The Detective's Garden (13 page)

They were out of Afghanistan within five and a half hours.
Almost nobody but Floyd got hurt. Aside from the jittery fear,
the whole thing felt like a celebration. They’d shown they could
strike in the heart of the country. This was just the beginning.
There was a lot more to come.

CHARLIE BASIN DROVE
slowly on the road that
shadowed the Maine coast. The tide was out pretty far. Seagulls
swooped and strutted in the sand. Sharply angled rocks bul
warked the coastal edge of the road against erosion. He pushed
on the brakes and the car slowed. The waves out there were
white-tipped. A lobster boat bobbed. He came to a stop in the
road. Far to the south, a lighthouse winked on and off, on and
off. He called his wife and she answered, “Hello?”

“Maybe we ought to retire up here.”

“Maine? You’re already there?”

“I’m in the middle of this little coastal road.” A white Volk
swagen stopped behind him and honked. Its engine revved up.
It pulled into the opposite lane and passed. “We could get a
little house,” he said. “A boat.”

He could hear her breathe. She was getting a cold. Her lips
clicked as they parted. “I talked to Charlene.”

“She okay?”

“She’s doing better.” Rosamund sniffed harshly. “She thinks
the therapist is helping.”

“Helping with what?” Charlie asked.

“She’s angry.”

“She’s always been angry. Ever since she was little.”

“She’s angry with you, Charlie.”

“What for?” he said. Her breath rasped on the line. He said,
“Christ, Ros. What was it? Did I yell at her too much? Was I
gone too often? Did I like the house too quiet? Didn’t I talk
to her enough? Maybe I made her feel like she didn’t do things
well? I did, didn’t I? Was it my fault that she was prone to
breaking things?”

“You’re a good dad, Charlie. I think kids just get mad at
their parents.”

“For no reason?”

“For not enough of a reason.”

“Is she pissed at you?” Charlie asked.

“Maybe you should come home,” Rosamund said. “You
could pass this case on to somebody else. If you wanted.”

“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “I’d just be put on something
else. Maybe something worse.”

“All right,” his wife said, “you want to move up there to
Maine, I’ll go with you.”

Charlie sat in the car for a few minutes before he started the
engine. He drove to Clarisse Parish’s house. She invited him
in. She made chamomile tea. They sat at an oak table in Clar
isse’s dining room, which overlooked the ocean. A wall of mist
rolled from above the water. Wind licked at the windows; the
yellowed grass bent inland.

Charlie Basin had one leg folded beneath him. He cupped
the teacup between his hands and held its warmth. He smiled.
“Thanks for talking to me,” he said. “I appreciate it.”

“I’m afraid I won’t be too much help,” Clarisse said. Her hair
was swept up in a bun and held together with two dark sticks.
She wore a light green shirt with a broad collar beneath a zip
pered wool sweater. Her hands were finely veined. “I should tell
you,” she said, “that I liked them very much.”

“Who?”

“All of them. The kids. Dominick, too.” Her hands gripped
the arms of the high-backed chair.

“It’s very beautiful here, you know,” Charlie said. He looked
out the large windows. Indiscriminate shapes scrolled around
in the mist.

“Most of the families aren’t in yet. They don’t come up until
June or July.”

“You like the quiet?” Charlie said.

“I do.”

“Would you mind showing me the apartment where they
stayed?”

“Of course not.” Clarisse began to push upward with her arms.

“In a second,” Charlie said. “Can I finish my tea?” She looked
at him blankly. He touched his cheek with his fingers. He said,
“Would you mind if we sat here for another minute?”

Her slippered foot tapped against the pine floor. She said,
“You’re not what I expected.”

“What were you expecting?”

“I don’t know,” Clarisse said. “Someone younger? Somebody
in a hurry, I suppose.” She gestured at his navy-blue jacket with
a pinkie. “The suit, I expected.”

“I used to be younger,” he said.

“Have you finished your tea?”

“Just about.”

“I have something I think you’d like to see.”

“I’m interested.”

“Just follow me,” said Clarisse. She stood, straightening her
long pale skirt. They walked through the sea-blue hall toward
the bathroom and she turned her head around to speak to Char
lie. “I got to know them quite well,” she said. She cleared her
throat. “It’s my opinion that they are very good people.”

He leaned his hand against the bathroom doorjamb. The
walls were a dark green. A great porcelain tub with brass han
dles sat in the middle of the room.

Clarisse stood next to the tub. She reached behind her and
flicked on the vanity lights. She pointed into the tub. “Look,”
she said.

Charlie leaned forward and peered down over his nose.
Smooth white porcelain. On the bottom salt spilled in thick
words. He squinted.

Woodpile, he read, Sylphine, Basin.

“It’s my name,” he said. “That’s odd. Who did it?”

THE RAIN BEGAN
the longest night that Dominick
could remember. It washed the dust from the new truck. It
knocked on the steel roof of the cab. It came hard and, mixed
with air and bits of ice, hammered against the hood of the truck
and bounced off in unpredictable arcs. They drove down a road
that none of them could name. Water flooded the windshield
and the wipers, set on high, couldn’t keep the glass clear. The
brake lights on the station wagon ahead lit up. Its hazard lights
began to flash and it pulled to the side of the road.

“Whoa,” King said, “can you see?” Clarke sat tight-lipped.

Dominick said, “I can’t see much.” He pulled onto a side
road in a town and parked. The rain fell all night and as they
drifted in and out of sleep, scenes seemed to play themselves
out before them in the downpour. At some point, Dominick
threw a single blanket across all three of them. King took off
her shoes and socks. They shared a can of pineapple rings and
half a loaf of bread. When the electricity failed, every town
light went out at once and total darkness settled down on them.
The kind of dark in which they could not see one another. The
kind of dark in which they couldn’t see their own hands and
the wind screamed with a young woman’s voice and buffeted
the truck hard enough to rock it back and forth on its shocks.
They looked out. Dominick saw things he shouldn’t have seen.
Dark shapes. A woman beside the window with hands clasped
around her throat. Swollen-bellied beasts running out of flood
ed gutters. The inky triangular masts of great vessels.

They passed the night listening to the white noise of the rain
and, when they’d heard enough, they finally slept soundly.

When King woke, she felt grit at her feet. The sun cracked
the low clouds open. The lawns of the houses around them were
flooded. Water rushed in the gutters. King looked down at her
toes on the floor mat.

Splitlog, read the words in salt, Rallentando, Doll.

Clarke rubbed the words out with the sole of his boot. Dom
inick started the truck and they drove to Illinois in a single
stretch. They traveled through Pennsylvania and Ohio and In
diana, staying mostly on the back roads, the old highways, so
that a drive that might have taken ten hours took twenty-four.
When they got out of the truck in the cement lot of a strip
mall overlit with sodium lamps, they groped forward toward
a pay phone like the undead. The three of them looked dirty
and mean. When the children stood across the lot from their
father, a woman walked out of a Dollar General and stopped in
front of them. She was dyed blonde and smelled of more than
one soap. “You look lost,” she said. She tilted her head to one
side and half smiled. A single dimple pocked her right cheek.
“You okay?”

King took a step toward her and Clarke caught his sister by
the shoulder. Clarke asked, “This is Illinois, right?”

“It is,” the woman said.

“What town are we in?”

“Rockford.” The half-smile widened. Her teeth were too
white and too straight.

“We’re not lost,” Clarke said and he pointed across the lot
to Dominick standing beside the booth with the phone to his
ear. With his shoulders hunched, their father waved his hand
broadly.

The woman said, “My name’s Rachael.” She lowered her
voice. She pushed an overly blonde curl from her cheek. “Do
you need any help?” she said.

“Why would we need help?” Clarke asked.

On the far side of the parking lot, Dominick used the phone
book to find the number for Saint Anthony’s Hospital. He di
aled the front desk, and a woman answered, and he said, “Hello,
I’ve got to get a message to Annie Sawyer.”

“She’s in Critical Care. I’ll put you through.”

“Wait, wait,” Dominick said. “I don’t have time. Can you
take a message?”

“A message?”

“Please give her this phone number.” He read the number
from the pay phone. “815-967-0255.”

“What’s your name, sir?”

“Just tell her that she’ll know who’s calling.” He hung up
and waited. Across the lot, by the entrance to the Dollar Gen
eral, a thin blonde woman in a thin white leather coat talked to
his kids. He waved his arm again. What did she want? What
business did she have with them? Didn’t she understand that
some people preferred to be left alone?

When the phone began to ring, Dominick lifted the hand
set. The receiver touched his ear as softly as a human finger.
“Annie?” he said.

“Oh, Jesus!”

“I’ve got the kids with me,” he said.

“Are you all right?”

“Fine,” he said. “I’m fine.”

“How are they?”

“Okay. They could use some help.”

“People’ve been calling, Dom. The police have been stop
ping out front. You can’t come here or to the house.”

“Who’s been there?”

“I’ve got to get back to work.”

“Where do the kids and I go, Annie?” he said. “We need a
place to stay for a while.”

“Have you got something to write with? Take down this
address.”

“I’m ready.”

“Twenty-six hundred Will James Road. In New Milford. It’s
a trailer home on the Kishwaukee River. It belongs to friends.
Nobody’s there. The key is under a flower pot. I’ve got to go.”

They bought a map of Rockford at the gas station on
the fringe of the strip mall. They found the trailer parked
in the middle of a ring of willows beside the Kishwaukee
River. No other homes were visible but they had driven
past mailboxes planted at the edges of gravel driveways. A
path of flat stones led from the road over a slight hill to the
single-wide trailer. They walked around the building in a
wide circle. The grass at their feet had begun to green. The
outermost reaches of the willows’ branches were limned
with furry buds shaped like arrowheads. The willows at
the rear of the home gave way to a stretch of pines and cot
tonwoods that led to an island near their side of the river.
They walked to the mud banks and looked around. The
sun shone off the surface. The water ran clean and clear.
Dark roots rose out of the ground and arched into the silt
at the bottom of the river. There was a small sandy area,
a boat launch, and an overturned green canoe. The water
deepened quickly as it fell away from the bank and the
stones at the bottom were rounded and the size of a child’s
fist and colored white and red and brown and black. On the
far side of the river, a great red-billed sandpiper pulled its
beak from the sand and its head moved toward them with
the jerky time-stop motion built into the musculature of
birds.