“Christabel Walsh? I’m a teacher’s aide?” She started to say where she worked, as if the name of the school would carry any weight, but her voice got choked in her throat and she couldn’t go on.
And now one of the other cops, the one who’d been in the bedroom, going through her personal things, clomped into the room and announced, “All clear back there. Nobody here but these two.”
“You go out there and check that yard, every blade of grass, hear me? Fence lines, all the fields around here. Get the dogs on it.”
“Yes, sir.” And that cop was gone, out the door and into the yard where lights were at war and voices stalked around the corners.
It was then, just then, in the interval before the chief cop turned back to her, that she began to understand. “Is this about Adam?” she asked, and why she asked she didn’t know — it was just some snaky intuition that made her heart hammer even faster and the fish go sour on her stomach.
At first the cop questioned them both together, but then, after he’d asked Christabel what sort of person Adam was and she’d said, “I don’t know, regular, I guess, maybe a little weird — he’s a nudist, I mean, sometimes, anyway,” the cop called one of his men over and said, “Why don’t you take her out in the kitchen and see what she knows. I’ll take care of Sara here myself.”
What he did then, with the lights flashing outside and cops all over the place as if this was some kind of war zone, was plunk himself down in the chair Christabel had just vacated, then scoot it over so that he was right there in her face, their knees practically touching. “You know, Sara — is it all right if I call you Sara? You know, I don’t really think we have to get upset here or anything — or take this down to the station either. I just want to ask you a couple questions. About Adam.”
“What did he do?”
“Why don’t you just let me ask the questions, okay? This doesn’t have to be hard. It’s not going to be hard. As long as you cooperate, you understand me?”
What she felt then, under threat, duress and coercion like nobody could believe, was just the faintest breath of release: they hadn’t come for her, they didn’t care about her or her dog either. All they wanted was Adam. But why? What had he done? Sitting there knee-to-knee with the cop and the fire snapping and Christabel shunted away to the kitchen with another cop, she tried to picture him, and what she saw was his body greased with sweat, his arms, his bare arms, and the knife at his side. And the gun. The gun.
“You saw him last, when? Two nights ago, is that right? Wednesday?”
She just nodded. She flashed on that day in the car, the day she’d met him, when he’d gone ballistic over the sight of a cop car going in the opposite direction. But what had he done? They wouldn’t bring a thousand cops around to swarm all over her if it wasn’t the worst, but what was the worst? What was the worst thing you could do? She felt her scalp prickle. She could barely breathe.
“And he left Thursday morning, early, before you were up?”
“Yes.”
“He say where he was going?”
“I don’t know, the woods. I think he was, like, living out there.”
“What about his rifle, did he take his rifle, did he have it here? With him, I mean?”
“He always had it.”
The cop was silent a minute, as if mulling this over, Adam and his rifle. Then he leaned in nearer so that she could see his eyes up close, the little dance of his pupils. “You took him to the hospital, why was that?”
“He asked me to. He had the — the runs. Giardia.” Kutya had been still, but now, in the far corner of the room, he began struggling again, though the cop there held him firmly down. “This isn’t right,” she said. “I don’t have to talk to you. And I’m not going to say one more word until you tell me what this is all about.”
Another silence, longer this time. The way he was watching her creeped her out, as if he was some kind of god looking down on the littlest thing in his creation, a bug or bacterium, when in fact he was just another tool of the system. “You want to get cute, I can arrest you right this minute.”
She didn’t want to push it, but she couldn’t help herself, because this was just sick, the whole slimy police-state Heil Hitler crap that had brought Jerry Kane down and was bringing her down too. “For what?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “Accessory to murder. How does that sound?”
Everything seemed to stop right then, the stomping, the hollering, the banging of her heart and the whimpering of the dog, replaced by a long slither of white noise hissing in her ears. What the cop told her was that Adam had shot somebody while he was on his sojourn out there in the woods, shot him and left him for dead, and that everybody had thought the Mexicans had done it, but it wasn’t the Mexicans at all. It was Adam. Proof positive. Adam had shot somebody and then he’d got sick and come to her, to her bed, and she’d washed his clothes for him and let him make love to her and he never even so much as mentioned it. As if people were nothing, as if you could just go around shooting and then drink bourbon and cook beef stew over a campfire as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world. She didn’t know what to say. She was in shock.
“And don’t pretend you don’t know where he is — you had a relationship with him. For what, two, three months now?”
“I told you,” she said, “he’s in the woods.”
“You getting smart with me? Because if you want to get smart, we can continue this down at the station.”
“No,” she said, “really. I don’t know where he is, I mean, other than that. I told you, he left here yesterday morning, and I haven’t seen him since. Or heard from him. Really.”
“And yet you took him to the hospital for medication.”
“Yes, but I didn’t—”
“That makes you an accessory right there.”
“I didn’t know—”
“You didn’t know he killed an unarmed man in cold blood?”
She shook her head.
“Or today. What about today? You know he killed another man today, right this afternoon? While you were what, knitting?”
It was all too much. She didn’t have to listen to this — whoever said she had to listen to this? He was a liar. He was just trying to get to her because he was the criminal, not Adam. “I don’t knit,” she said. “And I have no contract with you — how many times do I have to tell you people?” Kutya squirmed. He let out a low growl and the lights flashed in the yard. She shot a furious glance round the room, the cops, the poor dog — Christabel, where was Christabel? “You know what you are?” she said.
He just sat there, his lips zipped tight, trying to burn his eyes right through her.
“You’re just an actor, that’s all. Somebody in a costume. Like you’re dressed up for Halloween. And you know something else? I’m not into trick-or-treating.”
34
IN THE END, THEY must have believed her — and Christabel too, Christabel who by that point was scared sober and wearing a face like something she’d picked up off the floor — because eventually they took their muddy boots and clanking belts and double-barreled shotguns and faded back into the night, but not without taking two plastic bags of what they called evidence with them and leaving a patrol car just down the street with its lights off and two cops inside to see if she was going to run out into the woods, find her way to Adam and somehow warn him off. Which she would have, if she could. Because it was all lies and if you had to pick sides here she knew which one she was on. Adam never hurt anybody. And even if he did, even if it was true, whoever it was probably had it coming.