around his
children. Green military duffels made of canvas. Pistol cases.
Bolt cutters. A small set of tools. Cans of tuna and peaches.
Rope. Bullets. An electric drill. A loaf of bread. A tent. A
slim-jim. Sinkers and hooks and fishing line. A tarpaulin. A
machete. He didn’t say a word. His face looked like a plank
of wood and both kids waited without asking questions. They
sat in their sleeping bags as the day passed and night began
to gather in front of their eyes like a linen veil. They looked
into the dark hollow of the tree where they’d hidden in games
of hide-and-seek and where their mother had left clues inside
plastic eggs for treasure hunts that led them to the woodpile
and the window well and the forked trunk of the plum tree to
find chocolate and peanut-butter eggs wrapped in gold foil.

While their father gathered things and paced and talked to
himself, they whispered to one another. “You remember how
Mom used to make whoopie pies?” King asked.

“Sure,” Clarke said. “Pumpkin. Chocolate.”

“She made them for my birthdays,” King said.

“Mine, too, sometimes.”

“How long has it been?” said King.

“Since when?”

“Since she’s been gone.”

“Less than a year,” Clarke said.

“Is she coming back?”

“I don’t know.”

“My birthday is coming up,” King said.

Dark winged shapes flitted above their heads. Night had set
in fast. Their father covered packed duffel bags with brush and
stropped his Wharncliffe knife until his kids fell asleep to the
soft repetitive rasp. The moon had risen like a silver dollar and
when Dominick stood he heard the ungreased creak of his knees.
He set off quickly, up between the low Pennsylvanian moun
tains to the green saddle. There he breathed hard but smoothly
and looked out over the pieced farmland, and the radiant church
steeple, and the dead black of the Susquehanna River snaking
through the valley. He moved his head slowly back and forth,
searching as far as he could see for any moving light.