The Detective's Garden (30 page)

Clarke waited it out. His eyes began to adjust, to filter out a
dull grayscale world.

“Everything okay?” his father asked.

“It’s fine,” Clarke said.

“Fine how?”

“How do you get along with women?”

“You’re asking me?” his father said.

“Who else, Dad?”

“Elsie, you mean? Are you listening to her?”

“Sometimes she doesn’t make sense.”

“I understand that,” his father said. “But nobody makes
sense.”

“What do I do?”

“Are you listening to the way that she doesn’t make sense?”

Before morning, the surf woke King from a thin film of
sleep to her mother’s tongue. Her mother’s slow whispering
sounded like sand pouring. King listened with her head cocked
against the dark. Her mother’s voice was a low susurrus through
the screened window. The stars winked on and off like handfuls
of thrown coins. King stood from her bed. The cold dimpled
her bare skin. Her teeth cracked together. She listened hard.
If her mother used words, King couldn’t parse them, couldn’t
separate the edges of her phrases. Her mother’s secrets, like the
earth’s, called for an interpreter.

Half asleep, King walked out of the house, the screen door
flapping behind her. From the kitchen table, she had picked up
her father’s Wharncliffe knife. The handle was darkened, the
blade deeply notched. She shivered but she didn’t fully wake.
Wearing only underpants and a T-shirt, she walked across
the yard and down the rocky trail that led past the bluff. She
walked into the dark ocean and let herself settle to the bottom.
Driving her palms into silt, she felt for bones. She wouldn’t
return to the surface until she found them. Her hands closed
around soft branches, round stones, bits of glass, tin. Her lungs
tore her insides. Bubbles escaped her mouth and rose toward
the moonlight on the surface. Turning her head upward, she
saw herself as a grown woman, a woman tied to a hollow pine
by a red scarf. A woman whose neck would be throttled until
it snapped. Holding her breath became worse than breathing
water. She opened her mouth, let it rush in, surrendered and
became her mother, Sarah Tower Sawyer. Her arms tied to the
pine, her ring finger carved off by a knife, her body tossed into
the river. Seizures wracked her chest and then she was free,
crawling toward the light shining off the surface of the wa
ter, touching the skin of the water and watching the cloud of
blood spread from her hands. Then the yank of her braid, and
the screaming, and the fingers at her throat that held her head
beneath water as her limbs flailed.

And as their body kicked upward from the sanded bottom,
broke the surface, and breathed in the light, King saw the face
that looked back into her mother’s as the bones in her neck
snapped and she drowned.

In their cabin, Clarke and Elsie woke early and rolled
across the bed. What each of them wanted was to crawl inside
the skin of the other. They clawed at one another with their
fingernails. They left bruises on each other’s arms and backs.
Clarke pushed Elsie hard to the bed, and she arched her back
and pulled him to her and dug her nails into the soft skin on
his thick sides. She rolled up onto her knees, reached behind
and hooked her finger inside his mouth. He crammed himself
forward, and she pulled at his hips. They wanted boundaries to
fall, to hurt one another in good faith.

“Can we stay together?” Elsie asked.

“I don’t know,” Clarke said.

“When will you know?”

“Maybe tomorrow.”

At first light, Dominick shoved open the door to Benja
min Ward’s bedroom. A splintered artifact of light pushed its
way around the blinds. Benny’s great body dented the mattress.
His eyes blinked slowly as though the lashes were gummed.

Dominick pushed the paper holding his name in front of
him. “What’s this?” he said. For a moment, Benny’s face went
empty of all expression. “Did you call?” Dominick asked. “Tell
me you didn’t.”

Neither said anything. Benny kept his head down. The
downy hair of his forearms and the known smell of himself
brought up all the other moments he’d buried his head against
his arms and looked away from what confronted him. As a child,
his father had read to Benny from books about round-bodied
beasts with horns and beaks and Benny had wrapped his arms
around his own head and howled and hidden his eyes. When
his ex-wife had walked out of the house without looking back,
the edges of her skin like an unlit match, he had wanted to
start after her but he hadn’t, he hadn’t done anything—instead
he’d sunk to his knees and his arms had come to rest in front of
his eyes. Outside Fallujah, he’d walked in a line of men in the
pitch dark until the ground in front of him had exploded with
light, as though the fire had burst up from beneath the ground,
and the bodies of the men ahead of him broke into pieces that
hit the earth with sick, wet thumps and Benny had thrown
himself on the ground and pressed his fire-blinded eyes into his
fire-blackened arms.

They were quiet for a long time. Then Dominick said, “Ben
ny?” His voice was like an old blanket. He reached around and
touched the gun behind his belt. “Can I tell you something?”

“Okay,” Benny said.

Dominick told him how it had all started. How the first
deputy had come to the door of the A-frame. How he’d watched
from a window when the deputy, a young man, a boy really in
a gray-green uniform, had scuffed his feet on the welcome mat.
The boy stood stiffly and rapped on the door hard. Wind see
sawed between field and forest and the late-afternoon sun tres
passed everywhere. The boy held a red scarf in one hand. One
boot lifted and fell on the cement steps. His skin ruddied in the
late light. He took off his hat. He knocked again.

Dominick stepped out onto the porch, into a wash of light
only strong enough to warm the surface of things. The porch
boards creaked. A distant burn bin smelled of burned rubber.

“Afternoon,” said the deputy. There was something in his
voice, a false note of relaxation that hid a bit of nervousness,
some small indefinite concern.

“Something wrong?” Dominick asked. His body’s frame
filled the frame of the door.

“I’m Deputy Donny Boyer,” the boy said. He held out his
empty hand. The irregular patter of rifle fire echoed across the
top of the western ridge and down into the valley. Someone
practicing with paper targets or pie tins hung on strings.

“You been a deputy long?”

“Not long,” Donny Boyer said, “still in my first year.” He
held up the scarf. “You seen this before?”

“Not sure,” Dominick said. “My wife had a red one.” His
stomach muscles knotted. “You think that scarf is my wife’s?”

“That’s what I come to ask you,” Donny said. “It’s made of
alpaca wool. It’s an unusual knit.” He lifted the scarf toward
Dominick.

A neighbor’s distant lawn mower was the small whining en
gine of a Predator drone. “I can’t tell if it’s hers,” Dominick
said. “How’d you come by it?”

“Some kids dumped a stolen bike in the river,” said Donny
Boyer. “South of here, outside Liverpool. I waded in there and
pulled the bike out through the cattails at the bank. That’s
when I found the scarf. Knew it was alpaca wool straightaway.
My aunt raises alpaca.”

“All the way over by Liverpool?” Dominick said, a coarse
fear boiling up past his stomach to touch his esophagus. It
caught in his throat, hung there choking him, a partially di
gested mass of all the times he’d been afraid before, causing
his eyes to water. His heart began to jump in his chest. His
palms to sweat.

“That’s right,” Donny Boyer said. “It’s a nice scarf, too. I
figured somebody would like to have it back. So I rode over to
Patchwork Farms. That’s in Kantz pretty near here. They got
an alpaca store. You know Mrs. Yoder? She runs the place. I
walk in there and make some small talk. Then I hold the scarf
and say, ‘You know anything about this?’ and she took it off
me and felt the knit. Mrs. Yoder said she made that scarf for
Sarah Sawyer. Gave it to her, she said, as a Christmas present.
Right away when I heard your wife’s name I remembered the
missing-person report. That’s why I come by.”

Deputy Donny Boyer looked at Dominick, took a step back,
shifted his hand closer to his gun belt. “Hey?” he said. “Hey,
you okay?”

The arms that reached out to overwhelm the boy were not
Dom’s own. The eyes that saw all the things he had seen should
never have belonged to him. He could never do the things that
he did next. He couldn’t feel the body shake beneath his arms.
He couldn’t listen to its smothered voice. He closed his eyes and
squeezed and squeezed, and when the deputy no longer moved,
Dominick wrapped what was left in black plastic, dragged it to
the river, and threw it in.

Inside the main house, King was white as a ghost. She
shivered. Her small angular reflection passed across the glass
of the French doors. She heard her father’s voice in Benjamin
Ward’s room. She dropped her father’s Wharncliffe knife on
the table and took the canister of salt from the cabinet. She
walked on the tips of her toes. Her feet left moist prints on
the floor that evaporated after her weight was gone. She knelt
on the wood floor outside her father’s room and ran her fingers
over the seams between strips of wood. Her head bowed. In her
hands, the container tipped and salt spilled into words.

Murder
, wrote King,
Renascence
,
Miracle.

CHARLIE BASIN HAD
them now. The black Chevy
Suburban felt heavy against the road. It had weight. He was
being followed by a line of police cruisers and the up-armored
Humvee of Seattle’s SWAT team. He had banned sirens and
lights. A single phone call and the Sawyers’ location, so hard to
determine, was illuminated like a point on a light-up map. His
body felt electrified. This was beautiful country out here. The
hills mounded like the backs of petrified beasts. The mist rose
off the green ground. Everything seemed so alive. He pulled
his Glock 23 from its holster and set it on the seat. He pushed
the brake, pulled into the long gravel driveway that led to Ben
jamin Ward’s house, and pushed the gas hard enough that the
Suburban’s engine barked and jumped forward.

The gun in Dominick’s hands was the final and definitive
truth. He pointed it at Benjamin Ward. The barrel did not wa
ver. “Go ahead,” Benny said. “You ought to shoot.” He pulled
the green sheet up so that it covered his chest.

“What the hell, Benny?” Dominick said. His hands shook,
just once, around the handle of the gun.

“I can’t explain it, Dom,” Benny said. “It hasn’t been good
since we came back. I got nothing. I got dark thoughts about
my wife. She said she left because of money.”

“We’ve been like brothers,” Dominick said.

“Not for a while.”

The truth left them both quiet for a minute. Outside sounds
crowded in. The distant snarl of a heavy engine. The whistled
yelp of a white-tailed kite. The crunch and spit of tires against
loose stones.

“Somebody coming over?” Dominick asked.

Benny pushed himself up with his hands so that the sheet
fell away and exposed the corded muscle of his arms and chest.
“I think they’re here,” Benny said. “Dom, I talked to the FBI.”

Dominick backed toward the door. He stopped at the en
trance of the hallway with the gun rack behind him, raised the
pistol toward the ceiling, and fired.