But that wasn’t the job most of the time, of course. Every once in a while, there was a moment that lived up to the dream. But generally the job was more like it was now, standing in a rest stop parking lot, looking at a rotting corpse in a pickup truck, wondering about the implications, dreading the mountain of paperwork.
Graham Olstead, husband of Melody Murray, had been dead for a while by the looks of him. In the cab, his hunting rifle hung on its mount, and there was a box of provisions that would have lasted him a few days; beside him was a knapsack of clothes.
Melody Murray had said he was going hunting, and it looked like he’d planned to do just that. But, for whatever reason, he’d pulled over into this rest stop and died here. Chuck had a feeling he knew why. He’d seen it before.
“Subdural hematoma.” Katie sounded like she was talking to herself. He hadn’t seen her flinch at the body, or even shrink from the smell. She turned to him, and when he looked at her, he saw the same creamy skin, unblemished, unlined, that he saw on the faces of his own children. She was too young to be doing this job. He understood now why his parents hadn’t wanted him to be a cop. Maybe later he’d try to talk this sweet, small-town girl into being a kindergarten teacher or something.
The wind was picking up, and on the highway beyond the stand of trees, the sound of an air horn was mournful and heavy in the night air. The moon was hidden behind cloud cover, the sky an eerie silver-black.
“If he took a blow to the head with the baseball bat, there might have been a period of lucidity, as Melody Murray claimed, when he could walk and talk.” Katie pointed to the items in the cab. “He’d be able to get ready for the trip, drive off. But if the blood from the broken vessels didn’t clot properly? And maybe if he took a Motrin for the pain, it wouldn’t have. Then, a few hours later…” She let the sentence trail, lifting a slender palm toward the corpse. She moved in closer, and Chuck followed.
Katie pointed to a purple, flowering bruise by Graham’s temple, an ugly contrast to the grayish white of the skin beneath it.
“We won’t know until the autopsy,” she said. “It’s just a theory. Coroner’s on the way.”
When he still didn’t say anything, she said, “I’ll get my camera.”
Chuck didn’t like to arrest women, but he was going to have to get a warrant and bring Melody Murray in. He wished Jones were around to do it. He had the feeling Jones wouldn’t mind at all. He wondered, not for the first time, what their history was; he knew there was one. Everyone in this town seemed connected to everyone else somehow.
Coming from New York City, Chuck found this strange. He was used to distance, to the anonymity of the crowd. But his wife loved The Hollows. Loved that she went to the store for milk and saw three people she knew, that she’d get a call from a neighbor up the way to say the kids were playing off the cul-de-sac where they were supposed to stay with their bikes. But he found it oppressive, the way people knew your business, stopped by with baked goods, commented on your kid’s performance at a soccer game you hadn’t been able to attend. He wondered what it would be like to grow up in one place and stay there all your life, to forever be defined by your childhood relationships, to never know if you got to be the person you wanted to be, to always be the person you were when you were young.
When he looked over at Katie, she was staring at the body. For the first time since she’d arrived, she looked unsettled, brow furrowed, her professional veneer slipping.
“I think my mother used to date him,” she said. “A long time ago, in high school.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “It’s a small town.”
“She said he drank too much. That he was kind of a jerk.”
Chuck looked back at the dead man, a stranger to him, someone he’d never met in life. He wondered if it was true, what Katie said. If just saying something made it true, in a way. There was a story Chuck’s father used to tell about the boy who spread a rumor against a good doctor in the town where he lived. When the boy went to make amends, the doctor asked him to cut open a feather pillow and let the wind take the feathers away, then to come back the next day. When the boy returned, the doctor asked him to collect all the feathers and put them back in the pillowcase. Of course, it could never be done. Those feathers had been carried far, alighted in places where they couldn’t be seen or found but stayed there just the same.
“But you didn’t know him?”
“I just saw him around The Hollows. Like everyone.”
Something about the way she said it made him look at her.
“Didn’t you go to John Jay?” he asked.
“I did.”
“Why did you come back home?”
She shook her head, still staring at the body. “I don’t know. I missed my sister and her kids. The world out there, the city, it seemed so big. And I always felt small.”
The wind picked up again, making the trees bend farther and whisper louder. The air smelled like rain suddenly, and Chuck felt a sinus headache coming on. This place was hell on his allergies.
Katie walked away and starting taking pictures as two more prowlers pulled into the lot, lights flashing but sirens quiet. He’d called some bodies in to help him secure the scene. He watched as they blocked off the entrance and exit to the rest stop.
Chuck pulled the phone from his pocket to call in an arrest warrant. He looked at Katie, but she was immersed in her task, their conversation forgotten. The busy night ahead loomed large.
Leila hated her father’s house. She’d gone there as little as her sense of duty and obligation would allow while he was alive. And even now, with her father dead, she couldn’t muster any affection for the place. As she walked the rooms, which were exactly as her mother had arranged them all those years ago, she felt nothing but a tingling numbness, a persistent disbelief that it had all come to this. She waited for grief, anger, sorrow, all the things she should have been feeling at the violent passing of her father. But all she felt was the low rumble of nausea, a deep inner quiet.
She sank onto the stiff couch and found herself staring at the empty crystal candy dish that sat atop a dusty lace doily on the old mahogany coffee table. It had borne witness to every misery her father and brother could offer within the walls of this house. It had sat there, looking pretty, doing nothing. Just like her mother. Leila loved her mother, missed her every day. But God help her, the woman was weak, stood by and observed every abuse from the petty to the criminal. And still she got up before dawn to cook the old man’s breakfast and see him off to work with a kiss and a smile.
Above and around her, Leila could hear the heavy footfalls of her husband and her sons. The old clock on top of the television set-a wooden monster standing on four legs that hadn’t worked in years-read almost nine. She’d lost her energy to clean and organize, to find her father’s important papers, some indication of his final wishes, and to make the arrangements she needed to make. It was getting late, too late to make any more calls; she couldn’t stand to look in any more old boxes, to see any more old photos. More than anything else she hated those photographs, which her mother had painstakingly arranged in albums, labeled in her looping hand with little captions. Leila hated to see them, some combination of the four of them stiff and fake, smiling for whoever was holding the camera. Every time she looked at one of those pictures, all she could remember was what happened before or after. She and Travis in matching pajamas on Christmas morning, smiling, surrounded by gifts and a drift of torn wrapping paper-what were they? Maybe six and eight? Her mother’s caption: “Our angels on Christmas morning!” Leila remembered her father sulking because he felt that her mother had spent too much on gifts. Then later, her father beat Travis because he’d broken a dish while helping to clear the table. She remembered her brother screaming, trying to run up the stairs away from her father, her father chasing and yelling. You stupid little shit.