He goes back into the house and sits down at the kitchen table. Lights a cigarette, then digs through the envelopes on the table until he finds the unopened bill from the power company. He opens it, reads the impossible number, shoves the bill back into the envelope. He tries to calculate how long the ice will buy him, but he never could do figures, can’t begin to start to solve a problem like this.
He remembers: The basement refrigerator had always smelled bad, like leaking coolant and stale air. It wasn’t used much, had been kept out of his father’s refusal to throw anything away more than out of any sense of utility. By the time Punter found his mother there, she was already bloated around the belly and the cheeks, her skin slick with something that glistened like petroleum jelly.
Unsure what he should do, he’d slammed the refrigerator door and ran back upstairs to hide in his bedroom. By the time his father came home, Punter was terrified his father would know he’d seen, that he’d kill him too. That what would start as a beating would end as a murder.
Only his father never said anything, never gave any sign the mother was dead. He stuck to his story, telling Punter over and over how his mother had run away and left them behind, until Punter’s voice was too muted to ask.
Punter tried to forget, to believe his father’s story, but he couldn’t.
Punter tried to tell someone else, some adult, but he couldn’t do that either. Not when he knew what would happen to his father. Not when he knew they would take her from him.
During the day, while his father worked, he went down to the basement and opened the refrigerator door.
At first, he only looked at her, at the open eyes and mouth, at the way her body had been jammed into the too-small space. At the way her throat was slit the same way his dad had once demonstrated on a deer that had fallen but not expired.
The first time he touched her, he was sure she was trying to speak to him, but it was only gas leaking out of her mouth, squeaking free of her lungs. Punter had rushed to pull her out of the refrigerator, convinced for a moment she was somehow alive, but when he wrapped his arms around her, all that gas rolled out of her mouth and nose and ears, sounding like a wet fart but smelling so much worse.
He hadn’t meant to vomit on her, but he couldn’t help himself.
Afterward, he took her upstairs and bathed her to get the puke off. He’d never seen another person naked, and so he tried not to look at his mother’s veiny breasts, at the wet thatch of her pubic hair floating in the bath water.
Scrubbing her with a washcloth and a bar of soap, he averted his eyes the best he could.
Rinsing the shampoo out of her hair, he whispered he was sorry.
It was hard to dress her, but eventually he managed, and then it was time to put her back in the refrigerator before his father came home.
Closing the door, he whispered goodbye. I love you. I’ll see you tomorrow.
The old clothes, covered with blood and vomit, he took them out into the cornfield behind the house and buried them. Then came the waiting, all through the evening while his father occupied the living room, all through the night while he was supposed to be sleeping.
Day after day, he took her out and wrestled her up the stairs. He sat her on the couch or at the kitchen table, and then he talked, his normal reticence somehow negated by her forever silence. He’d never talked to his mother this much while she was alive, but now he couldn’t stop telling her everything he had ever felt, all his trapped words spilling out one after another.
Punter knows that even if they hadn’t found her and taken her away, she wouldn’t have lasted forever. He had started finding little pieces of her left behind, waiting wet and squishy on the wooden basement steps, the kitchen floor, in between the cracks of the couch.
He tried to clean up after her, but sometimes his father would find one too. Then Punter would have to watch as his father held some squishy flake up to the light, rolling it between his fingers as if he could not recognize what it was or where it came from before throwing it in the trash.
Day after day, Punter bathed his mother to get rid of the smell, which grew more pungent as her face began to droop, as the skin on her arms wrinkled and sagged. He searched her body for patches of mold to scrub them off, then held her hands in his, marveling at how, even weeks later, her fingernails continued to grow.
Punter sits on his front step, trying to make sense of the scribbles in his notebook. He doesn’t have enough, isn’t even close to solving the crime, but he knows he has to, if he wants to keep the police away. If they figure the crime out before he does, if they question the killer, then they’ll eventually end up at the pond, where Punter’s attempts at covering his tracks are unlikely to be good enough.
Punter doesn’t need to prove the killer guilty, at least not with a judge and a jury. All he has to do is find this person, then make sure he never tells anyone what he did with the body. After that, the girl can be his forever, for as long as he has enough ice.
Punter drives, circling the scenes of the crime: The gas station, the school, her parents’ house, the pond. He drives the circuit over and over, and even with the air conditioning cranked he can’t stop sweating, his face drenched and fevered, his stomach hard with meat. He’s halfway between his house and the gas station when his gas gauge hits empty. He pulls over and sits for a moment, trying to decide, trying to wrap his slow thoughts around his investigation. He opens his notebook, flips through its barely filled pages. He has written down so few facts, so few suspects, and there is so little time left.
In his notebook, he crosses out father, mother, boyfriend. He has only one name left, one suspect he hasn’t disqualified, one other person that Punter knows has seen the girl. He smokes, considers, tries to prove himself right or wrong, gets nowhere.
He opens the door and stands beside the car. Home is in one direction, the gas station the other. Reaching back inside, he leaves the notebook and the binoculars but takes the hunting knife and shoves it into his waistband, untucking his t-shirt to cover the weapon.
What Punter decides, he knows it is only a guess, but he also believes that whenever a detective has a hunch, the best thing to do is to follow it to the end.
It’s not a long walk, but Punter gets tired fast. He sits down to rest, then can’t get back up. He curls into a ball off the weed-choked shoulder, sleeps fitfully as cars pass by, their tires throwing loose gravel over his body. It’s dark out when he wakes. His body is covered with gray dust, and he can’t remember where he is. He’s never walked this road before, and in the dark it’s as alien as a foreign land. He studies the meager footprints in the dust, tracking himself until he knows which way he needs to go.
There are two cars parked behind the gas station, where the drowned girl’s car was before it was towed away. One is a small compact, the other a newer sports car. The sports car’s windows are rolled down, its stereo blaring music Punter doesn’t know or understand, the words too fast for him to hear. He takes a couple steps into the trees beside the road, slows his approach until his gasps for air grow quieter. Leaning against the station are two young men in t-shirts and blue jeans, nearly identical with their purposely mussed hair and scraggly stubble. With them are two girls—one redhead and one brunette—still wearing their school uniforms, looking even younger than Punter knows they are.
The brunette presses her hand against her man’s chest, and the man’s own hand clenches her hip. Punter can see how firmly he’s holding her, how her skirt is bunched between his fingers, exposing several extra inches of thigh.