The Detective's Garden (3 page)

Below the saddle between low mountains, King pushed
Clarke awake.

“What?” Clarke said.

“Dad’s not here,” she said.

“He’ll be back.”

There was a long period of quiet. Branches clattered over
head. The mummy bags rustled. “If Mom was going to come
home,” King asked, “when do you think it would be?”

“Once I heard her telling Dad that she was going to leave,”
Clarke said.

“When?” King asked.

“They were arguing,” Clarke said. “I think she wanted to get
away from him.” He looked down. “I think they hate each other.”

“No, they don’t,” King said.

“I don’t think she’s coming back,” Clarke said

“Why don’t we ask Dad again?” asked King.

“I’ve asked him. He won’t answer. There’s something wrong
with him.”

LONG AGO BY
the covered bridge, the cold had turned
their breath to rime. Snow lay thick over the flat yellowed grass.
The sun rose like an orange. Dominick and Sarah had stood un
der the bridge, not a mile from where, in a few months, Dom
inick would use his enlistment bonus to buy a plot of land on
which he dreamed of building them a cabin. They stood under
giant hewn beams supporting an old slate roof. Boards bowed
beneath their feet. Icicles stretched from the eaves. She held his
arm and leaned. She was as young as he was and dressed densely
enough that the skin of her face looked reddened and warm.
She tightened her fur collar. She was pregnant and she hadn’t
yet taken his surname. Her name was still Sarah Tower.

“You shouldn’t go,” she said. “This baby will need you.”
Wisps of dark hair escaped the hood of her woolen coat. She
had eyes of dark rock.

“I don’t know.” His gloves felt tight as he moved his hands.

“I don’t want you to go,” she said.

Beside the bridge, the creek water had been diverted into a
small channel that fed a pond. It was round as a hand mirror
and frozen solid. They walked gingerly across the ice. He swiv
eled his leather satchel from his back to his front. He unhooked
the ice auger and opened the satchel for the collapsible rod and
wax worms and hooks and line and bobbers. Sarah Tower put
her hand up to shield her eyes from the light. He augered a
hole in the ice. He took off his gloves to assemble the pole and
to fish the line through the hook’s eye. The cold stiffened his
fingers. He lowered a worm and sat to watch the bobber in the
shrinking hole in the ice.

She said, “You’ll barely ever get to see him. Or me.”

“You can come with. After basic training, I’ll be at Fort Ben
ning. You can live there, too.”

“I’m not leaving here,” she said. “This is what I know.”

“Then I’ll be home whenever I can.”

“It won’t be enough,” she said.

“Jesus,” he said, “we’ve talked this through already.”

“I know.” She turned away from him. “We ought to name
him Clarke,” she said. “I want him to know you really well.”

Light trammeled the ice. The field to the south was dotted
with snowy hummocks.

“We don’t know it’s a boy yet.”

“I do know,” she said.

“It’s not like I want to leave,” he said.

“Can’t you listen to me?” she said. “I don’t want you to,
either.”

THE SECOND FBI
man lay down on the beige bed
cover at the Days Inn near Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Yellow
ish flower-print curtains hung over two windows. The second
FBI man still wore his smooth brown shoes. He sniffed. The
air smelled like disinfectant. “This place is the fucking pits,”
the second FBI man called toward the bathroom. The door was
open. The water ran in the sink. A dark shadow roiled in the
mirror attached to the back side of the door. On the bed, the
second FBI man put his arms behind his head.

“Clean towels anyway.” Charlie Basin appeared in the doorway
holding a hand towel. He was thin and dark-haired. He looked at
the second FBI man on the bed. He thought of his wife at home,
asleep under their down comforter. He glanced at his watch and
pulled his phone from the pocket of the jacket hung over the
back of a desk chair. She answered at the first ring.

“Rosamund,” he said, “I’m going to be stuck up here a few
days.”

“I miss you,” she said. “Stuck up where?” Her voice sounded
clotted and unused.

“Central Pennsylvania,” he said. “You in bed?”

“I am,” Rosamund said. “Charlie, did I tell you that I’ve
been worried about Charlene?”

“Sure,” he said, “you did.”

“I haven’t been able to get her on the phone in three days.”

“That’s what you’ve been worried about?”

“She’s drinking,” Rosamund said. “She’s skipping class. I
think she’s depressed.”

“She’ll be fine,” he said. “She’s always fine. I’ve got to go, Ros.”

When Charlie Basin got off the phone, he hesitated. Their
daughter was a junior at Duke. On the lacrosse team. President
of a pre-law society, the Bench and Bar. A good kid who didn’t
want to talk to her father much. Charlie sat in the chair by the
desk and dialed his boss. Andrew C. Fry, the assistant director
of the Criminal Investigative Division of the FBI. When Fry
answered the phone, Charlie said, “I think this guy’s gone un
derground, Andy.” He paused a moment and pulled Dominick
Sawyer’s file from his briefcase.

“Underground or flown the coop?” Andy asked.

“Hard to tell. Neighbors aren’t cooperative.”

“You want to pull out of there? Put out the APB, come
home, and wait for something to come in?”

“Maybe better to stick around a day or two.”

“No more than two,” Andy said. “Let me know when you
learn anything.”

“Will do,” Charlie said. He hung up the phone.

The second man moved his elbow backward so that it
knocked against the headboard. “This is a fucking waste of
time, Charlie,” he said. “This place is a backwater.” He took
out his gun and laid it on the nightstand. “This guy isn’t here.
He’s split. Maybe he killed his kids.”

“He’s not the kind,” Charlie said. “He’s been back and forth
from Iraq for years.”

“You think he’s lingering?”

“He’s still here.” Charlie turned and tossed the hand towel
into the bathtub.

“What makes you say so?”

“He’s here but he’s readying to leave,” Charlie said. “He
won’t bolt, he’ll depart. So we hang around. See what pans out.
Wait and see if the local police find anything.”

“What’s taking him so long?”

“He’s got two kids. Kids slow you down. Maybe he needs
time to think.”

“He’s going to take them with him? What for?”

“Let’s hope he does, because those kids are our way to find
him. You look at his military records? Without the kids, we’ll
never catch him. He’ll flee the country. He’ll disappear.”

THE NEXT MORNING
Dominick roused the kids
with a cold boot. They ate out of tin cans. Then he marched
them past the plum tree and through the soft light of the fields.
Ruffed grouse startled in front of them, their wings thumping
like giant hearts. They traveled by deer trail and derelict rail
road track. King said, “Where we going, Dad?”

Her father asked a question in return. “What way we heading?”

“West,” King said.

“What’s to the west?”

“Mr. Howland’s place,” King said.

They walked along a small brown path to a short-grass field
spotted with budding jonquils. Clarke straggled behind, his
feet scuffling against the ground. Reluctant to follow, afraid to
be left behind. Near the middle of the clearing, a tiny covered
bridge, no wider than Dominick’s broad shoulders, split a creek
in half. Ivy lumped at the bridge’s base and moved too slowly
for their time-sharpened eyes to see. Beyond the ivy sat a stone
cottage. Smoke rose from the chimney.

Dominick knocked on the plank-and-iron-batten door. The
door cracked and Jon Howland’s long beard appeared first, then
the whites of his eyes. The walls of the house behind him were
lined with heart pine.

Howland looked out toward the clearing. His head swung
back and forth. His lips twisted as though touched by some
thing gone sour. He said, “Come on then, get inside.”

The children filed in and Dominick followed, heavy on their
heels. They stopped by a long table. Howland lifted his chin at
the kids. “In the basket on the table,” he said, “there’s the last
of my Gala apples. Eat.”

Clarke stepped slowly toward the basket and King grabbed
an apple in each hand. Howland reached beneath his horseman’s
duster to wipe his hands on his jeans. Then he shifted the pot on
top of the woodstove. Heat rose and brought the smell of celery
and bay leaves and ham hock. He lifted an eyebrow toward Dom
inick. The eye beneath the eyebrow was brown as a stirred pud
dle. His cheeks were reddened with work. “Lentil soup?” he said.

“Howland?” Dominick said.

Both kids stopped moving, Clarke with an apple in his hand
and King with one in her teeth. They looked at Jon Howland.
They’d known him for their whole lives. He paid them well
to split wood. He’d helped their mother when their father had
been gone. He’d given them pocketknives with handles whit
tled from pear wood.

“Jon?” said Dominick.

Howland picked up a shallow wooden spoon. He turned his
back on Dominick. He picked up a gray rag and pulled the top
from the Dutch oven.

Dominick said, “Whose side you on in this?”

Howland turned to face Dominick and looked at him with
his mouth pursed. “I’m on your kids’ side,” he said. He stirred
the pot and the children’s appetites rose with the thin steam. “I
think they’re coming after you hard.”

“Who’s coming?”

“Not just Dallas Pope.”

King stared at Jon Howland, her eyes dark and sightless, her
mind tunneling through a coin thrown into the air and the dank
rotten smell of the ginkgo berries, and she was sitting in the car
again, the old Plymouth. Her mother walked toward her. Dallas
Pope leaned into the window well, his weight on his elbows, his
tan uniform and his sheriff’s badge a costume that King would
tell her father, in a letter, that she’d like for Christmas, and Sher
iff Pope’s mouth kindly turned downward as he pulled a silver
dollar from behind King’s ear and juggled it in his hand.

“More than Pope?” Dominick said. “Who else?”

“Feds.”

“You remember the names?”

“Nope,” Howland said. “But they wore city shoes. Slipped
in the mud. Walked about high-stepping like my rooster.”

“What’d you tell them?”

“Didn’t tell them that the wind was from the east this morn
ing. Or that I could smell peach wood burning in your fire.”

“Thank you, Howland,” Dominick said.

“No thanks needed.”

“Can the kids sleep here while I gather our things?”

Jon Howland looked at Clarke and King. “The couch is
theirs,” he said. He took in the shadows under their eyes, their
greasy hair. “You got anything else to ask?”

“It’s a big one.”

“Shoot.”

“I need a car,” Dominick said.

“Don’t have a car to spare,” Howland said, “but you can take
the F-150.”

Dominick cupped one of his hands with the other and looked
down into the well of his palms. He nodded toward the kids
and stepped toward the door. “All right then, I’ll be back before
morning.”

Howland caught Dominick lightly. “Hold your horses,” he
said. Both children watched the arthritic curve of the thick
hand on their father’s shoulder. “The truck,” Jon Howland said,
“you’d better thank me for that.”