The Detective's Garden (4 page)

When their father had gone, Clarke and King did chores
until the day was nearly over. Washed clothes, swept floors,
chopped wood. For supper they had soup. Then they sat side
by side on the couch, their legs hidden underneath an afghan.
Howland stooped over the sink, wiping bowls clean with a rag.
A lentil hid in his beard. The electric lights flickered off and
on, leaving an impression of the constant darkness to come. The
children’s eyes stuck to Howland’s back. He turned his head to
one side and called, “I feel you staring.”

“Can you tell us what’s going on, Mr. Howland?” Clarke said.

Howland turned, wiped his wet hands against his shirt, and sat in
a wooden chair across from the couch. “I only know a little,” he said.

“Dad said he saw a ghost,” said King. She held her arms up.

“I’ve no faith in such things,” said Jon Howland. There was
a wry turn to his mouth and his tongue pushed at a tooth as
though it ached.

“What’s happened?” Clarke said. “Why’re they after him?”

“Here’s the thing, boyo,” Jon Howland said. “A deputy’s
maybe been killed.”

“Killed where?”

“Sheriff said there’s no body yet. They only found blood
down by the river.”

“Why do they think it was my dad?” Clarke asked.

“They didn’t say.”

Air pushed against the windows and the heavy curtains shift
ed. A dog bayed at some distance. Clarke said, “You’re giving
Dad your truck?”

“I’m giving you kids that truck.”

“I’m not going with him,” Clarke said. Just to say it, this
half-truth, he felt like his spleen had torn inside him. Howland
offered no opinion. “He’s not telling me anything,” Clarke said.
“He’s not making any sense.”

King stood up and placed her palm on Howland’s arm. “If
we leave our house,” she asked, “how will Mom find us?”

“I don’t know,” Howland said. “She’s been gone how long?”

“Almost a year,” Clarke said.

King said, “What’s my dad done wrong?”

“Depends on the way you see it,” Howland said. “He’s not
precisely law-abiding. There’s hooch in the back field. All those
guns. No belief in taxes. But then a lot of us got those problems.”

Clarke said, “Did he kill that deputy?”

“You’re asking the wrong man.”

“What do you know?” Clarke said. His face tightened like
a clenched fist.

“I know your daddy doesn’t want to lose you,” Howland said.
A small lamp disgorged a disproportionate quantity of light. The
shadows of Jon Howland and Clarke and King held still on the
walls. Half-moon-shaped mice debouched from the room’s corners.

“What do we do?” King asked Clarke.

“I don’t know,” Clarke said.

King turned to Howland. “Do you know what we should do?”

“Nope,” Howland said. “But you stay around here, they’ll
take you from him.”

When night fell and they wearied of talk, the children went
to sleep on the couch. King dreamed. In her dream, not ev
erything was as it should be. Her eyes were open and she was
alone. Her skin crawled as though someone was watching her
from a distance. The house, Jon Howland’s house, was a shadow
made solid. The air smelled of damp honeysuckle. Something
dark and soft and small crawled beneath her shirt, and she held
still. Where was everyone who should have stood beside her?
Had they left? Would they come back? One of her eyes began
to tremble. She called out for them, first for her mother and
then for her father and brother. Her mouth was so wide and
loud that her lips tore at the edges. She called again and again.

Someone came. Someone dark and calm stood over her, and
a sense of peace swirled like ink in water, and she knew that
everything she had lost would be returned.

When Dominick came back, he found his kids asleep on the
couch, one head on a cushion at either end. He stood above them
and the fire crackled and darkness hummed all around. He leaned
in and the floor creaked beneath his feet as though complaining
about his weight. Clarke rolled his face toward the back of the
couch. When had he gotten so big? He lay still and breathed deep
ly. He smelled like a boy should, of sweat and grass and something
citrusy. King shook. Dark lank hair trembled as though it had
come fearfully to life. Her eyes rolled behind her lids. Her legs
twitched back and forth in mimicry of walking or running.

Dominick felt a tightness like steel bands wrapped around
his chest. He gently laid his hand on his daughter’s shoulder.
Before him his children were dark possibilities, the night like a
great breath drawn in. His vision blurred, his hand against his
daughter’s drumming heart. Why was this pleasure always en
twined with sharp pain? Was he mistaken in his understanding
that this was love?

Under the hand on her shoulder, King woke. The deep gulch
in her eyes looked so old. Old in the way that belonged only to
the young and tender. Old in the way that ancient visions rise
only from infants’ eyes, and Dominick knew that his daughter
was a child in the dark and not yet narrowed to a woman.

King’s head rose inches off the couch. Her lips parted like a
broken seam. Her breath smelled strange and forlorn. “Daddy,”
she said, “I dreamed a great dream.”

IN THE MORNING
at the Days Inn, the second FBI
man said, “There’s not been a goddamned word. There’re out of
here. We’ve got to broaden the search.”

“Might be,” Charlie Basin said. In adjacent hotel rooms
they could hear two women’s voices speaking softly in Span
ish, high-pitched giddy laughter, the long indrawn breath of a
vacuum cleaner.

Charlie lowered himself to the floor. He began the push-
up routine that he followed every morning. He believed that
the human body must be stunned awake, that left to follow
physiological desire our muscles curl toward sleep. His arms
levered him up and down. It was not without effort. He sweat.
He had been doing five hundred pushups each morning for the
last thirty years. It calmed his mind. Gave him space to think.
To think, on this particular occasion, about his daughter, Char
lene. Had his wife spoken to her? Would she want to speak
with him? Then Charlie thought of Dominick Clarke Sawyer.
About post-traumatic stress disorder. About what a man would
do to keep his children at his side.

“Let’s get out of here, Charlie,” said the second FBI man. “A
coffee. A burger. I don’t care.”

When they left the hotel, the two suited figures drew many
eyes. The sallow pinched clerk pointed at them with the busi
ness end of his pen. In the hotel windows, curtains shuffled
slightly so that dark hollows were exposed, cloth held back by
the tips of pale fingers. Stools swiveled in the donut shop across
the road and older men with oiled hair shaded their eyes in
detached accidental salutes. When the dark SUV drove onto
the road, the hotel seemed to open up, to let in light, to take a
long shallow breath.

JUST BEFORE FIRST
light, they drove the Ford
pickup out of Jon Howland’s old barn. Dark hulking hay bales
and bleating sheep, the huge stump of wood past the threshold,
the indignant rooster and the old blood and the ax and the smell
of slaughtered things. The truck bumped over wheel ruts. King
opened the window and leaned her head outward and the wind
blew over them, traveling from nowhere to quiet nowhere. Not
one of them said a word while the cottage shrank behind them
and the road lumped ahead. The slow hills were lined with bud
ding vegetation. Out the windows, the children saw only what
they were leaving behind. Cow-spotted mountains, and the safe
ty of a cabin that their father had built with his hands, and thick
deciduous woods they could navigate blind, and the easy way
they had often sat together by the honeysuckle beneath the plum
tree in the back field, and the cast of the fishing line beside their
father on the bank of the river. And the wait, too; they remem
bered the wait that had both hurt and saved them, the wait for
winter to turn into spring, or for their father to light the wood
stove in the morning so that they could stop shivering, or for the
last of the snow to melt, or for the tulips to rise like the undead
from the earth, or to turn twelve and sixteen years old, or, most
pressingly, for their mother to come home.

Their father told them to shut the window by spiraling his finger.
Then his hand took the steering wheel where it fixed and became
part of the wheel and the wheel gave itself over to the column, and
the column to the steel beneath. He opened his mouth as though
he was about to speak. He closed his mouth again. He leaned across
King, rifled through the glove compartment, and balanced a pair of
dusty wire-rim sunglasses on his nose. He tugged on his bottom lip.
Even now he wanted them happy. He smiled awkwardly.

They rode past dark woods and past a stream that cut through
rock. Gray-and-white water gullied around a bolus of melting ice
and then spilled downward into the great open mouth of a steel
pipe that ran beneath the road and poured, faucetlike and tamed,
over a short cliff. They rode past dynamite-blasted red rock that
rose steeply to either side and betrayed thousands of years. They
rode over hills covered with trees reddening with spring growth.
They rode past curtained windows and past a man in a trapper’s
hat waving at them with both arms. They rode past a skeletal
peach orchard and past topped apple trunks and branches aborted
into reachable spheres. They rode with their own thoughts past
a bonneted woman hanging clothes on a thin wire. They rode
behind two women on bicycles, an ancient tractor, a team of six
pale horses. They rode without speaking. They rode without fear.
They rode through a countryside that they felt was their own.
They rode together as they’d done a hundred times before over
a short barren mountaintop, beside a dry round-stoned creek,
through a crease of a valley lined with violet crocuses.

When the boxy sheriff’s car pulled behind them, the spin
of tires cast stones into the woods. A siren sounded once in
a short strain. Lights flashed. Dominick’s eyes were hard and
narrow. He said, “It’s Dallas Pope.” He gunned the Ford and
then gently braked. He pulled halfway onto the shoulder and
then accelerated back onto the road. The tires squealed. The
brakes clutched like the arms of a nervous parent before the
truck shot forward again and they skimmed across the county
on a road bordered by no houses. Parallel to the road, a line of
reddish-gray rock rose up into occasional cliffs. The sun glared
down painfully, the sky was a baked late-winter blue, and every
one in the Ford F-150 squinted at the squad car behind them.

“Dad,” Clarke said, “are you going to pull over?”

Their father failed to answer. His eyes shifted back and forth.
His foot rose above the pedals, poised in indecision. Then the
truck pulled to a stop on the side of the road. The sheriff’s car
angled to a stop just behind.

“Kids,” their father said. He turned and leaned halfway over
the seat toward them. The red and blue lights altered his face.
A thin film of moisture veiled his lips. “Kids,” he said, “I need
you to trust me.”

“I do,” King said.

Clarke’s leg jumped against the floor mat.

“Listen,” their father said, “I’m headed back to talk to him.”

“What about?” Clarke asked.

“I need you to listen to me,” their father said. “Especially
you, Clarke. Right now I need you to do what I ask. You stay
right here.”

“Okay,” King said.

“And you close your eyes.”