“You know,” she said smoothly, turning to look at me. “None of us could figure it out.”
I stared back, unaccountably afraid.
“Why you? Why Hannah wanted to bring you into our little group. I’m not trying to be rude, but from the beginning none of us could stand you. We called you ‘pigeon.’ Because that’s how you acted. This grimy pigeon clucking around everyone’s feet desperate for crumbs. But she loved you. ‘Blue’s great. You have to give her a chance. She’s had a tough life.’ Yeah, right. It didn’t make sense. No, you have some weirdly dreamy home life with your virtuoso dad you blather on about like he’s the fucking second coming. But no. Everyone said I was mean and judgmental. Well, now it’s too late and she’s dead.”
She saw the look on my face and did a Ha. The Ones Making an Exit had to have a Ha, a truncated laugh that brought to mind videogame Game Overs and typewriter dings.
“Guess that’s life’s little joke,” she said.
At the end of the hall, she pushed open the door and was illuminated for a second by a puddle of yellow light, and her shadow was tossed, elongated and thin, in my direction like a piece of towrope, but then she stepped nimbly through the doorway, and the door slammed and I was left with the carnations. (“The only flower that, when given to someone, is only marginally superior to giving dead ones,” Dad said.)
The Big Sleep
The next day, Saturday, April 10, The Stockton Observer finally published a terse article on the coroner’s findings.
LOCAL WOMAN’S HANGING DEATH RULED SUICIDE
The death of Burns County woman, Hannah Louise Schneider, 44, was ruled a suicide by Sluder County Coroner’s Bureau yesterday afternoon. Cause of death was determined to be “asphyxiation due to hanging.”
“There was no evidence whatsoever of foul play,” said Sluder County Coroner Joe Villaverde yesterday.
Villaverde said there was also no evidence of drugs, alcohol or other toxins in Schneider’s body and the manner of death was consistent with suicide.
“I’m basing my ruling on the autopsy report as well as the evidence found by the sheriff’s department and state legislators,” Villaverde said.
Schneider’s body was found March 28 hanging from a tree by an electrical cord in the Schull’s Cove area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. She had accompanied six local high school students on a camping trip. The six students were recovered without injury.
“This can’t have happened,” I said.
Dad looked at me, concerned. “My dear—”
“I’m going to be sick. I can’t take this anymore.”
“They just might be right. One never knows with—”
“They’re not right!” I screamed.
Dad agreed to take me to the Sluder County Sheriff’s Department. It was astonishing he actually consented to my outlandish, fitfully proposed demand. I assumed he felt sorry for me, noticed how pale I looked of late, how I could barely eat, didn’t sleep, how I sprinted downstairs like a Beat junkie looking for a fix to catch First News at Five, how I reacted to all questions, both ordinary and existential, with a five-second transatlantic delay. He was also familiar with the quotation, “When your child is seized by an idea with the zeal of a fundamentalist Bible salesman from Indiana, stand in his or her way at your own risk” (see Rearing the Gifted Child, Pennebaker, 1998,p. 232).
We found the address on the Internet, climbed into the Volvo and drove for forty-five minutes to the station, located west of Stockton in the tiny mountain town of Bicksville. It was a bright, chipper day, and the flat, sagging police building sat like an exhausted hitchhiker on the side of the road.
“Do you want to wait in the car?” I asked Dad.
“No, no, I’ll come in.” He held up D. F. Young’s Narcissism and Culture Jamming the U.S.A. (1986). “I’ve brought some light reading.”
“Dad?”
“Yes, sweet.”
“Let me do the talking.”
“Oh. By all means.”
The Sluder County Sheriff’s Department was a single ransacked room that resembled the Primates section of any midlevel zoo. All efforts, within budget, had been made to lead the ten or twelve captive policemen to believe they were in their natural environment (bleating phones, cinder-block walls painted taupe, dead plants with leaves like tendriled bows on birthday presents, chunky filing cabinets lined up in the back like football players, Department star patches barnacling their clay brown shirts). They were given a restricted diet (coffee, donuts) and plenty of toys to play with (swivel chairs, radio consoles, guns, a ceiling-suspended TV hiccupping the Weather Channel). And yet there remained the unmistakable whiff of artificiality to this habitat, of apathy, of everyone simply going through the motions of being a law enforcer, as struggling for survival was no longer an immediate concern. “Hey, Bill!” shouted one of the men pacing in the very back by the water cooler. He held up a magazine. “Check out the new Dakota.” “Already did,” said Bill, coma-staring at his blue computer screen.
Dad, with a look of unmitigated distaste, sat down in the only seat available in the front, next to a fat and faded girl wearing a tinseled halter top, no shoes, her hair so coarsely bleached it resembled Cheetos. I made my way to the man behind the front desk flipping through a magazine and chewing a red coffee stirrer.
“I’d like to speak to your chief investigator, if he or she is available,” I said.
“Huh?”
He had a flat red face, which, discounting his yellowed toothbrush mustache, recalled the bottom of a large foot. He was bald. The topmost part of his head was grease-spattered with fat freckles. The name tag under his police badge read A. BOONE.
“The person who investigated the death of Hannah Schneider,” I said. “The St. Gallway teacher.”
A. Boone continued to chew the coffee stirrer and stared at me. He was what Dad commonly called a “power distender,” a person who seized the moment in which he/she possessed a marginal amount of power and brutally rationed it so it lasted an unreasonable amount of time.
“What’s your business with Sergeant Harper?”
“There’s been a grave error in judgment regarding the case,” I said with authority. It was essentially the same thing Chief Inspector Ranulph Curry announced at the beginning of Chapter 79 in The Way of the Moth (Lavelle, 1911).
A. Boone took my name and told me to have a seat. I sat down in Dad’s chair and Dad stood next to a dying plant. With a look of faux-interest and admiration (raised eyebrow, mouth turned down) he handed me a copy of The Sheriff’s Starr Bulletin, Winter, Vol. 2, Issue 1, which he detached from the bulletin board behind him, along with a small sticker of an American Eagle crying an iridescent tear (America, United We Stand). In the section of the newsletter on p. 2, “Activity Report” (between Famous/Infamous and Bet You Didn’t Know…) I read that Sergeant Detective Fayonette Harper, for the last five months, had made the greatest number of Fall Arrests in the entire department. Detective Harper’s Fall Captures included Rodolpho Debruhl, WANTED for murder; Lamont Grimsell, WANTED for robbery; Kanita Kay Davis, WANTED for welfare fraud, theft and receiving stolen property; and Miguel Rumolo Cruz, WANTED for rape and criminal deviant conduct. (In contrast, Officer Gerard Coxley had the lowest number of Fall Arrests: only Jeremiah Golden, WANTED for unauthorized use of a motor vehicle.)