The Next Time You See Me (38 page)

“Oh, thank God,” she said. “Thank God.”

The girl was filthy. Her bare hands were covered in soil, and dirt was streaked across her face, too; a sooty mark, like a thumbprint, smudged her lower lip. He touched her face and winced at how cold it was, then ran his hands along her arms and legs, trying to feel for moved bones. “I think she just lay down here,” he said, more to himself than to Sharon. “I think it’s best if I just carry her back. It’ll save time.”

“Sure it’s safe to move her?”

“Think so,” he said. He balanced his weight over his hips and his hips over his knees, then leaned down to put the girl’s left arm around his neck. His right side was stronger, and so he slipped his left arm under her knees, then shifted her toward him a little, gritting his teeth against a little sting of protest in his scar.
Please don’t let me drop this child,
he thought.
Please don’t let me blow my back out between here and the road.

“Tony,” Sharon said.

“Just a minute,” he grunted. There was a smell on the girl, an awful smell, and he pinched his lips shut against it. How much did she weigh? He had been imagining a child all this time, though his memories of eighth grade, of girls who were taller than him, of snapping bra straps when the teacher wasn’t paying attention, should have prepared him to expect a woman’s body. He hefted her gently, testing. One thirty, at least. Would have been nothing back in the day—he remembered carrying Stefany to the bedroom, swinging her around playfully, tossing her onto the mattress.

“Tony,” Sharon said again, and he didn’t even bother replying this time. He had as good a hold on Emily as he’d ever have, and so he set his back straight, bit his bottom lip, and tried to unfold his knees. There was the pain he’d been eluding all morning; it clawed his lower back, making tears spring to his eyes.

“Darn it, Tony, I’m sorry, but you’re going to want to look at this,” Sharon said as he finally lifted to full height and locked his knees. He was sweating, and he was thinking that he might have to get Sharon
to help him with Emily, little as he wanted to admit it, when he saw the woman’s face, the horrified confusion on it, and let his gaze follow the line of hers.

Maggie was pulling frantically on the end of her lead, but Sharon was holding her back, first with steady pressure, as if playing a tug-of-war, then with exasperation, yanking the leash shorter and shorter in harsh, arm-length increments. “Back,” she said sharply. “Down, Maggie. Back.” The dog’s panting took on a strangled, raspy sound as she strained against her harness, digging her toenails into the soil for purchase, and then Tony saw what she was trying to get at.

There was a ragged hole in the ground about ten feet away. Emerging from it was what looked to Tony in the gray daylight like a plastic garbage bag. It was stuffed full to bulging, the surface marred by a small dot of white.

“What is it?” he said.

Sharon looked at him unblinkingly.

He couldn’t put Emily down—he would never be able to lift her again. But he took an unsteady step forward, then another, then another, wanting to go only as far as necessary to bring that dot into focus. Then it happened. He stopped, squinted, closed his eyes. When he opened them it was still there.

The dot was the tip of a finger. It had pushed through a strained spot in the plastic bag: the sharp edge of a long fingernail, too thick and brightly peach to be anything but artificial. It seemed to be pointing at Tony, and he nearly dropped Emily in his desperation to back away from it.

Maggie lifted her head and bayed again.

2.

He put on a brave face for the ambulance tech, who kept asking about his back, and gulped down a single Darvocet as soon as he’d
seen Emily off. He might as well have spit in the ocean, but the next hours were critical, and he couldn’t fuck this up.

“We need to call in the state police,” he told Pendleton. Another officer had arrived to drive Christopher and his mother to the middle school and Sharon and Maggie back to the Best Western, and so they were alone on the side of the road, trying to ignore the conspicuously slow crawl of passing cars. “We don’t have the resources to process the scene down there.”

“You think it’s Ronnie?”

“I don’t know who else it could be,” Tony said. He was sweating with the pain now.

Pendleton waved a car by irritably. “What in the hell was that girl doing down there? I mean, shit.” He shook his head, obviously not wanting to say what he was thinking.

“Maybe it was coincidence,” Tony said.

“Ain’t no such thing.”

Tony lifted his hands and looked at them. He could still smell the rotten stench that had clouded the girl, which was now on him, and he rubbed his tongue roughly across the roof of his mouth to keep from retching.

There was no time to rest, barely time to think. While they waited for the first state officer to arrive, Pendleton’s wife came by with a bag of hamburgers from McDonald’s, and so Tony and Pendleton sat in Tony’s car with the heat running and had a fast and awkward meal. Tony had left his appetite behind in the woods, but he chewed the food as if it were medicine, knowing that if he took another Darvocet on his empty stomach he’d not be able to keep it down.

Pendleton put away two of the burgers, then offered the last to Tony, who shook his head. “I can’t have this shit in front of me,” Pendleton said apologetically, wadding up the bag with the leftover burger in it and throwing it quickly into the backseat. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth immediately. “I don’t know why she buys that junk. She just don’t think.”

“It was nice of her to come by,” Tony said. He slurped the big
cola she’d brought him, enjoying that more than he had the food. He didn’t drink soda much, and it always came as a shock to him—so sweet, so much bite from the carbonation. He felt a surge of energy, which he knew would be short-lived, and was glad when the brown state car arrived and pulled off on the shoulder ahead of him. Maybe the sugar rush would last long enough to get him back down to the body, long enough for him to hand the case over and work on a way to tell Susanna the thing he suspected, which was the thing she must have already known was true, somewhere deep down: that Ronnie was never coming home.

It was almost five o’clock before he finally begged off. The forensic team had arrived from Madisonville, Pendleton had gone back to the station to file a report, and Tony had told Lieutenant Brice most of what he knew about the remains and the chain of events that had led him to them. He showed him the location of the body and where Emily had been found in relation to it, and he helped Brice string up yellow warning tape in a perimeter around the scene. On their way back through the woods to Hill Street, Tony had to stop for a moment and catch his breath. It was embarrassing, all the more because the lieutenant was probably at least a couple of years younger than him, tow haired and toothy—he looked like the high school quarterback. Tony didn’t want to hand this case over to him, even though he knew it was the right thing to do, maybe the only thing. He was so tired that it had become an effort just to string words together. But he’d done some good work today, damned good work—the kind of work that might make a difference a few years from now, when Sheriff Coe finally retired—and he didn’t want someone else getting credit for it.

“You all right, Tony?” Brice asked.

“I’m fine,” he said roughly, then regretted it. He hadn’t sounded strong or in charge; he’d sounded defensive, desperate. “I’m sorry. I haven’t slept since getting up yesterday morning.”

“Well, you’ve earned some rest. Go on home for the night. We’ll catch you up tomorrow.”

They resumed their walk. Tony felt as if he were wearing cement boots; every step required effort and thought.

At the road, Brice smiled and shook Tony’s hand. “Thanks for all your efforts, Mr. Joyce. I’m looking forward to talking with you more in the morning.”

“Likewise,” Tony said. “I’ll be at the station no later than seven o’clock.”

“Eh, make it nine o’clock. We won’t have any lab results before then, anyway.” He waved to another officer, who was waiting at a second state car. “Wanda, we’re ready down there. Grab the camera.”

She popped the trunk and started shouldering equipment. Tony found himself staring at her in a dazed way.

“See you, Tony,” Brice said pointedly.

He nodded. He got it.

In his car, he found some old fast-food napkins in his glove compartment and mopped his face dry, then gulped down the watery dregs of his soda from lunch. Tired as he was, he couldn’t yet go home and sleep—not until he’d talked to Susanna. But how could he say this to her? And what could he even tell her at this point? He wanted to offer her something, anything, as consolation, but he didn’t want to be premature, and he didn’t want to compromise the investigation at such a critical juncture.

His car was already pointed north, so he started it and went ahead and drifted downhill, not even having to apply the gas, into Wyatt’s subdivision. There was an unrest in him, a ticklish sense of elements beyond his control. All his life he’d had a habit of sinking into sudden gloom over things that he couldn’t at first remember, or hadn’t even yet realized. He’d be moving through a day, fine, and then suddenly he’d feel an acute wrongness, and all he could do was work on tracing its source. What had he just been thinking? What had he seen to provoke it? More often than not, the gloom’s root was trivial, and the cure was just to remember it: a bill he’d dreaded paying, some minor annoyance in a conversation with one of his colleagues. Nothing worth being upset over. Sometimes, the source was more of a tangled
knot, an accumulation of details that eventually sent warnings up to his conscious brain. These moods always lasted longer, weeks and even months, and the realizations they signaled were harder to accept. Like the end to his relationship with Stefany. Or his decision to come back to Roma to keep an eye on his parents, because he simply understood one day that his dad’s health was on a steady decline, that it would be a moral failing for him not to take care of them when their time of need came.

What he was feeling now—this tickle—was similar but not the same. It was like doing a long-division problem, getting to the end, and realizing that you must have made some trifling error along the way. So he wasn’t surprised, exactly, when he pulled past Wyatt’s house and saw what he saw.

Wyatt’s truck wasn’t in the driveway.

“Damn it,” Tony muttered. He idled in front of the house, wondering if he should call Brice. But what could they do without an indictment? Wyatt was probably just out on an errand. He’d run out of groceries. He was going stir-crazy and needed a few minutes outside. He was a fifty-five-year-old man recovering from a major heart attack, living on a factory worker’s salary. Tony was pretty sure he didn’t have the health or the resources to make a break for it.

Tony, in the meantime, still had Susanna to talk to and two nights’ sleep to catch up on. He decided that Wyatt could wait until morning.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

1.

Wyatt wasn’t at the grocery store or running an errand. He wasn’t out for a drive. He was, in fact, parked in the middle of the employee lot at Price Electric. His hands, still bruised red and black from the IV, were folded neatly in his lap, and his eyes were fixed on the entrance used by the factory’s laboring class: the men and women who funneled through that door each morning, tiredly punching their cards, buffing the concrete floors to a shine with their shuffling steel-toed boots; the same men and women who funneled back out eight and a half hours later, talking, lighting cigarettes, their eyes dimly lit, too, with the relief of another day passed. For almost forty years Wyatt had been one of them. It was strange, sitting here, trying to make sense of the passage of time. He had never stopped to consider it. He had never parked in this lot and not gone immediately into the building, which was a low, sprawling series of metal-sided boxes abutting a brick-clad front office. A corner was marked off with chain-link fencing; behind the fence, half a dozen men smoked and wandered back and forth, looking like prisoners getting their ten minutes of sunlight.

No, he’d never sat here like this, contemplating the place where he had spent most of his adult life. What a waste it was. You worked to live and lived to work. Price Electric had put sausage in his skillet
and gas in his truck tank, but the fuel kept bringing him back here, to toil under the buzzing fluorescent lights, alongside men whose language he didn’t speak and boys who didn’t respect him. He came in wishing the day over. He went home dreading five
A.M
., when his body, whether he wanted it to or not, would jolt suddenly to wakefulness. And yet now, as he imagined that he was looking at the factory for the last time, that he would never enter that front door again and punch his card, he felt lost.

He’d had a bad night—tossing and turning, the bed hard beneath him, Boss getting up and down, up and down, whining about some kind of disturbance outside. Wyatt had finally risen, crept to the living room, and parted the curtains of the picture window. He hadn’t been able to make sense of what he was seeing: a pack of men, perhaps half a dozen, walking along the street and shining flashlights at the homes on both sides of the road. As he watched, the men with the flashlights passed, and the street grew calm once more. He had returned to his bed and drawn the covers over his head, like a child afraid of monsters. At some point he slipped into a half sleep, a kind of anguished limbo in which the men with the flashlights kept coming back, he kept watching them approach, and then his conscious mind interceded just enough to remind him that they’d passed his door.

He spent most of the next morning trying to work up the courage to call Sarah and ask her why she had not come over as she’d promised. Her silence told him everything he needed to know—and yet, he wanted to hear her voice again. He thought that if he could speak to her, if he could tell her how much he needed her, she would at least let him explain his side of things. There was a story he had started to tell himself, a story that he was starting to believe. In it, the woman at Nancy’s, the one who’d helped pay his tab and given him the ride back to Roma, had admitted to him how unhappy she was. She hated her job, the sameness of it, the thanklessness. She hated her rental house. She hated the boyfriend she’d gotten into an argument with.
I’ve had a rough night,
she had said.
Hell, I’ve had a rough life.
In this story, she dropped him off at home, thanked him for the company, and told him
that she’d finally had it—that she’d fantasized more than once about just getting on the road and driving and driving, leaving and never returning. He hadn’t believed her at the time. It was just one of those things people said to each other in the dead of night, when they’d been drinking and confiding in one another. But, looking back, there was something in her eyes. Determination. Recklessness. A part of his mind snagged on the fact of her car, but in the story, the story that he was telling himself, he navigated around the inconsistency the way the mind moves through inconsistencies in a dream, always improvising, accommodating, until enough of them pile up that the sleeper is forced to awaken. In the story, she drove off perched on her seat cushion, hand making little waves on the air rushing through her window, and she found happiness somewhere that wasn’t here. The story was for him as much as it was for Sarah, or the police. He needed it to be true. He couldn’t be the man he thought he was if it wasn’t.