The Detective's Garden (8 page)

“I got us something to eat,” their father said. “A place to stay.”

He drove the Ford to a two-story garage behind a beach house.
At the top of the exterior staircase to the second floor, they stood
outside the door of the garage apartment. Dominick set King
down and fumbled in his pocket. The kids pulled their collars
tight. The wind pushed them forward against a window to one
side of the door. Their faces pressed against the glass and they
looked inside at a soft light. A bed in white linens. A television.
Walls that had been recently painted a sunflower yellow. A pile
of split wood in a basket, a fireplace that glowed hotly with em
bers, a door open to a bathroom. A sink, a shower, a microwave.
A tile-floored kitchen. A refrigerator. A hot plate. Flowered win
dow curtains and a vase of daffodils on a nightstand.

In his hand their father held the silver key. “Can you feel it?”
Dominick said.

“Feel what?” said Clarke.

“This is a good place.”

After they dropped their bags on the floor, Dominick took
Clarke to the main house to meet the owner, a woman named
Clarisse Parish. They used the brass knocker to hammer at the
door until it opened. A woman with a deeply creased face and
white hair pulled them forward by their hands. She said, “Come
in, come in.” She wore a long velvet skirt and a pastel sweater
and shoes soled with cork. Her smile deepened every crease in
her face. “Sit down,” she said. She pointed through them to
ward the garage and said, “That old place has been empty too
long.” Dominick and Clarke looked down at themselves, then
around and back behind.

Alone in the apartment, King threw herself backward onto
the white bed. She bounced a few times. She crossed her arms
behind her head, leaned back, and stared at the long crack in
the ceiling. The edges of her mouth lifted. She reached for the
remote control on the nightstand.

She scrolled through the channels until her hand froze. On
the glass was an image of her father in the desert, wearing fa
tigues and holding an M4 carbine. King knew this image of her
dad in the way that her hand knew how to find her mouth in
the dark. A black-haired newscaster announced that Dominick
Clarke Sawyer was wanted for questioning in the murder of
Sheriff Dallas Pope of Snyder County, Pennsylvania. The news
caster spoke with a man from the FBI. The FBI man said her
father was armed. He said her father was dangerous.

King’s body jumped like a wire running with electricity.
She slapped at the remote until the screen fell dark. Her hands
squeezed the white sheets and she held herself still until she
decided what to do. She wouldn’t tell anybody. Not a single
soul. Not her father. Especially not Clarke.

CHARLIE BASIN SET
out a white tablecloth and
small blue plates that had belonged to his wife’s grandmother.
It was midmorning. He sliced two baguettes and placed them
on a plate with a portion of brie. He cut the tomatoes on a bias.
He bruised the basil with his fingers and laid it on the cheese.
He pulled the seat out for Rosamund and gestured for her to sit.

Her dark hair had begun to gray at the temples. She had
strangely long fingers. A slight wattle beneath her chin and
strong cheekbones. A charming self-consciousness. “Some
thing’s happened with Charlene,” she said. “It’s pretty bad.”

“What happened?” Charlie said.

“She’s in the hospital.”

“What for? What hospital?” He tensed in his chair and
leaned forward.

“She’s okay, Charlie.” Rosamund put both of her hands in
front of her on the tablecloth. Her head dipped and rose like
something at sea. “She’s at Duke University Hospital.”

“‘Okay’?” Charlie said. “What happened to her?”

Rosamund paused. She looked up at him. “She’s in the psy
chiatric ward.”

“What happened, Ros?” Charlie said.

“She cut herself.”

“Cut herself where?”

“It wasn’t that serious. One of the doctors called it deliberate
self-harm.”

“Jesus,” Charlie said. “Why?” His mouth hung open, then
closed, then opened again. He leaned back in his chair, tried to
relax. “How long’s she been in there?”

“Two days.”

“I’m going to go see her,” Charlie said.

“I don’t know, Charlie. I didn’t want to tell you this part.”

“Tell me what?”

Rosamund straightened in her chair. “She said, pretty specif
ically, that she doesn’t want to see you.”

Charlie touched his fingers to his lips, then to the tablecloth.
He put his hand around his glass of water, raised it halfway,
then put it back down. They were quiet for a few minutes.
Their seltzer water hissed against their glasses.

Rosamund said, “What is this?”

“What’s what?” he said.

“This,” she said, gesturing to the tablecloth and her grand
mother’s plates and the halved baguettes. “Is this brunch?” She
spread a white napkin across her lap. “Why’re you going in so
late to work today?”

“Things got worse yesterday,” Charlie Basin said. “It doesn’t
really matter much now.”

“It still matters,” Rosamund said. “Tell me about it.”

“I crawled inside a corrugated drainage pipe,” Charlie Basin
said.

“What for?”

“I pulled out a body.” Charlie Basin looked down at his palm
in his lap. His hands had left deep prints in the silt as he had
crawled. The pipe had barely accommodated his shoulders. The
light had jerked forward in his hand until it hit a patch of
brown greasy hair. Basin’s elbow had come to rest in blood-wet
mud. He’d recoiled. A folded body and a jumble of limbs. A
head bent back too far. A snapped neck. A throat slit open like
a great mouth.

“I’m sorry, Charlie,” Rosamund said. Her voice was quiet.
Her arms were folded on the table.

“What are we going to do about Charlene?” Charlie said.

“I don’t know.”

Rosamund picked up her bruschetta. Charlie Basin scooted
his chair nearer to his wife’s and they sat beside one another. He
turned sideways so that he faced her. “Why didn’t you tell me
about this right away?” he asked.

“This is hard for me, too,” Rosamund said. She set her ba
guette back down and pushed it across her plate. “You look
tired,” she said. “Can you skip going in today altogether?”

“No,” he said, “I can’t.”

“Do you want to tell me about this case?”

“A father running with his two kids. An Iraq vet, an Army
Ranger from a reconnaissance detachment.”

“Two kids?”

“Uh-huh.”

“One boy, one girl?”

“That’s right.”

“Just like us,” Rosamund said.

“WHY DO YOU
have a gold ring?” Clarke asked.

Dominick held up his hand. He lay in the bed. “This one?”
he said.

“The woman’s ring. In your satchel.”

“You’ve been rifling through my stuff?” Dominick’s knees
cracked as he stood. He could hear King in the bathroom
brushing her teeth.

“Whose ring is it?” Clarke said.

“Clarke,” his father said. “What’s mine is mine.” He took a
step forward.

“Is it Mom’s?”

Dominick sat back down on the edge of the bed. He put
his head against his hands. “We’ve got to take it easy on each
other,” he said.

“Is it?”

Dominick looked up at his son. He held the silence for a
moment. “Of course it’s your mother’s.”

“Why do you have it?”

“Who else’d have it?” his father said.

“Why didn’t she take it with her?”

Dominick was quiet for a minute. He looked at his son. “Be
cause,” he said, “she didn’t want it.”

Later that afternoon, Clarisse Parish pulled bits of Styro
foam from her attic. She sat on the rag rug in her living room
and pieced them together. When she knocked on the door
to the garage apartment, her arms were filled with airplanes.
Clarke and King opened the door. Behind them, she could see
Dominick bending over the hot plate. She hefted the planes
and said, “Kids, let’s fly these things.”

King reached out and took a plane from the crook of Clar
isse’s elbow. She handed it to Clarke.

Clarisse looked at Dominick. “Come on,” she said. “There’s
enough for you to have one, too.”

They stood in the wilted grass that ran from the front of
Clarisse’s home to the retaining wall. The tide was high and
the surf crashed. They threw the planes back and forth at one
another. The planes cut upward in curious curlicues. They de
scribed neat little curves. They nose-dived and ran into house
windows. Clarisse’s neighbor came out and stood on her back
porch with her bathrobe pulled shut against the wind. Her
mouth pursed tight. She smiled when the planes splintered
against rocks. From the side of her mouth, Clarisse whispered,
“Her name’s Roseanne Small.” Then she gestured them closer.
“She’s a witch.” Clarke smiled but King stared at the neighbor’s
dark robe and long bony fingers and then she turned and threw
her plane against the wind, and it caught an errant upward
draft and rose with its wings tipping back and forth. It soared
pretty far. Farther than it should have been able to from such an
awkward throw. It lofted over the neighbor’s roof and dived and
Roseanne Small began to smile until it rose and floated across
the backyards. It turned in a great arc toward the swamped
beach and floated over breaking waves to the quieter water.
They all watched the plane descend with dry open mouths. It
came in fast and low. Like a warplane.

Some of their days in Maine took the shape of normal lives.
Dominick slid the pistol under the bed. They bought bagels
and yogurt at the Price Chopper. They bought and split a lob
ster from the Lobster Pound. A film of snow came and went on
the beach. Bundled in a jacket, King pestered Clarke until he
loaded sand into buckets for her sand castle. They waded in the
cold salt marsh. They hunted up and down and found decayed
kelp and rotting clams and hundreds of dead crabs no larger
than silver dollars. They collected empty shells and brought
back a blue mussel and a razor clam and a knobbed whelk that
King held to her father’s ear. “Listen,” she said.

He listened. The noise washed back and forth in his head,
moving from place to place. He could hear two oceans, one
inside and one out. It made his mind feel like a hard place that
he could turn around and get lost in, a place that contained
places within other, darker places. Inside the sweep and dip
of Pennsylvanian mountain roads was his memory of a brick
alleyway in Philadelphia. The hilltop village of Maduu nestled
inside Iraq like an eardrum inside the curled nautilus of an ear.
With his free hand, he pushed at his temples as each place spi
raled into another. He took the whelk shell and pressed it into
the sand. He was here, right now, with his children. He didn’t
want to be anywhere else. He pointed at the shell. “Is there still
a critter in there?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” King said.

Dominick took a deep breath, let himself feel the room in
side his chest. They were safe here on the beach. King sat in the
sand a foot away from him. Ten paces over, Clarke squatted by
a tide pool, sullen, disturbing the water with a stick. Dominick
felt the distance between them like a cold breeze tightening
his skin. He let his held breath out. Wasn’t this the way it was
meant to be with a teenager? Couldn’t distance signal growth?
Couldn’t it be a good thing to watch Clarke, who’d suddenly
gotten large, grow even bigger? Couldn’t Dominick relax into
the strain? He let himself smile. He reached out and touched
King’s knee.