I told her it was a matter of life and death. She said it always was. I said I meant death for real. No more breathing, I said. She told me I had to be nuts. I reminded her what office she worked in.
After a few minutes’ wait, Archie came on and I said, “I found the guy who killed her.”
He said, “Did you hurt him?”
“Hardly at all.”
“Did you kill him?”
“Not yet.”
“Do you feel any better, Jack?”
“You know, I really don’t,” I said.
“After what you told me, I didn’t think you would. On the other hand, I didn’t think you’d catch him.”
“Why should you have?”
“It’s wonderful you did.”
“I suppose,” I said.
“Don’t do anything rash.”
I started to laugh, and I didn’t know how to stop. I giggled pretty stupidly, and then I was crying.
“Jack,” he said.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You should see him.” That made me laugh again, so I hung up.
Someone brought a chair out for Mrs. Tanner. She lay back in it with her bright golden blanket around her, sitting on her throne like the queen of nothing.
Strodemaster and his lawyer talked to Bird. Strodemaster made marks on a topographical map the state police insisted on using. I didn’t try more than once to point out how on a map like that you need to see the shape of the land like you’re looking from above, and with all the snow, of course we couldn’t. The cops were in charge and all of us did what they said. And Mrs. Tanner watched us.
We waited two hours for a state roadworks bulldozer to be brought up on its tractor trailer. By then, local men had brought in wood by pickup truck, and they’d started a fire just behind Strodemaster’s barn to keep Mrs. Tanner and most of the rest of the hamlet warm. The dirty smoke blew back at them and up, but they sat in front of it, accepting the heat and watching us through the raggedy darkness of the early afternoon.
Archie had come out. He’d been held away from the house by the police and he’d argued awhile and then left. I didn’t like seeing him go. I thought he could talk to Mr. and Mrs. Tanner. I thought he could talk to me.
We were out now where the bulldozer had pushed a poor road through the snow. Bird was the least of the law now, he and the cop he’d arrived with. There was a captain, and we’d been told a colonel was on his way. There were a number of plainclothes investigators wearing bulky jackets under the bright, thin windbreakers labeled STATE POLICE. Some of them also wore baseball hats that told them who they were. They carried notebooks and wrote in them. I couldn’t imagine what they could think of to say.
I looked back over to the local people at their fire. If you could look down from above, the way the topographical map did, you would see Mrs. Tanner in her chair and the rest of them standing in a loose semicircle. Then you would see the road cut through the snow like a wound, showing corn stubble and even in places the frozen mud below it. Then you’d see us, and we’d look as small as the rest of them if you saw them from above, working a hundred yards or so away from the fire and the parked vehicles and what in that hamlet would pass for a crowd. It was growing. Word had spread on the scanners and people were driving in.
The investigators agreed that they thought he was lying about how far he’d carried her when he laid her into the snow, planning to come back in late March or early April and use the laws of physics to bury her at night for good. But we all thought it was right to start looking where he’d indicated and then move back toward the house.
The snow was to be moved toward the south end of the field. We would move it back while moving ourselves north and west toward the barn. The police had brought shovels and so had the state road crew, and people in the hamlet had loaned us some. There were twenty men and women, middle-aged or younger, most of us cops, who dug shallowly, almost scooping more than digging. Behind us were the people with shovels and buckets who moved what we dumped while we widened our circle at the end of the road in the snow. If you were looking from above, you would have seen us making awkward motions and not getting very far down.
I began to have a kind of daydream. I’m in Hannah’s bedroom, in the plaster dust and pools of Sheetrock screws and splintered wood and the clawed-looking walls. I’m in there alone and Fanny is gone, at Virginia’s, and then the dog comes clicking down the hallway, his tail wagging as he rounds the corner into the room, because he’s happy about showing Rosalie in.
She either says she was lost for forty minutes finding the house and then her car went into a snowbank and she walked the rest of the way or she doesn’t bother. I can never decide. She’s holding a shopping bag in each hand. Her face is bright from walking in the cold and because she wants to see me.
I’m sitting against a far wall, near the window, but not looking out. I don’t know what to say to her, so I raise my hand a little and then let it drop back to my lap.
Rosalie says, “Your wife isn’t here.”
I shake my head.
“I don’t care if she is.”
“You’d care,” I say. “She’d be at least a battalion’s worth of mean if she found you.”
Rosalie says, “Found us, you mean. And let her be. I brought you soup. The makings of soup. I make wonderful vegetable soup, and I have a bottle of Barolo that we deserve to drink, and also my toothbrush.”
“This is really dangerous,” I say.
“No. It’s really wonderful.”
“Well, yes. It is. And dangerous.”
She has set the bags down and is letting her coat drop down her arms.
“Fine,” she says, “dangerous.”
She goes to her knees, then lies between my legs and along my chest. I put my arm around her. We lie in the corner where the crib had been, and I wonder whether to tell her.
“Faculty don’t do this,” I say instead.
“Faculty do anything they want, Jack. And I can tell you something.”
“Do you have to?”
“This is the real scene of the crime,” she says.
I don’t answer. I know that what I want to do is not think about the crib, or Fanny coming home, or Fanny never coming home, or the truth of what she has just said. I want to unfasten Rosalie’s jeans. I want to do it so much that I start and she helps, standing to slide them down her legs more easily. While she stands above me, I unfasten my own, and she holds the top of my head and slowly, not closing her eyes or looking anywhere but into me, she slides slowly down until we are locked to each other, wet and then not moving.
“How long can we sit like this do you think?” she says.
I start to buck up, but I want to feel everything slowly. Her small hands are strong on me, her muscles move powerfully. I want to hear us be together. So I stop. I lean forward, forgetting my ribs, and I listen to her heart through her shirt. She adjusts a little, and I hear the sound of our wetness.
She says, “Jack?”
I nod against her shirt, maybe make a noise.
“Is the dog watching us?”
I stopped myself, but I was happy a minute, though my ribs were naturally not cooperative. This wasn’t a comfortable motion for them. No motion was. I worked at not making noises and at scooping the snow. I looked down into it, seeing grit and pieces of vegetation and coarse crystals of ice. I was looking for a small young face with a glad mouth and unhappy eyes. She would come up, I thought, like someone floating in a pond. She would rise while we dug, and if you were looking from above, you’d see her surfacing. I stopped and took some very short, choppy breaths. That was the best way to regulate it, I had found. I was looking down the road toward the fire and I saw Archie’s car return. It was followed by Fanny’s. Archie parked his sloppily. He usually drove it like that. He got out and he went around to Fanny’s car and opened the door for her. At that distance, she looked like anyone else at the end of winter in a heavy coat. But I knew it was Fanny and then I saw the dog. Archie looked at a patrolman and shook his finger and talked awhile. They got passed through.