“On the Fourth?” says Fenton. “Forget it.”
“Why?”
“Why? We had three dozen corpses at least. As many as forty, I think. They were stacked like firewood down there.”
“Oh.”
Stacked like firewood. My neighbor, sweet Mr. Maron of the solar still, he died that night.
“We weren’t able to process them properly, is the other thing. No photographs, no intake records. Just bagging and tagging, really.”
“The thing is, Dr. Fenton, this particular corpse would have been rather distinctive.”
“You, my friend,” she says, tasting her tea with a moue of displeasure, “are rather distinctive.”
“A man, thirties probably. Gold-capped teeth. Humorous tattoos.”
“How so, humorous?”
“I don’t know. Zany, somehow.” Dr. Fenton is looking at me bemusedly, and I don’t know what I had imagined: a tattoo of a rubber chicken? Marvin the Martian?
“Where on the body?” Fenton asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know the means of death?”
“Weren’t they all—gunshots?”
“No, Hank.” The words are dry with sarcasm, but then she stops, shakes her head, continues quietly. “No. They weren’t.”
Dr. Fenton takes off the glasses, looks at her hands, and in case I am correct in my impression that she is silently weeping I avert my gaze, try to find something interesting to look at in the dimness of the hospital lobby.
“And so,” she says abruptly, shifting back into her characteristic tone, “the answer is no.”
“No, there wasn’t anybody matching that description or, no, you don’t recall?”
“The former. I am relatively certain we did not see a body matching that description.”
“How certain is relatively certain?”
Dr. Fenton thinks this over. I wonder how it’s going upstairs for the desperate man and his wife, bleeding from her wrists, how they’re faring under the charge of Dr. Gordon.
“Eighty percent,” says Dr. Fenton.
“Is it possible a victim might have been taken to New Hampshire Hospital?”
“No.” she says. “It’s closed. Unless someone took a body there and didn’t know they were closed and dumped it in the horseshoe driveway. I understand—” She pauses, clears her throat. “I understand some bodies have been deposited in such a way.”
“Right,” I say absently.
She stands up. Time to get back to work. “How’s the arm?”
“So-so.” I squeeze my right biceps gingerly with my left hand. “I don’t feel much yet.”
“That’s appropriate,” she says.
We’re walking back to the stairway. I set my half-empty teacup down carefully on the floor next to a full garbage can.
“As circulation improves over the next couple weeks, you’ll start to get a persistent tingling, and then you’ll need physical therapy to work toward regular functioning. Then, around early October, a massive object will strike Earth and you will die.”
3.
“So I go over there on Friday night, maybe two hours after you take off, and the playground is a no-man’s-land. The swings are cut down, just chains dangling, you know? The fence is kicked over, and the—what do you call it?—the jungle gym, it’s over on its side. I’m thinking maybe I’ve got the wrong place.”
“You’re at Quincy Elementary?”
“Yeah,” says Detective Culverson. “Quincy. The play field behind the school.”
“That’s right.”
The diner; the booth; my old friend with an unlit cigar, stirring honey into his tea, telling me a story. A fat double-bread-loaf indentation in the vinyl where McGully used to sit.
“So there I am like a dummy, holding this samurai sword. And don’t even ask how I got it, by the way. I’m standing there and I’m thinking, Okay, so, Hank’s little buddies have moved along, they’ve found some other squat. But then I see that there’s a flier: If you are the parent of… You know? One of those. It looks like they got scooped up.”
I exhale. This is good news. This is the best possible outcome for Alyssa and Micah Rose. A mercy bus came and took them somewhere indoors, with food and organized play and prayer circles three times a day. Ruth-Ann is sitting at a stool by the counter. She’s got her hot-water carafe, her pens arranged behind her ear, her little order notebook jutting out of the front pocket of her apron. Culverson is in his undershirt, off-white and yellowed and stained at the pits, because he’s lent me his dress shirt, which puffs out at my stomach and gaps at the collar.
“Was it the Catholics?” I ask him.
He shakes his head. “Christian Science.”
“Sure,” I say. I’ve started in drumming the fingers of my working hand on the tabletop. Now that I know that my kids are okay, that they didn’t suffer from my absence these last few days, I’m ready to move on, lay out my case. I hustled down here to make sure I caught Culverson within the loose bounds of the lunch hour, so I could run down my missing-person-turned-murder, see what he thinks.
“So I went to the address on the flier. Warren and Green. I didn’t have descriptions so I asked for the names.”
“How are they doing?” I ask. “Are they happy?”
“That’s the thing,” says Culverson. “They’re not down there.”
“What?” My fingers freeze. “They’re not?”
“Nope. A lot of other kids are, though. I found one named Blackwell.”
“Stone,” I say. “Andy Blackstone.”
“Yup. Funny kid. But Andy says that your guys…” Culverson flips through his notes; he’s got a steno pad like we used to use for case notes; I bet he helped himself to a box from the CPD supply closet before we were cleared out of the building. “He says they were there but then they left before the head count.”
“Oh.”
“And that’s as far as I could get.”
“Oh,” I say again, and stare down at the grimy linoleum. I can’t believe I let them go. They were my responsibility, those kids, a self-imposed responsibility but a responsibility nevertheless, and I treated them casually, like objects—a file that could be turned over to a colleague. I chose instead to follow the case of Martha Milano’s missing husband, and every choice forecloses on other choices; each step forward leaves a thousand dead possible universes behind you.
I think of the small broken boats I saw from the window of the blockhouse: the drowning, the dead.
“Detective Palace?” Culverson says. “Your turn. Tell me about your case.”
I nod. I look up, take a breath. This is why we’re here. I’ve come this far. I talk fast, giving him the highlight reeclass="underline" Julia Stone at UNH, Brett Cavatone at Fort Riley. The gunshot, the orange leaf from the ghillie suit, the diary page. Detective Culverson stops me after the mysterious Mr. N.
“Wait,” he says. “Slow down.” He clears his throat, looks thoughtful. “So, you got a girl who comes to you for help. Husband is Bucket List, she wants him back.”
“Yeah.”
“You find the husband, and right away he’s shot.”
“Yeah. By someone who knows how to shoot.”
“Military?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Someone who knows how to shoot.”
“Okay.”
“And then you get back home,” says Culverson. “How do you get home?”
“In a helicopter—that’s a whole other…” I shake my head. “Don’t worry about that. Skip ahead. I get home, I go over to Martha’s house this morning and she’s gone.”
“Any idea where she is?”
“No. Yes. I have a theory.”
Culverson raises his eyebrows, twiddles with his cigar.
“Okay,” he says. “Lay it on me.”