Additionally, Sergeant Harper was featured in the black-and-white team photo of the Sluder County Sheriff’s Dept. Baseball League on p. 4. She was standing on the right, at the very end, a woman with a sizable crooked nose, and all other features crowded around it as if trying to keep warm on her arctic white face.
Twenty-five, maybe thirty minutes later, I was sitting next to her.
“There’s a mistake with the coroner’s report,” I announced with great conviction, clearing my throat. “The suicide ruling is wrong. You see, I was the person with Hannah Schneider before she walked into the woods. I know she wasn’t going to go kill herself. She told me she was coming back. And she wasn’t lying.”
Sergeant Detective Fayonette Harper narrowed her eyes. With her salt-white skin and bristly lava hair, she was a harsh person to take in at close range; it was a swipe, whack, a kick in the teeth no matter how many times you looked at her. She had broad, doorknobbish shoulders and a way of always moving her torso at the same time as her head, as if she had a stiff neck.
If the Sluder County Sheriff’s Department was the Primates section of any midlevel zoo, Sergeant Harper was obviously the lone monkey who chose to suspend disbelief and work as if her life depended on it. I’d already noticed she narrowed her eyes at everyone and everything, not only at me and A. Boone when he escorted me over to her desk at the back of the room (“All right,” she said with no smile as I sat down, her version of “Hello!”), but she also narrowed her eyes at her TO BE FILED paper tray, the exhausted rubber-and-metal Hand Stress Reliever next to her keyboard, the sign taped above her computer monitor that read, “If you can see, look, and if you can look, observe,” even at the two framed photographs on her desk, one of an elderly woman with cotton-hair and an eyepatch, the other of herself and what I assumed was her husband and daughter; in the photo they bookended her with identical long faces, chestnut hair and obedient teeth.
“And why do you say that,” Sergeant Harper asked. Her voice was dull and low, a combination of rocks and oboe. (And that was how she asked questions, not bothering to hoist up her voice on the end.)
I repeated, for the most part, all that I’d told Officer Coxley in the Sluder County Hospital Emergency Room.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” I said, “or disrespectful to your — your systematized process of upholding the law, which you’ve been doing for years, probably quite effectively, but I don’t think Officer Coxley wrote down the specifics of what I told him. And I’m a very pragmatic person. If I thought there was even the slightest chance of the suicide ruling being true, I’d accept it. But it’s not feasible. First, as I said earlier, someone followed us from the camping ground. I don’t know who it was, but I heard him. We both did. And second, Hannah wasn’t in that kind of mood. She wasn’t depressed — at least, not at that moment. I’ll admit she had her moments of being down. But we all do. And when she left me, she was acting very sane.”
Sergeant Harper hadn’t moved a muscle. I became acutely aware (particularly from the way her eyes gradually drifted away from me before being jerked, by a certain emphatic word of mine, back to my face) she’d seen my type before. Housewives, pharmacists, dental hygienists, banking clerks, undoubtedly they’d all come to plead their cases, too, with their hands clenched, their perfumes rancid, their eyeliner skid-marking their eyes. They sat on the edge of the same uncomfortable red chair I was sitting on (which made woolly nonfigurative prints on the back of one’s bare legs) and they wept, swore on a range of Bibles (Today’s English, King James, Illuminated Family Edition) and graves (Grandma’s, Pa-paw’s, Archie who died young) that, whatever the charges against dear Rodolpho, Lamont, Kanita Kay and Miguel, it was lies, all lies.
“Obviously, I know how I sound,” I tried, attempting to iron the twinges of desperation out of my voice. (I was slowly gathering Sergeant Harper didn’t do twinges of desperation, nor did she do pangs of longing, worries to distraction or hearts broken beyond all possible repair.) “But I’m positive someone killed her. I know it. And I think she deserves for us to find out what really happened.”
Harper thoughtfully scratched the back of her neck (as people do when they vehemently disagree with you), leaned to the left of her desk, pulled open a file cabinet and, narrowing her eyes, removed a green folder an inch thick. The labeled tab, I noted, read #5509–SCHN.
“Well,” she said with a sigh, slapping the file on her lap. “We did account for the person you think you heard.” She flipped through the papers — photocopied, typewritten forms, too small a font for me to make out — until she stopped on one, glancing through it. “Matthew and Mazula Church,” she read slowly, frowning, “George and Julia Varghese, two Yancey County couples, were camping in the area at the same time as you and your peers. They stopped at Sugartop Summit around six, rested for an hour, decided to continue on to Beaver Creek two and a half miles away, arriving around eight-thirty. Matthew Church confirmed he was wandering the area looking for firewood when his flashlight went dead. He managed to make his way back to the site around eleven and they all went to bed.” She looked at me. “Beaver Creek is less than a quarter of a mile from where we found her body.”
“He said he saw Hannah and me?”
She shook her head. “Not exactly. He said he heard deer. But he’d had three beers and I’m not sure he knows what he saw or heard. It’s a wonder he didn’t find himself lost, too. But you probably heard him wandering around, crashing through the brush.”
“Does he wear glasses?”
She thought about this for a moment. “I think he does.” She frowned, scanning the paper. “Yes, here it is. Gold frames. He’s nearsighted.”
Something about the way she’d said that particular detail, nearsighted, made me think she was lying, but when I sat up imperceptibly and tried to glimpse where she was reading, she closed the file quickly and smiled, her thin, chapped lips pulling away from her teeth like tinfoil off a chocolate bar.
“I’ve been camping,” she said. “And the truth is, when you’re up there, you don’t know what you’re seeing. You came across her hanging there, am I right?”
I nodded.
“The brain dreams up things to protect itself. Four out of every five witnesses are completely unreliable. They forget things. Or later on, they think they saw things that weren’t there. It’s witness traumatization. Sure, I’ll consider witness testimony, but in the end I can only consider what I can see in front of me. The facts.”
I didn’t hate her for not believing me. I understood. Because of all the Rodolphos, Lamonts, Kanita Kays and Miguels and other delinquents she caught red-handed wearing dirty underwear, watching cartoons, eating Cocoa Puffs, she assumed she knew everything there was to know about The World. She had seen the bowels, the guts, the innards of Sluder County and thus no one could tell her anything she didn’t already know. I imagined her husband and daughter found this frustrating, but they probably tolerated her, listened to her over a dinner of sliced ham and peas, all silent nods and supportive smiles. She looked at them and loved them, but noticed a chasm between them, too. They lived in Dream Worlds, worlds of homework, appropriate office conduct, unspoiled milk mustaches, but she, Fayonette Harper, lived in Reality. She knew the ins and outs, the tops and bottoms, the darkest, most mildewed corners.
I didn’t know what else to say, how to convince her. I thought about standing up, knocking over the red chair and shouting, “This is a veritable outrage!” as Dad did when he was at a bank filling out a deposit slip and none of the ten pens at the Personal Banking Counter had ink. A middle-aged man always arrived out of the blue, zipping, buttoning, tucking in shirttails, palming wisps of antenna-hair off his forehead.