The Detective's Garden (31 page)

The tendons pulled across Benny’s throat as he called, “I’m
sorry, Dom, I’m sorry!”

In the hallway, King paid no attention to the gunshot, nor to
the swollen voices of Benjamin Ward and her father. She walked
out of the house carrying the canister in one hand. Salt spilled
behind her in a thin trail. She wore no shoes. Her skin was pale
against the mossed rocks. She stumbled across the dewed grass
and over a mound of earth covered with clovers. The morning
sky was shaking with anxiety. She moved into a half-round of
giant trees and soft dripping sounds. The arch of trees cupped
oversized ferns and Canterbury bells. The red sun erupted in
the sky. She felt unsteady. She felt uneven. She pushed at the
flowers with her hands and tried to look at them, at bell and
stamen and pistil, but her vision splintered into circling patch
es of light. Each frond was a cataract of blue blossoms. Her ears
rang. She was going to faint, she knew that. She held herself up,
wavering, until the sky moved down unilaterally, like a great
obliterating fog.

Charlie Basin had his window down. The Suburban
bucked and jumped over potholes and hills. The pitted drive
was nearly a mile long and the police convoy had covered
half the distance. Charlie could smell something in the air,
lavender and salt and ash. When the single gunshot rang out,
it sounded distant and contained. Small-arms fire. Probably
indoors. He couldn’t see the house that he knew lay ahead.
To his left, he spotted a Volvo station wagon parked behind
a pile of logs, half covered by a blue tarp. He stuck his arm
out of his window and motioned the SWAT team forward.
The Humvee glittered like a beetle and crashed through the
bushes alongside the driveway and pulled forward with a
great turn of wheels and Charlie Basin knew that this was
out of his hands, whatever might happen now. He had put
these kids, who were so much like his kids, in danger. Char
lie Basin could have been this man, this Dominick, whose
voice he had never heard and whose face he had never seen,
if just a few unidentifiable moments of his life had tipped
against him.

The single crack of a pistol shot returned Clarke and El
sie to their own skins. They became aware of their nakedness,
of their grotesque angles, of the blood between them. They
looked at one another, really looked. Between them there was
something as fragile as a rope of spit between two lips. They
slipped apart, wiped fluids on the sheets, and rooted around for
clothes, reeling themselves back together.

Dominick went through the hall and past the rack of guns in
two great steps. He took the turn hard enough that his shoul
der dented the drywall and he spun and reached for the door to
King’s temporary room. He pushed it open with such force that
the screws pulled from the top hinge. Empty space. A rumpled
sheet on a bed. The door tipped forward until it hung precari
ously in the air, pulling against the single bottom hinge. Dom
inick stepped to his room over the
Murder, Renascence,
Miracle
on the threshold.

He picked up the two bags that lay packed on the made bed
and went back fast, past the salt. He pushed out the rear door
hard enough that it slammed into the siding with the sound
of a hand clapped on water. When he leapt over the porch, the
green duffel bags flapped like tumorous wings. He hit the blue
door to Clarke and Elsie’s cabin still running and his shoulder
pressed the wood until it snapped.

Clarke flinched when the door exploded inward. Solid wood
broke along the bevel. The panels cracked into pieces and gave
way to a splintered vision of Dominick’s flesh. Elsie and Clarke
were beside the bed, bits of clothing in their hands. Dominick
didn’t stop moving but gathered Clarke’s T-shirt and Elsie’s
pants from a chair and tossed them at them. Clarke thought
of giving up, of waiting here beside Elsie in the soft bed, of
embracing what might come. Then he thought of his sister left
alone.

His father kicked his shoes toward him. He had a handgun
in the holster under his belt and he looked as purposeful as
steel. He stopped in front of Clarke and Elsie and put a hand on
each of their shoulders. “Are you ready?” he asked.

“I’m ready,” Clarke said and hitched his shoulders.

Dominick herded Clarke and Elsie before him, pushing
them out of the cabin and toward a dark cavelike break in the
line of trees to the south. He kept the buildings between them
and the sounds of engines and brakes and then the voices crack
ling on radios. Over the bluff, the sea shone with light. Elsie
stumbled and breathed hard. Her eyes were wide.

“Where’s King?” Clarke grunted.

“We don’t have time,” Dominick said.

“She’s ours,” said Clarke.

“First we disappear, then we find her,” Dominick said. “We
don’t leave anybody behind.”

On the slight hill that led into the break in the trees, Elsie
tripped. She saw the white clovers among the grass. Her hands
extended forward to break her fall but then her body slowed
and jerked backward, and she felt Clarke’s huge, warm hand
wrapped around her upper arm, and she saw his face, tanned
and sweating and anxious and darkly beautiful. The dim clutch
of trees waved them forward. Clarke set Elsie on her feet and
gave her half a smile. Just ahead, Dominick waved them both
forward with the same hand that loosely held the pistol. Tree
roots wound through the dirt like the carcasses of great worms.
Moss ran up the red bark of the trunks. Ferns fluttered like
tattered wings. Dark birds scattered before them, winging up
ward and shrieking warning to one another.

Elsie felt a sense of impending grace, of deep satisfaction
that this urgency was hers and that this boy, this man, who
pulled her forward wanted her enough that they’d run forward
together. A cold wind blew from beneath the canopy of the
trees and her eyes watered.

Charlie Basin stood by the Suburban. The SWAT team and
the police officers fanned across the property. They pushed into
the buildings. He heard things topple inside. He heard things
smash. Charlie had his gun drawn but it felt like a formali
ty. The bulletproof vest under his jacket irritated his armpits.
He glanced behind him at the clovered mound of earth and
the semicircle of old trees cupped around hundreds of blue
bell-shaped flowers. What was that he smelled? What was that
thin white line on the ground that trailed from the cabin? He
bent and touched the line with his finger. Salt? Then, up the
hill where the white trail led, he saw something skin-colored
and thin among the flowers. A foot? He stepped forward, hold
ing his gun before him with both hands. His legs scissored as
he pressed among the blossoms. His focus cleared and his angle
of vision widened and the sole of the foot became callused. The
foot was attached to a leg, the leg to the body of a small girl.
Black-haired and loose-faced. The girl convulsed once and then
her body relaxed. The bells bobbed around them. He holstered
his gun and plucked the kid from the ground. She felt no heavi
er than a cat. Her limbs were so thin, like bones beneath paper.
Charlie carried her back down the hill, her head resting against
his shoulder. Her mouth drooled on his shirt and the moment
doubled up and became overlaid with hundreds of other times
that Charlie had carried his children. Oswell draped against his
shoulder when he’d pulled the boy from the car seat and walked
him inside and up the stairs and settled him into bed. Charlene,
who’d once cut her hand and passed out on the tiled floor of the
kitchen, bloody and unconscious, and Charlie had come on her
like that and, as he’d done so many times before, he’d lifted her
up. All the scraped knees and bicycle falls and the heft of his
kids and the comfort that passed both ways when he held them
to his chest.

Dominick and Clarke and Elsie climbed into the hills.
Miles passed beneath their feet. Their legs burned as they
jogged to the peaks and caught glimpses of a distant settle
ment before they trotted down into brief valleys. They followed
the coastline. They tromped into a wet forest with Dominick
urging them wordlessly forward. A cold fog settled over the
hills and crept inside their clothes and then a light rain began
and night settled over them. They huddled together. From a
bag, Dominick pulled a tarp and a blanket and they sat close
together. The moon was full. The craggy silhouettes of firs cir
cled around them. Clarke’s stomach rumbled.

“We’ve got no food,” Dominick said.

“We don’t?” Elsie’s face collapsed.

“There wasn’t time.”

“I’m hungry,” she said.

Dominick pointed through a break in the trees over a cliff,
where they could just make out a long gray wharf extending
into the ocean. “We’ll find something soon.”

DOES THE UNCONSCIOUS
child dream? Is her
skin fevered? Does the daylight perform beneath her closed eye
lids? Is the flicker of light a love story? Does her family come
to act out parts better left untended? Will she one day reenact
each role herself? Will she come to know herself only by inhab
iting another? Does her body shiver? Does it convulse? Does it
bite its own tongue? Does the palsy of the dream echo in flesh?
Does it choke on blood? Does it knock her head against rocky
earth? Will it lie still again? Is she trapped inside? Will her
body come back to her? Will her eyes stay closed longer than
demanded by her unseen wounds? Will she have wet herself?
Does she already feel the bottomless fear she will wake to? Does
she lie there taking comfort in the dark? Is she already awake?

CHARLIE BASIN DROVE
to St. Joseph’s Hospital
in Bellingham, the girl’s head resting in his lap. Her pulse was
strong. She breathed evenly. She was going to be okay.

They had found Benjamin Ward but not the others. Ward
had lain in his bed, eyes wide and open. He put his hands over
his head. He had nothing useful to say. Dominick and the old
er kids had slipped into the woods. The forests in the Pacific
Northwest were dark and mushroomed and wet. Charlie had
called Andrew Fry and asked him to pressure the locals for
more manpower. Let the young guys handle the legwork. The
police and the SWAT team were even now spreading out across
the property in a great human net.

The traffic curled around overpasses and over bridges and
the sea glittered to the west and the sky was a giddy unrealistic
blue. Charlie looked at King’s bare feet. There was dirt embed
ded in her skin’s shallow creases, a hangnail on her left big toe.

He telephoned the SWAT team leader to get an update.
They’d lost the trail in the woods but hounds were on the way.
He put the phone back in the breast pocket of his coat. What
had he once enjoyed about this job?

The wheels hummed against the blacktop. He straightened a
lock of the girl’s black hair. She smelled unwashed. Why hadn’t
he just called an ambulance? Or he could have sent one of the
uniformed police officers. Why take her to the hospital him
self? The girl curled into a fetal position. What had he missed
at his home while he’d been hunting men?

DOMINICK WALKED ONTO
the wooden wharf
past two men carrying a blue plastic cooler, their backs bent
like fishhooks. Two teenagers hung their bare feet in the water.
Dominick’s feet knocked on the wood. He looked purposeful.
He looked like he belonged where he was. Clarke and Elsie
followed, holding hands. The wharf was lined with jet boats
and cabin cruisers and yachts of polished teak. Near the end of
the dock, seals rolled among the pilings. Kelp bulbs bobbed on
the water’s surface. The surf sounded like someone whispering.
Dominick dropped his duffel bags on the white vinyl seating of
a speedboat. “Hop in,” he said. He sounded like a father impa
tient to show his kids the vagaries of the sea. He wiped his hand
across his brow. He unzipped one bag. He put his back between
the steering wheel and the wharf. When the engine stuttered to
life, he said, “You two ought to sit down.” He motored slowly
beside the wharf, maneuvering past the buoys, pointing the
bow toward the distant ferries and scows and barges and the
white-sailed schooners. He pushed the throttle forward and the
seagulls drifted behind them as they moved through Belling
ham Bay and out into the Puget Sound.