And why didn’t you ever say so, once he became a person of interest?
And if the boy had brought it up himself, that day we watched the sheriff interviewing him—what would you have said then?
But that wasn’t what Halsey was asking; this wasn’t the time for those questions.
“Report what?” Moran said finally, and Halsey said, “Why didn’t you report a girl falling through the ice, Ed? Or a girl drowning, for all you knew?” And then he watched as this question landed too, the few seconds Moran took to process it, before looking away and shaking his head again.
“I don’t know, Wayne. I don’t remember a whole lot after that cast on the side of my head. Except waking up on the ice half-froze to death—I remember that.”
Halsey watched him. Then he said, “You want to come down to the station with me, Ed?”
Moran took a breath and let it out. “No, Wayne, I do not. What I want is for you to move your vehicle so I can be on my way already.”
Halsey said nothing. He nodded, then he said, “In that case, Ed, I’m going to have to ask you to step out of this vehicle now, with your hands in the air.”
Moran didn’t move. “Don’t be an idiot, Wayne. You got no probable cause.”
“I believe I do.” He drew his gun and held it one-handed at his side. Then with his free hand he lifted the latch and swung the door open. “Now show me your hands and get up out of the car for me, Ed.”
Moran sat watching him. He looked again toward the Tahoe, the girl. He looked at the deputies. Then he put his hands in the air and stepped out of his cruiser.
“This won’t stick, Wayne,” he said, turning, lacing his hands behind his head.
“Spread your feet for me, Ed,” Halsey said. Moran did so, and Halsey took the laced fingers in his grip and holstered his gun and relieved Moran of his. He reached back with the .45 and one of his deputies stepped forward to take it from him. He drew Moran’s right wrist down and snapped on the cuff, then brought the left down and did the same, and when Moran was cuffed he turned him around and unbuckled his utility belt and handed that off to a deputy too.
“You won’t be able to hold me,” Moran said.
“We’ll see,” Halsey said. He asked Deputy Moser to get the rifle from the back seat and mind his fingerprints and the deputy did so, carrying the rifle by the barrel to his own cruiser and laying it with care on the back seat.
Moran looked once more at the Tahoe, and Halsey looked too. The girl sat there as before. She had not put her head down but instead had watched it all. Halsey held Moran just above the elbow and he made him stand there so he could see the girl. So the girl could see him. But the girl’s eyes were not on Moran, they were on him.
“Do you know what you’re doing here, Wayne?”
“I’m busting you, Ed.”
“You are killing me, Wayne. Some little girl tells you a story and you arrest me like this, in public, for the whole world to see? Small town like this. You’re killing me, Wayne. Just killing me.”
He led Moran by the elbow toward Deputy Lowell’s cruiser. “Edward Moran,” Halsey said, “you might think about shutting that mouth of yours and waiting for your lawyer.”
Throughout it all Moran had not looked once at the two young men standing in the bay of the garage, the mechanics, but he looked at them now—he looked at the two of them, and then he looked at Marky Young alone, and Marky Young did not look away. He kept his eyes on Moran’s, and even after the lady deputy took Moran from Sheriff Halsey and made him get into the back of her cruiser, placing her hand on the top of his head, on his hair, and even after the cruiser door was shut Moran continued to stare at Marky through the glass, and Marky did not look away. And after they were all gone—Moran and Sheriff Halsey and his deputies and the girl Audrey Sutter—Marky and Jeff went out into the cold and helped Mr. Wabash hook up Moran’s cruiser to the wrecker and they were standing in the cold yet when Mr. Wabash drove out of the lot, hauling the Escape behind him on his way to the sheriff’s impound lot.
64
THE NURSE WHO called her name and took her into the examination room was a young woman with dark eyes and an accent that made you think of islands, of great flowered plants and a turquoise sea. She’d never seen the beautiful nurse before and she wondered if she’d ever seen such a face her whole life before going south to school. As if such a face could not survive up here in so much whiteness, the way a parrot, or any other colorful thing, could not.
The nurse took her temperature and blood pressure and wrote these things down and then said, “Come with me, baby,” and left her in the care of the radiologist, himself a young man whom she’d never seen before either, and she realized then that she didn’t recognize any of the staff on this floor, and that none recognized her, or gave any indication that they did—as if all of that, her long stay and her long walk on the last day to see her father behind the curtain, had happened in some other hospital, or some dream of a hospital. Which it hadn’t, of course, and when she saw Dr. Breece again for the first time since that day, the doctor floating into the examination room with the beautiful nurse behind him, she had to swallow down her heart, but after that she was all right.
“How are you, Audrey?” He’d let his hair grow out just a little. He smelled as before of hand sanitizer and mint.
“I’m fine, thank you. How are you?”
“Never better.” He looked at her, and she held his eyes. “Any trouble with the cast?” he said.
“Other than getting it wet, no.”
He didn’t ask how it happened, getting it wet, but instead simply took the cast in his hands as if taking it from her, as if relieving her of its care. Turning it this way and that and her heart skipping, not because she thought he knew how it had been used and was looking for signs of that day on the river—that violence, those details had not been in the news, and certainly not her name; Sheriff Halsey had kept his promise about that—but because she thought he knew she’d intentionally not covered the cast when she’d taken her shower the night before.
The doctor slipped two fingers between the padding and her forearm and slipped them out again and rubbed them with his thumb. He returned the cast to her and sat down to study the x-ray image on his computer screen, then checked her chart again, his lips pursed.
“Five weeks is cutting it close,” he said. “But it was a clean break and the x-ray looks good. You’re a good healer.”
“Thanks,” she said. The feeling of his fingers where he’d slipped them in under the cast remained in a distracting way.
He watched her. Then he said, “Well, you drove all the way up here. Shall we cut that sucker off?”
He uncapped a Sharpie and drew a line from one end of the cast to the other on both sides, top and underside, and the beautiful nurse handed him the cutter—it looked like one of the power tools from her father’s garage, the ones she’d thought about using herself—and the doctor explained how the blade did not spin but oscillated and therefore could not cut her skin, and then he thumbed it on and the little machine filled the room with its furious noise. He dipped the blade into the line he’d drawn and the vibrations traveled through her bones up to her teeth. He followed the line precisely end to end before turning the cast, and when both lines were cut the nurse handed him a large instrument like a pair of pliers and he inserted the instrument into the underside seam he’d made and moved along the seam, parting it until the cast cracked open like a clamshell and he slipped the entire thing from her arm. The nurse handed him scissors and he ran them under the damp padding, snipping, until that fell away too and her arm lay naked and pink and strange. As if it were not the one she remembered but had grown inside the cast into some other kind of arm.