Happy Policeman (6 page)

“Seresen, look,” he said patiently. “There’s always a why.”

The Kol sighed. “It makes you unhappy, then. Not my intention. So. If I tell you what you wish to hear, you will go? The light given off at the time of erasure is strong. We have no wish to hurt you.”

“I’ll go. Now tell me.”

“The woman is trapped in the house.” Seresen’s blank gaze moved to the darkened doorway.

DeWitt opened his lips to speak. Cold entered his mouth like a possessing spirit.

“You do not understand,” Seresen said.

DeWitt shook his head.

“There are universes where the woman is attached to place. To what has happened. We must unattach her.”

“Are you trying to tell me the house is haunted?”

“If that is how you must understand it.”

Seresen walked off to the postal van, the other Torku crowding around him. He looked to where DeWitt still stood, frozen by the autumn wind and his own surprise. Then DeWitt went to his squad car, keyed the ignition, and drove off. He’d not gone a hundred yards when there was a blue-white strobe behind him and a quiet crunching sound.

He stepped on the brake and turned. Loretta’s house had vanished.

Chapter Eleven

DEWITT
opened of the door of his darkened house and was struck with the chest-thudding, nonsensical fear that it was vacant. Following a glowing trail of moonlight, he crept into Denny’s room and studied the blanket-covered mound of sleeping child.

Denny was a silent slumberer given to gentle dreams, a child who surrendered so freely to unconsciousness that he sometimes appeared to have died without protest in his sleep.

DeWitt loved his children with the fierceness of despair. There were so many dangers: the heavy tires of school buses; the lake that could turn a tiny body into a pale, bloated sponge; traffic accidents that made unrecognizable splashes of red and splinters of white. Each time DeWitt investigated a child’s death, he would imagine Denny’s face, or Tammy’s, or Linda’s, on the small, dead body, just to see how surviving felt.

He put his hand near Denny’s mouth, close enough to feel the boy’s warm breath.

Realizing that he was hungry, DeWitt tiptoed to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, and indexed the food. He settled on the last of a Sara Lee chocolate cake, which he ate standing in the lighted V of the open refrigerator.

Licking the frosting from his fingers, he made his way to the back bedroom.

Janet was a hard lump under the bedclothes, a granite mountain range with snow cover. He sat in an armchair and pulled off his boots in the dark. The right one made a clunk as it hit the floor. Guiltily, he looked up. There was no answering creak from the mattress.

In stocking feet he rose and took off his belt, eased the top drawer of the dresser open, and by feel took out the old sweatsuit that functioned as his favorite winter pajamas. He laid his jacket, his sweater, and his jeans carefully over the back of the chair.

His wife’s voice was a disembodied thing. “Who killed her?”

Was it you?
Now there was a white form between DeWitt and the headboard. Janet must have sat up and pulled the covers with her.

“I don’t know.”

“What about the kids?”

“I haven’t found them yet.” He had a sudden image of Tammy or Linda missing: he pictured himself, clothes rent in Biblical mourning, wandering through the streets shouting their names.

“Do the Torku know who the murderer is?”

The question made the cake in his stomach churn. What if Janet
had
killed her? And what if the Torku had seen? DeWitt was Seresen’s main liaison. If Seresen knew Janet had killed Loretta, he’d never tell.

“They’re acting like they don’t.”

“Are you coming to bed?”

He was tired but no longer sleepy. A nerve twitched in his neck.

Tammy had been a terrible sleeper in infancy, all body jerks and small cries. Every night DeWitt and Janet had wrestled with her until terror wore her down. He was exhausted like that. “In a minute.”

An angry squeak of bedsprings as Janet flung herself under the blankets. The left side of the bed, his side, was suddenly brighter. She’d taken the covers with her to make an annoyed cocoon.

Holding his keys to prevent them from jingling, he walked barefoot to the carport, flicked on the thirty-watt overhead bulb, and closed the kitchen door. By the woven mat lay Janet’s sneakers, socks inside like nesting hens, Over the canvas sides was a drying scum of mud. He picked the shoes up. In the soles’ ornate grooves were chips of something white, He looked quickly at the Suburban. There was a pebble in the muddy right front tire.

DeWitt put the sneakers back, and pried the pebble from the tread. White, soft caliche, like the gravel that littered Sparrow Point.

He got to his feet. A cardboard box had been partially hidden in a tumble of gardening tools. Leaning over a rake, he peeked inside: Avon packages. A Torku bill of lading, the hue of bubble gum, sat atop three boxes of toothpaste labeled
ETTA WILSON.

DeWitt took his penlight front the squad car’s glove compartment and went to the rear of Janet’s Suburban. He faced the navy blue door in painful indecision.

Impossible. Loretta had been five inches taller, a hundred pounds heavier—Janet couldn’t have killed her. But before DeWitt could sleep, he had to banish all doubt.

The come-along. That might have been enough to get the body into the Suburban. He shone the penlight into the shadowed depths of the carport. The small block and tackle, rusty with disuse, lay atop his workbench where he had left it.

DeWitt opened the rear of the Suburban and swept the pencil-thin beam over the roomy interior. Balls of fluff sat atop the beige carpet like pills on an old sweater.

Janet would have had to catch her victim by surprise. Look here, Loretta, look what I got. The snap of a garrote around Loretta’s neck. No time, no air, to scream. The struggle. Loretta’s shoes whipping back and forth across the carpet. Maybe Loretta didn’t bleed to death. Maybe her throat had been torn to obliterate the marks of strangulation.

But a lot of things could have caused those scuffs. Janet had carted lumber. The boards had shifted.

DeWitt crawled inside, searching on hands and knees. He found a tiny lipstick sample. A toy car. A soda straw still in its paper sheath. He ran his hands along the side, dipped his fingers under the carpet. A penny. A toothpick. A piece of foil.

He brought out the foil and studied it. Heavy grade, blue on one side, silver on the other; the circular indentation of what it had contained.

The instant DeWitt recognized what he was holding, his brain froze. His instinct was to fling it away. He couldn’t. His fingers clenched the condom package as if they had seized a live wire.

He’d take this to the bedroom, wake Janet up, ask her who she was sleeping with. Ask her for God’s sake why. And if she didn’t tell him, he’d shake her so hard, her delicate neck would snap.

No need. He already had the answer. DeWitt always knew that one day he might lose his wife to Foster. And if he confronted her now, she would leave and take the children. He could deal with her affair if she didn’t flaunt it, if only she would stay.

Besides, he had lost Janet a hundred times before: in high school, when Foster had the money to take her to the prom; in college, when he’d had the better car. An MG then. A Corvette now.

In trying to please her, DeWitt had repeatedly made the wrong choices. He sat in the Suburban that Janet hated, that he had bought with such pride, and suddenly he realized how Foster had gotten Loretta’s body to Sparrow Point.

DeWitt took the foil to the rows of garbage bags and gave it an indecent burial, between an empty Doritos package and a wet mass of coffee grounds.

Faintly, far away, someone screamed. DeWitt returned to the house, and in the hall nearly collided with Janet. “I’ll get it,” he snapped, his resentment still raw.

Without a word she turned and went back to bed.

The bedside lamp was on in the girls’ room, and Linda was sitting up, staring at her sister. Tammy’s hands were over her face. Her mouth was open, and an odd, inhuman wail was coming out of her.

“Here, baby. Daddy’s here.” DeWitt sat down and tugged her fingers from her face. The screams became hiccupping sobs. Settling her cheek against his chest, he crooned a worried parent’s song.

From the opposite twin bed, Linda watched.

“Go to sleep, sweetheart.”

She yawned. “Bathroom.” Fumbling her way out of the covers, rubbing her eyes with her small knuckles, Linda padded out.

“I was watching cartoons,” Tammy said.

DeWitt stroked the side of her wet face.

“The cartoons went off. It made me mad.”

Down the darkened, hushed hall came the sound of a flush.

“So in my dream the sirens start and you and Mommy come and we all run out into the street.”

DeWitt’s soothing palm stroked as though anointing her mind with forgetfulness.

Linda came back, lay down, and pulled the bedclothes around her.

“Then we go down into Mrs. Stanley’s storm cellar, only there’s a bog monster there.” In his cradled arms Tammy had become four again, calling the name of the bogeyman she’d known when she was younger, a more innocent form of nightmare. Something to do with dogs, DeWitt remembered, and the four-year-old Tammy had not been able to pronounce the word.

“So we scream and run away, only there’s a bog monster outside, too.”

DeWitt’s hand paused. “What does the monster look like, honey?”

She took a breath punctuated by a shiver. “I don’t know. I can’t see it.”

His hand continued its interrupted stroke. “That’s a scary dream.”

“Degenerate, Daddy. It’s just a degenerate dream.” In his embrace she had somehow aged ten years.
Time flies,
he thought, picturing her as she had been before Bomb Day, before the discovery of boys, before the discovery of favorite new words.

“Well, it sort of happened like that,” he said. “Except there wasn’t a real monster in Mrs. Stanley’s cellar.” Only the Stanleys, DeWitt’s family, and Foster.

DeWitt had ended up in the elementary school basement with about seventy others. When he tried to leave, Bo, who DeWitt had hired despite a troubling record, forced him back at gunpoint, saving the others from the radiation they thought lurked outside.

DeWitt spent twenty-four hours wondering where his family was, listening to the frightened silence around him, and the hiss of a radio tuned to dead air. It was nice that Tammy had included him in her dream. When bog monsters come, fathers should be there.

“When we came out, we saw the Torku,” DeWitt said. “They aren’t monsters, are they?”

Tammy laughed, but fear clung to her. “No, Daddy. They’re sort of funny.”

“It’s a scary dream because what happened was scary. So when you dream about it, you make up monsters.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. Then yawned.

He helped her lie back on the bed. She pushed her face into the pillow, and he rubbed her back the way he had when she was very small. “I love you, punkin.”

“Love you too,” she replied drowsily.

“Are you all right now?”

But she was already asleep.

He got up, turned off the light, and went to the front door. Opening it, he caught the cold breeze on his face. As if in protest to his act, the central heat came on with a click and a low rumble of air.

The yard was iced with moonlight. Down the street the lights were on at the Fergusons’. Maybe they, too, were afraid of the dark.

For there
had
been a monster in the elementary school basement. DeWitt supposed it had been in the Stanleys’ cellar as well. A monster of terror, fed by darkness. Its smell was the smell of vomit, and its voice was the utter silence of seventy people.

He’d been so afraid.

There were some things about that basement he would never forget. How he ran from one huddled group to another, calling Janet’s name. The disbelief he felt seeing the gun in Bo’s hand, muzzle aimed at his chest. How Granger kept thumbing the black dial on the transistor radio, like a Buddhist twirling a prayer wheel. Granger searched all night for a station, as if something were wrong with the radio and not with the world.

And when they could no longer endure their own fear, they crawled out into the normal sunlight, expecting death from radiation. The Torku were waiting.

DeWitt closed the door and walked down the hall to the bedroom. He lay down and passed his palm over the covered form of his wife.

Not her fault. Not anyone’s, really. He should have been beside her in that cellar. “I love you,” he said. And despite everything, he meant it.

Chapter Twelve

“Jimmy?” Dee Dee called.

Schoen disentangled himself from the covers. “Jimmy, honey? What is it?”

He sat on the side of the bed, the carpet tickling his toes.

In the cobalt rectangle of the window he could see, framed between the trees, a swatch of starry sky.

“Honey. Don’t let the Torku worry you like that. Them coming up at altar call. It doesn’t mean a thing.”

But nothing was meaningless in God’s world.
Not a sparrow falls .
. . Everything was ordered, everything preordained. The hairs on his head were as numbered as his days.

“Tonight in church you weren’t looking at me. You’re supposed to look at me during the sermon. Did you hear a word I said?”

“Well, honey, of course I did. I always listen, you know that. I was thinking, that’s all.”

“Don’t think! The congregation sees you looking around like you’re wondering what to make for dinner. God has called you as my helpmate. We’re married for a reason. I can’t save the town by myself.”

A creak of bedsprings as she sat up. “Oh now, Jimmy. I help. Don’t I help? I run the cake sales. I organize the visiting. I—”

“And what in God’s name have you done with your hair?”

Dee Dee was a black, silent form next to him. He couldn’t tell whether she was shocked wordless or simply confused.

“Oh, this?” she asked from the dark. “The frosting? Mary Dixon did it for me. She colors her hair, and she always looks so good. She said it makes me look sophisticated. Isn’t that just the nicest thing you’ve ever heard? When I looked in the mirror, I thought I looked really sophisticated too, like I was from New York or something.”

“Vanity is woman’s trap. Rinse it out tomorrow. Do whatever you have to do to look like yourself again.”

“Oh honey, don’t you get tired of the same things over and over again? Always Grape-Nuts and dry toast for breakfast. Roast every Sunday. Steak every Saturday night. And you never want to try a new salad dressing. French. Every supper, we have to have French. I could buy creamy garlic or ranch. Wouldn’t creamy garlic be fun? And I’d like to change the curtains. Get some pretty throw pillows. It’d be nice to have some bright colors–“

“Be thankful for what you have. God puts a roof over your head. Food on the table.”

“Well, I get food from the store really, and of course it
does
come from the Torku, even though I figure, well, God would have to have a hand in it somehow, wouldn’t He? I could make curtains. Terra cotta and turquoise, don’t you think? I think turquoise and terra cotta are just the most sophisticated colors. Mary Dixon says if we don’t change, we get old too quick. And it seems to me she’s right. Why, all the old people I know–“

“Don’t raise your voice with me.” He got to his feet.

“Jimmy?”

“Be quiet. You’ll wake the children.”

He strode to the living room and opened the front door, for the night air to clear his mind. For the wind to tell him why, after fifteen years of marriage, his wife wouldn’t obey him anymore.

Shivering, he walked across the porch to his telescope and peered through the eyepiece. Hubert Foster’s bedroom window came into sharp focus. The room was dark.

Schoen straightened and sighed. Pulling a lawn chair up to the telescope, he sat down, his vigilant eyes scanning the neighborhood at the bottom of the hill.

Granger was in his workshop. Doc was drinking again in his study. The Albertsons were sitting down to a late-night snack of chocolate cake.

The night was still and hushed, most sin abed. Distance was containable. It was a soothing perspective–seeing things at arm’s length, the way God sees. He felt as though the figures in the telescope lay cupped in his sheltering hand.