He hasn’t thought much about how the girl got into the pond or who put her there. He too assumed murder, but the who or why or when is not something he’s considered until now.
In juvie, the counselors told him nothing he did or didn’t do would have kept his mother alive, which Punter understood just fine. Of course he hadn’t killed his mother. That wasn’t why he was there. What he’d done afterward is why they had locked him away, put him behind bars until he was eighteen.
This time, he’ll do better. He won’t just sit around for months while the police slowly solve the case, while they decide that what he’s done is just as bad. This time, Punter will find the murderer himself, and he will make him pay.
He remembers: missing her, not knowing where she was, not understanding, just wishing she’d come back. Not believing his father, who told him that she’d left them, that she was gone forever. Looking for her all day while his father worked, wandering the road, the fields, the rooms of their small house.
He remembers descending into the basement one step at a time, finding the light switch, waiting for the fluorescent tubes to warm up, stepping off the wood steps, his bare feet aching at the cold of the concrete floor.
He remembers nothing out of the ordinary, everything in its place.
He remembers the olive green refrigerator and the hum of the lights being the only two sounds in the world.
He remembers walking across the concrete and opening the refrigerator door.
More than anything else, he remembers opening his mouth to scream and not being able to. He remembers that scream trapped in his chest like a fist, never to emerge.
When the eleven o’clock news comes on, Punter waits for the story about the girl. He’s ready with his small spiral-bound notebook and his golf pencil stolen from the Keno caddy at the bar. He writes down the sparse information. The reporter recounts what Punter already knows — her name, the school, the abandoned car. And then there’s a clip of the local sheriff, who leans into the reporter’s microphone and says, We’re still investigating, but so far there’s no proof for any of these theories. It’s rare when someone just gets out of their car and disappears on their own, but it does happen. He pauses, listening to an inaudible question, then says, Whatever happened to her, it didn’t happen in the car. There’s no sign of a struggle, no sign of sexual assault or worse.
Punter crosses his legs, uncrosses them. He presses the pencil down onto the paper and writes all of this down.
The next clip shows the girl’s father and mother standing behind a podium at a press conference. They are both dressed in black, stern and sad in dress clothes. The father speaks, saying, If anyone out there knows what happened — if you know where our daughter is — please come forward. We just want to know where she is.
Punter writes down the word father, the words mother and daughter. He looks at his useless telephone. He could tell these strangers what they wanted, but what good would it do them? His own father had known exactly where his mother was, and it hadn’t done either of them any good.
According to the shows on television, the first part of an investigation is always observation, always the gathering of clues. Punter opens the closet where he keeps his hunting gear and takes his binoculars out of their case. He hangs them around his neck and closes the closet door, then reopens it and takes his hunting knife from the top shelf. He doesn’t need it, not yet, but he knows television detectives always carry a handgun to protect themselves. He only owns a rifle and a shotgun, both too long for this kind of work. The knife will have to do.
In the car, he puts the knife in the glove box and the binoculars on the seat. He takes the notebook out of his back pocket and reads the list of locations he’s written down: the school, her parents’ house, the pond, and the gas station. He reads the time when the clerk said he saw her and then writes down another, the time he found her in the pond. The two times are separated by barely a day, so she couldn’t have been in the pond for too long before he found her.
Whatever happened to her, it happened fast.
He thinks that whoever did this must be a local to know about the pond. Punter has never actually seen anyone else there, only the occasional tire tracks, the left-behind beer bottles and cigarette butts from teenage parties. He thinks about the girl, about how he knows she would never consent to him touching her if she were still alive, how she would never let him say the words he’s said, the words he still wants to say. He wonders what he will do when he finds her killer. His investigation could be either an act of vengeance or thanksgiving, but it is still too early to know which.
Punter has been to the girl’s school once before, when the unemployment office sent him there to interview for a janitorial position. He hadn’t been offered the job, couldn’t have passed the background check if he had. His juvenile record was sealed, but there was enough there to warn people, and schools never took any chances. He circles the parking lot twice then parks down the sidewalk from the front entrance, where he’ll be able to watch people going in and out of the school. He resists the urge to use the binoculars, aware that he must control himself in public, that he must not act on every thought. This is why he hasn’t talked in months, why he keeps to himself in his house, hunting and fishing, living off the too-small government disability checks the unemployment counselors helped him apply for.
The counselors, they hadn’t wanted him to see what they’d written down for his disability, but he had. Seeing those words written in neat script didn’t make him angry, just relieved to know. He wasn’t bad anymore, just a person with a disorder, with a trauma. No one had ever believed him about this, especially not the therapists in juvie, who had urged Punter to open up, who had gotten angry when he couldn’t. They didn’t believe him when he said he’d already told them everything he had inside him. Punter knows they were right to disbelieve him, that he did have feelings he didn’t want to let out. When Punter pictures the place where other people keep their feelings, all he sees is his own trapped scream, imagined now as a devouring ball of sound, hungry and hot in his guts.
A bell rings from the building, and soon the doors open, spilling girls out onto the sidewalk and into the parking lot. Punter watches parents get out of other cars to go greet their children. One of these girls might be a friend of the drowned girl, and if he can just talk to her, then he might be able to find out who the drowned girl was. He might be able to make a list of other people he needs to question so that he can solve her murder.
The volume and the increasing number of distinct voices overwhelms Punter. He stares, watching the girls go by in their uniforms. All of them are identically clothed, and so he focuses instead on their faces, on their hair, on the differences between blondes and brunettes and redheads. He watches the girls smiling and rolling their eyes and exchanging embarrassed looks as their mothers step forward to receive them. He watches the breeze blow all that hair around all those made-up faces. He presses himself against the closed door of his Ford, holds himself still.
He closes his eyes and tries to picture the drowned girl here, wearing her own uniform, but he can’t. She is separate now, distinct from these girls and the life they once shared. Punter’s glad. These girls terrify him in a way the drowned girl does not.