Trixie whirled around to find Detective Bartholemew standing in the front yard. He looked like he was freezing, like he'd been waiting for a while. “You scared me,” she said. The detective nodded down the block. “I see you and your friend are on speaking terms again.”
“Yeah. It's nice.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “Did you, um, come to talk to my dad?”
“I already did that. I was sort of hoping to talk to you.” Trixie glanced at the window upstairs, glowing yellow, where she knew her father was still working. She wished he was here with her right now. He'd know what to say. And what not to. You had to talk to a policeman if he wanted to talk to you, didn't you? If you said no, he'd immediately know there was something wrong.
“Okay,” Trixie said, “but could we go inside?” It was weird, leading the detective into their mudroom. She felt like he was boring holes in the back of her shirt with his eyes,
like he knew something about Trixie she didn't know about herself yet.
“How are you feeling?” Detective Bartholemew asked. Trixie instinctively pulled her sleeves lower, concealing the fresh cuts she'd made in the shower. “I'm okay.”
Detective Bartholemew sat down on a teak bench. “What happened to Jason ... don't blame yourself.” | Tears sprang into her throat, dark and bitter.
“You know, you remind me a little of my daughter,” the detective said. He smiled at Trixie, then shook his head. “Being here... it didn't come easy to her, either.”
Trixie ducked her head. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
She pictured Jason's ghost: blued by the moon, bloody and distant. “Did it hurt? How he died?”
“No. It was fast.”
He was lying - Trixie knew it. She hadn't realized that a policeman might lie. He didn't say anything else for such a long time that Trixie looked up at him, and that's when she realized he was waiting for her to do just that. “Is there something you want to tell me, Trixie? About Friday night?”
Once, Trixie had been in the car when her father ran over a squirrel. It came out of nowhere, and the instant before impact Trixie had
seen the animal look at them with the understanding that there was
» nowhere left to go. “What about Friday night?”
“Something happened between your father and Jason, didn't it.”
“No.”
The detective sighed. “Trixie, we already know about the fight.”
Had her father told him? Trixie glanced up at the ceiling, wishing
she were Superman, with X-ray vision, or able to communicate telepathically like Professor Xavier from the X-Men. She wanted to
know what her father had said; she wanted to know what she should
say. “Jason started it,” she explained, and once she began, the words tumbled out of her. “He grabbed me. My father pulled him away. They fought with each other.”
“What happened after that?”
“Jason ran away . . . and we went home.” She hesitated. “Were we the last people to see him . . . you know . . . alive?”
“That's what I'm trying to figure out.”
It was possible that this was why Jason kept coming back to her now. Because if Trixie could still see him, then maybe he wouldn't be gone. She looked up at Bartholemew. “My father was just protecting me. You know that, right?”
“Yeah,” the detective said. “Yeah, I do.” Trixie waited for him to say something else, but Bartholemew seemed to be in a different place, staring at the bricks on the floor of the mudroom. “Are we . . . done?” Detective Bartholemew nodded. “Yes. Thanks, Trixie. I'll let myself out.”
Trixie didn't know what else there was to say, so she opened the door that led into the house and closed it behind her, leaving the de tective alone in the mudroom. She was halfway upstairs when Bartholemew reached for her father's boot, stamped the sole on an in1 pad he'd taken from his pocket, and pressed it firmly onto a piece of blank white paper.
* * *
The medical examiner called while Bartholemew was waiting for his order at the drive-through window of a Burger King. “Merry Christmas,” Anjali said when he answered his cell phone.
“You're about a week early,” Bartholemew said. The girl in the window blinked at him. “Ketchup mustard salt or pepper?”
“No, thanks.”
“I haven't even told you what I've got yet,” Anjali said.
“I hope it's a big fat evidentiary link to murder.” In the window of the drive-through, the girl adjusted her paper hat. “That's five thirty-three.”
“Where are you?” Anjali said.
Bartholemew opened his wallet and took out a twenty. “Clogging my arteries.”
“We started to clean off the body,” the medical examiner explained. “The dirt on the victim's hand? Turns out it's not dirt after all. It's blood.”
“So he scraped his hand, trying to hold on?” The girl at the counter leaned closer and snapped the bill out of his fingers.
"I can ABO type a dried stain at the lab, and this was O
positive. Jason was B positive.“ She let that sink in. ”It was blood, Mike, but not Jason Underhill's."
Bartholemew's mind started to race: If they had the murderer's blood, they could link a suspect to the crime. It would be easy enough to get a DNA sample from Daniel Stone when he was least expecting it - saliva taken from an envelope he'd sealed or from the rim of a soda can tossed into the trash.
Stone's boot print hadn't been a match, but Bartholemew didn't see that as any particular deterrent to an arrest. There had been hundreds of folks in town Friday night; the question wasn't who had walked across the bridge, but who hadn't. Blood evidence, on the other hand, could be damning. Bartholemew pictured Daniel Stone on the icy bridge, going after Jason Underhill. He imagined Jason trying to hold him off. He thought back to his conversation with Daniel, the Band-Aid covering the knuckles of his right hand.
“I'm on my way,” Bartholemew told Anjali.
“Hey,” the Burger King girl said. “What about your food?”
“I'm not hungry,” he said, pulling out of the pickup line.
“Don't you want change?” the girl called. All the time, Mike thought, but he didn't answer.
* * *
“Daddy,” Trixie asked, as she was elbow-deep in the sink washing dishes, “what were you like as a kid?” Her father did not glance up from the kitchen table he was wiping with a sponge. “Nothing like you are,” he said. “Thank God.”
Trixie knew her father didn't like to talk about growing up in Alaska, but she was starting to think that she needed to hear about it. She had been under the impression that her dad was of the typical suburban genus and species: the kind of guy who mowed his lawn every Saturday and read the sports section before the others, the type of father who was gentle enough to hold a monarch butterfly between his cupped palms so that Trixie could count the black spots on its wings. But that easygoing man would never have been capable of punching Jason repeatedly, even as Jason was bleeding and begging him to stop. That man had never been so consumed by fury that it twisted his features, made him unfamiliar.
Trixie decided the answer must be in the part of her father's life that he never wanted to share. Maybe Daniel Stone had been a whole different person, one who vanished just as Trixie arrived. She wondered if this was true of every parent: if, prior to having children, they all used to be someone else.
“What do you mean?” she asked. “Why am I so different from you?”
“It was a compliment. I was a pain in the ass at your age.”
“How?” Trixie asked.
She could see him weighing his words for an example he was willing to offer out loud. “Well, for one thing, I ran away a lot.”
Trixie had run away once, when she was little. She'd walked around the block twice and finally settled in the cool blue shadow beneath a hedgerow in her own backyard. Her father found her there less than an hour later. She expected him to get angry, but instead, he'd crawled underneath the bushes and sat beside her. He plucked a dozen of the red berries he was always telling her never to