I suppose I could have just let Kevin out and waited for him to scratch on the door when he was done. He didn’t seem like the kind of dog who was crazy about the rain, but something made me want the fresh air—cold wet air soothing the inner walls of my cranium, getting sucked into my lungs, the burn of tobacco and its sweet, sticky resin, a cold wind blowing through my hair and chilling my scalp. I watched Kevin sprint up a low hillock, then rise up on his hind legs, then disappear into the grass. I whistled for him—strangely familiar, since I’d never had a dog—and headed down to the water’s edge. On the third try, I managed to light my cigarette. A thin crust of ice had formed on the surface of the water, but the rain was quickly melting it away. The wind picked up and somewhere to my left, a branch snapped and cracked, followed by the whoosh of foliage falling to the ground. Something was wrong.
Just as this thought entered my mind, Kevin began barking and whining, whining then barking. He sounded trapped or confused. I turned around. Kevin was up by the house and he was barking at something—a tree limb? a bag of trash?—lying fallen by the basement door, directly below the back deck. I turned back to the bay and finished my cigarette. Then I lit another one. And another. The rain was falling heavier now and the jacket was getting heavy. My face was numbed with cold. I began walking slowly back to the house.
Johnny was lying facedown in a puddle. The soles of his feet were pointed upward, the sure sign of someone who isn’t going anywhere. He was naked and on his left buttock I could the see the deep purple spiral of his tattoo, something he’d explained to me about a Bornean hag who waited at the entry to the afterlife, checking your body for spirals. If she found one, she would let you enter unscathed. But if she didn’t, the hag would pluck out your eyes and you would be forced to go through eternity blind. Maybe blind was better. Kevin looked at me, then back at Johnny, whose wild hair was matted in clumps around his neck. I looked up at the deck. There was some kind of scrape—maybe blood, but hard to tell because the rain was washing everything away—on the railing. With the snow and freezing rain, it was possible that Johnny had slipped.
The sky was dropping rain on my face, splat after splat. I wondered when it was going to stop. I looked back down at Johnny. Kevin was licking his neck.
“No!” I said. “Bad dog!” I pushed Kevin away with my foot. Then I saw the wound on Johnny’s neck, a ragged tear. It started in the front and wound around his neck, not a neat incision, but a ripped section of skin and flesh—a pillow losing its feathers. I stood back up and was soon getting sick into a clump of wild sage that grew around the pillars of the deck.
“Katherine. Katherine, what’s wrong?”
Arthur was standing on the deck wrapped in the blanket. He was wearing Johnny’s shoes.
“Call an ambulance,” I said. “Johnny’s dead.”
The ambulance came and with the ambulance, the police. The sun made an appearance shortly after that. The day had turned beautiful but I found it hard to appreciate with all the police crawling over the property. Some had dogs. I’m not sure why. They had found a couple of things that day—the remains of fire lit in the woods and some empty baked-bean cans. Someone had been camping out there. Bad Billy, maybe? Who knew?
Then there was the possibility, which seemed the most likely, that Johnny had fallen off the deck, knocked himself out on the way down (there was a monstrous contusion on his forehead to back this theory up), drowned facedown in a puddle, then provided an easy meal for some coyotes or skunks.
“Would skunks do that?” I asked the police officer, an Officer Browning, who was young and seemed more interested in me than Johnny.
“Skunks eat anything, Miss. I’m sorry about your friend.”
“Oh, God.” I shook my head. I had been crying all morning and I wasn’t sure why. There was fear in with the grief. I looked at Johnny’s back. A photographer was snapping away.
Arthur was talking to another police officer, an older woman who had her arm around him. Arthur seemed to be taking it worse than I was, which wasn’t that surprising, because Johnny and Arthur had spent a lot of time together over the past week.
Another young cop was rooting around under the deck. “I think I found something,” he said. The photographer went over and snapped a few shots. It was the snow shovel, which had been up on the deck at one point, but for some reason was now under the deck, about six feet from where Johnny was lying.
“Is that blood?” asked the young cop.
Detective Yancy, who’d been on the phone for the last half hour, came striding over. “Don’t touch anything. Get that bagged.”
“Don’t worry about anything,” said Officer Browning.
“Don’t worry? What do you think that shovel’s all about?”
“We’ll figure this out,” said Officer Browning.
“Miss,” called Detective Yancy, “a few words.”
I raised my eyebrows at Officer Browning. I don’t know what I meant to imply by this, but he stepped back and let me pass.
“You were drinking?” said Detective Yancy.
“Just a little.”
“Is that sarcasm?”
“It’s understatement.”
“Say things plainly, Miss. I’m not in the mood for jokes.”
“We were drunk. When I came home from the airport at eleven A.M., Johnny was already drunk. I think it was close to nine o’clock at night when I remember him going out on the deck.”
“Was Mr. Verhoven drinking?”
“Mr.—? Oh, Arthur, yes, a lot. We were all pathetically drunk, and now we’re all pathetically remorseful, except for Johnny. The only one who remembers anything is the dog, and he’s not very forthcoming.”
“Miss, I must remind you that this is not a time for jokes.”
“This is not funny to me, not in the slightest, and I resent your constant patronizing. I am answering your questions…”
Then I stopped because I saw someone walking around the side of the house, down the lawn toward me. He was wearing a cowboy hat that was strangely lacking in irony. He was bow-legged. He had a suitcase in his hand, a suitcase that seemed impossibly light, the suitcase that women carried in movies from the thirties and forties as they headed to New York, L.A., and Paris, from Minneapolis, Cherryville, and Farmington—suitcases filled with nothing but dreams. When he saw me he set down his suitcase, took his hat off in a gesture of politeness, and stood, holding his hat in both hands, as if waiting to be invited to the investigation.
Arthur came over and put his hands on my shoulders. “Who’s that?” he asked.
“That,” I said, “is Travis.”
Travis came walking over. He nodded when he saw me. “Katherine,” he said.
“Howdy,” I replied.
“I would have called, but I didn’t have your number.”
“That’s okay.”
Travis looked around at the police then down at Johnny’s body. “Is this a bad time?”
“I’m going to make some coffee,” I said. I went inside and Travis followed with his suitcase. I was surprised to see a typewriter by the counter, an old Olympia that looked to weigh a hundred pounds.
“You don’t mind, do you?” said Travis.
I shook my head. “You can stay in the room at the end of the hall.” Travis was about to ask me something, but my expression made him change his mind. I could tell. I could almost hear his reasoning, “What are the chances of something like that happening to me?”
That night I slept badly. Kevin was having nightmares, whining in his sleep, his paws twitching. Arthur had fallen asleep after sharing a bottle of Maker’s Mark with Travis. All of us had checked the doors at least twice before retiring. I’d seen a flashlight in the back and it was a tense couple of seconds before we made out Officer Browning with some other guy prowling around. I heard tires crunching down the gravel drive more than once. The police were keeping a close watch over the house, which made me feel both paranoid and safe. I finally passed out at around four in the morning. Next thing I knew, Arthur was shaking my arm.