“Sugar?” he asked.
“Yes please,” said Dr. Walls, who had picked up a newspaper from the kitchen table and was holding it close to her face. She unstuck a ballpoint pen that had been taped to the window frame over the table.
“You’ve got your sugar spoon all ready to go,” Chico said.
David felt he could trust Chico about as much as he could trust any police detective who had made multiple trips to his home. David put the spoon in his robe pocket, set the pot of water on the range, and took the box of tea out from the pantry along with the bag of sugar.
“How have you been feeling?” Chico asked.
Placing the sugar on the counter, David slipped some tea bags into his robe pocket, opened the cabinet, and took down three cups and three saucers. He arranged each cup on a saucer and picked up the bag of sugar. “I’m fine. I went on a walk,” he said, unrolling the bag. Inside, a scrap of paper peeked above the sugar line like a prize in a cereal box. David held the bag close to his chest and dropped his free hand into his pocket.
“Very good,” said Chico. “I was worried you would be cooped up all season.”
“Laying eggs,” Dr. Walls said, rubbing her eyes.
David clutched the sugar spoon in his pocket. “My wife’s car is gone.”
“Yes,” Chico said. “The bank confiscated the vehicle due to nonpayment.” He tapped his shirt pocket and reached inside. “I can give you the number of the appropriate department to contact with your grievances.”
“It doesn’t matter,” David said. “I mean, if that settled the debt, it doesn’t matter. I didn’t like that car.”
Dr. Walls made a mark on the newspaper. “The light in here,” she said.
The water on the stove pimpled with the pending boil. The spoon was cutting a ridge into David’s palm and he loosened his grip and brought it out of his pocket. “Thank you for letting me know about the car,” he said. He used the spoon to dig into the sugar mound, uncovering more of the paper. There was a word on it, a sentence. He turned his body, placing himself between Chico and the bag.
“We’ve been talking to a few coworkers of your wife,” Chico said. “Nobody said anything against you, but they all did have the same issue.”
“An issue.” David dug around the piece of paper, trying to make unnoticeable motions, careful not to rip the page.
“They all mentioned the fact that you’re never around. A few of them joked that they didn’t think you really existed. Only one of them claimed to have even met you.”
“They came over and cut my hair three weeks ago.”
Chico looked at Dr. Walls, who set aside the newspaper and produced a pad of sticky notes. She wrote something on one. The water came to a full boil while David was reaching his hand into the sugar bag to grasp the corner of the paper. He kept his back square between the bag and the detective.
“Who cut your hair?” Chico asked.
The page in the sugar was not a card or a strip, but a full piece of notebook paper. When he had unearthed enough of it, David closed the top edge of the page in his fist and pulled it out whole. The action spilled sugar on the counter, his robe, the floor, the range. The sugar blackened and burned under the pot of boiling water. In one motion, he stuffed the piece of paper into his pocket and leaned down to blow on the smoke rising from the burning sugar. “It was a whole group of them,” he said. He felt the grains of sugar coating his hand and wiped it on his chest. “They seemed like nice girls. Maybe they were students. They were all young.”
“The girls cut your hair.”
David poured water into the cups and spooned sugar into one. Steam blushed the spoon’s edge. “One cut my toenails. I told them all not to bother, but they said they were here to do it as a favor to my wife.” The threat felt warm in his pocket.
“Could I get their names?” Chico asked.
“I don’t know their names,” David said. He reasoned that if he had left the threat in the sugar, it might have dissolved and vanished. It was too important to be ruled by the normal properties of paper. Taking hold of it had been important.
Dr. Walls was beside him. “David, your hair is past your ears.”
“It was longer,” David said, handing her a cup. He touched the fuzzed nape of his neck. “You wouldn’t believe.”
“Where do you keep the tea?” she asked.
David patted the front of his robe, produced one of the bags, and dropped it into her cup. He had the sense that this woman was here to trick him. He didn’t trust the things she said or the way she watched him. He crossed his arms, covering his pockets so that she couldn’t reach in. The woman went back to sit at the table in the seat where guests sat, the one without a place mat. She was trying to be polite. David slipped the other tea bags into the other cups.
“I’m sorry we’re asking so many questions,” Chico said, accepting his tea. “I’m sure you want to get to the bottom of this as much as we do.”
“Important items have special properties,” David said.
“You have been so helpful,” said Dr. Walls.
“I believe I’ve maintained a tradition of cooperation with members of local law enforcement and public works operatives,” he said. “I believe that civilians ought not fear the guiding hand of the state.” He lifted the cup to his lips.
“What was that page you pulled out of the bag of sugar?” Chico asked.
David effused a small amount of bile into his tea.
“Good God,” said Dr. Walls.
“What is your name?” David asked the woman. He wiped his face with his sleeve. “What is your full name?”
The woman’s teacup rattled on its saucer, though she was touching neither cup nor saucer. He saw her leg jiggling the table from underneath. “Marie Walls,” the woman said.
“Marie,” he said. “I’m sorry about all this.”
“It’s all right, David.”
“I haven’t been the same since my wife left.”
“David,” she said.
“I hate to state the obvious,” said Chico, “but you vomited into that cup after I asked you a question.”
“David,” Marie said. Her face elongated before him. Her eyebrows went first, pinching a delicate fold into her forehead. Her eyelids snapped up to follow and she tipped her head back slightly to accommodate the movement. She observed him from behind her cheekbones.
David was holding the paper protectively in his pocket. “It was nothing,” he said. “It was a piece of the bag that fell into the sugar. I felt ashamed to serve the sugar to guests with a piece of the bag loose inside.” He attempted a religious convert kind of gaze with the detective, but Chico’s eye contact was stronger. It was clear that in a past life the detective had been a phone booth beside an empty highway. David felt the page wilting in his warm hand. The sugar stuck to his palm.
From the corner of his eye he could see that Marie was nodding. “Such a good host,” she said.
“A good host,” Chico said. He was making the kind of eye contact employed by officers of the law. He had once been a mechanical crane that hauled beams to the top of a skyscraper.
David tipped his ruined tea out in the sink, took the paper out of his pocket, and laid it on the table. Chico stood beside him and read it aloud:
I WILL STRIP THE BARK FROM A TREE AND MAKE YOU NEW CLOTHES. YOU WILL WEAR THESE CLOTHES AS YOU WANDER THE FOREST FOR FOURTEEN YEARS. YOUR FATHER WILL DIE WATCHING THE SKY AND YOUR MOTHER WILL FORGET YOUR NAME.
Chico stopped reading, but David could tell he was looking over it again, memorizing it. The man had no visible reaction beyond his jaw moving slightly down and to the left behind his closed mouth. It was enough for David to know that he should not have trusted either of his visitors.