The Detective's Garden (20 page)

“Basin?” Annie said. “He’s been here?”

“No,” Dominick said. “Clarke ran into him.”

“Where?”

“Out joyriding,” he said.

“Shit, does he know you’re here?”

“Not yet,” Dominick said. “Anybody follow you?”

Annie set the bags on the table. “I snuck out the back door,”
she said, “and borrowed a friend’s car.” She pulled Clarke’s chin
up toward her with one hand. “You okay?” she said. Clarke
nodded. “Who’s this?” Annie asked him. With her other hand,
she pointed at the thin round-nosed girl in the chair a little too
close to Clarke’s.

Loose-wristed, Elsie held out her hand. “My name is Elsie,”
she said. She flicked her long hair back over her shoulder with a
toss of her head. The silver star glittered in her nose.

Everyone was quiet for half a minute. A cold draft rose from
the floorboards. Through the windows, light winked behind
broken clouds. King’s chair scooted back from the table with a
low judder and she stood. She said, “If we have to leave, I want
to go home.”

Dominick walked out the door and corralled the bags in the
bed of the truck. Annie followed his broad dark back. King
stood near the front door. Clarke and Elsie walked out of the
trailer and onto the lawn. Putting her hands on Clarke’s shoul
ders, Elsie whispered in his ear. “You can stay,” she said. Her
lips touched his ear.

“I want to,” he said, “but I can’t. I’ve got to take care of my
sister.”

On the porch, King looked back into the house, first at
the phone in the living room and then at the kitchen counter,
where she had left her belt behind.

The bags knocked heavily against the metal truck bed.
“Jesus, Dominick,” Annie said, “I hope you didn’t do these
things.” He noticed that her hands had begun to wrinkle. Her
hair was drawn up in a braid that looked like a vestigial tail.

“What things?” he said. He tossed the last bag into the bed.

“The things they say you’ve done,” she said.

Dominick turned and looked at his sister. “Sometimes every
thing falls apart,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“Most of it I can’t remember.” He put a hand against the
side of his face and took it away again. Dried blood sprayed
against dun-colored walls and a wet breath loosed against his
face. He felt his finger curled around a metal trigger, heard
voices like curses in a language he didn’t understand. His hands
were around a thin throat. The crack of bone. Blood running
past yellow marrow. Bruises welling like black ink beneath pa
per skin. The edge of a knife pressed against the slender joint
of a slender finger.

“I’m going to miss you so badly, Dom,” Annie said.

“Me, too, Annie.” He turned away from his sister and gritted
his teeth to suppress the pressure in his throat.

“When we were little,” she said, “you were the kindest boy.”

Behind the truck, Clarke and Elsie had latched their arms
around one another. Her eyes were huge and wet. One of her
hands made circles against his back. The other fished in a
coat pocket for a pen. She pushed him a half-step back and,
in blocky black letters, wrote 815 966 4774 on the pale
underside of his forearm. They leaned into one another like
falling fence posts. She moved so close that her lips touched
his ear as she whispered, “You call me. Then I’ll come get
you.”

The sun sat low and orange in the sky. From the driver’s seat,
Dominick murmured to his sister as she leaned against the side
of the Ram. She felt the truck’s thin metal cladding give a little
beneath her weight.

King walked out onto the creaking porch, turned around,
and ran back inside the trailer. She hollered back, “I forgot
something.” She dropped to the floor beside the phone so that
she was completely out of view of the windows. She dialed Jon
Howland’s phone number. The phone rang, and she whispered,
“Hurry, hurry,” until Howland answered. King asked, “Did
you find anything?”

“Are you kids okay?” Howland’s voice graveled and static
jumped across the line.

“I only got a second,” King said. “We’re fine. Please, you’ve
got to tell me what you found.”

“Okay, okay. A picture of you and your mom. She’s got you
on her shoulders. Looks like you’re carrying a turtle. There’s a
crucifix. A glass vial filled with something.”

“What’s in it?”

“Looks like water. Hold on.” King hears a muted pop and a
snort. “Smells like perfume.”

“That it?”

“There’s a handkerchief. White. Maybe looks like it used to
have something written on it. That’s it,” Jon Howland said.

The truck’s horn blared. King let the receiver fall into the
cradle. She walked slowly back toward her father, her feet
knocking against the wood floor and echoing into the crawl
space beneath. She left the front door gaping open and leapt
down the steps onto the dark springy earth with one arm raised
above her head, holding the belt that swung like a black adder
in her hand.

CHARLIE MADE A
phone call from the satellite FBI
agency on West State Street in Rockford, Illinois. It was a non
descript brick building with black awnings. Charlie had taken
over a corner office. He swore into the phone. The bandage
on his head had a small stain the color of rust. Dark-suited
men came into the office when he beckoned through the great
windows and left again when he motioned with his head. The
office phone had a long spiraled cord that stretched across the
office and knocked over the pencil holder and the stapler and
a stack of paper. Charlie went round and round the desk like
a tetherball. He called for roadblocks and traffic stops and an
aerial search.

Charlie paused and wiped the edges of his lips with his
thumb and forefinger. Then he called Rosamund.

“What’s wrong, Charlie?” she said.

“I’m fine. Don’t worry. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

“I can hear it,” she said. “Something’s wrong.”

“What does it sound like?”

“Tinny. Higher-pitched than usual.”

Charlie lowered his voice to a strained, breaking baritone.
“How’s this?”

“Sexy.”

Outside the office, a burly man beckoned to him with one
hand. Charlie held up his index finger. “I had the older kid,”
Charlie said to Rosamund. “His name’s Clarke.”

“You had him? Past tense? You don’t have him anymore?”

“This girl he was with hit me in the head with a tire iron.”

“My God, Charlie! Are you okay?”

“I got a few stitches.”

“Have you thought about calling the kids?”

“Not really.”

“Maybe you ought to call them. Especially Charlene. She
needs to hear from you. She’s struggling.”

“She’s having a hard enough time, isn’t she?” Charlie said.
“Without adding on my problems.”

“Call her, Charlie. Tell her what’s happened.”

“I got a lot to coordinate right now, Ros,” Charlie said. “The
Rockford police. The satellite bureau.”

“Then hurry up, Charlie, catch these people and then come
home.”

THE RAM TRUCK
scuttled out of the narrow driveway
and the tires spat gravel as Dominick turned onto a cement
lane not wide enough for two cars. A woman with her hair tied
in a handkerchief planted bulbs and craned her head to follow
the Sawyers’ retreat, a cigarette dangling from her lips. They
turned onto a two-lane drive with a twenty-five-miles-per-
hour speed limit. A yellow hatchback seemed to follow them.
It drove too close but then slowed and pulled into a driveway
and idled while an automatic garage door yawned. They came
to the busy four-lane artery that would flush them out of New
Milford. Dozens of cars dopplered by in flashes. It seemed to
Dominick that every head turned to look at them. Bright faces
flashed questioning looks. There were raised eyebrows. Down
turned lips. Deep disapproving scowls.

Night fell over them like a tossed sheet. A giant orb of moon
rose as though attached to a pulley. The Sawyers limped away
from New Milford, the distance between sets of headlights
widening until everything behind them sat dark. A helicopter
droned overhead. The streets narrowed at each turn and the
tilled fields expanded like a creeping mold. Dominick turned
the truck onto a small road lined by thin trees that curved to
the east. Far ahead, through the trees and across a field, they
saw two pairs of brake lights slowing to a halt. Briefly, red and
blue lights flashed. The beam of a flashlight cut the night into
halves.

“What’s that?” King asked. She was slumped against her
brother on the seat.

“A checkpoint,” Dominick said. He had taken his foot from
the accelerator and the truck’s weight began to work against
its speed.

Panic pulled Clarke’s voice into a higher pitch. He held one
arm in front of his sister to hold her in her seat. “What do we
do?”

“We walk,” Dominick said.

They bumped off on a dirt road. Thin pale beech trunks
loomed toward them in the night. Dust and insects glinted
in the headlight beams. The truck rumbled to a halt. Dom
inick cut the headlights. He stepped out and walked around
through the soft wilted grass and opened the passenger door.
Clarke and King slipped out of the cab, leaving the door open
behind them. The dome light shone as bright as a lighthouse.
Dominick tossed each of them a bag from the truck bed and he
shouldered what remained. He pushed the passenger door shut
and the dome light faded.

They walked for three nights. The weather held out with
sun-warmed afternoons and deep-starred evenings. When it
was dark, they walked through fields and forests, the land be
fore them great and flat and tame. When they saw the lights
of cars, they hunkered down and waited for them to pass. They
avoided roads. Sometimes smoke rose from distant chimneys
and lights burned at farm windows and the kids looked long
ingly back over their shoulders as their legs carried them be
yond the range of their desires.

“I’m really tired.”

“It’s not even that late, King.”

“It feels really late. We’ve been walking forever.”

“You’re fine. Just stay behind your brother.”

“I can’t keep going, Dad. I can’t.”

“Come here, I’ll carry you.”

“All right.”

“Hold on to my neck.”

“Okay.”

“How’s that feel?”

“It’s pretty good. Why’s it so dark out here?”

“I’m carrying you and it’s just pretty good?”

“It’s nice.”

“Do you think you can sleep?”

“I don’t know. When do we get to stop again?”

“Not until it gets light.”

“Can you carry me until morning?”

“I can carry you a long time.”

At daybreak, they camped in stands of elms or amid firs or
in patches of deer-flattened prairie. Daffodils wilted in small
clearings. Red and yellow tulips poked from yellowed grass. At
one camp, the ground was littered with cow bones. Skulls and
vertebrae and scapulae. Dominick and King had a sword fight
with thin ribs. At daybreak they ate bagels and salami and cans
of beans and beets and corn. They stretched their mummy bags
out on the ground in a triangle. They yawned and slipped in
side. They rolled onto their sides. They curled into tight S’s.
The ground beneath them was hard but their minds had soft
ened with weariness. Their breathing slowed and evened. They
slept. Their sleeping bags were dotted by shadows shaped like
the leaves of elms.