The Detective's Garden (14 page)

The soft burble of the river was a nice sound. They stood on
the bank and the sunlight caught the top half of them so that
their skin warmed. They felt good. This was a nice place.

“Look at that,” King said. “There!” She pointed.

A tiny bluish figure was swept down current, pulled under,
and then pushed to the surface again. Dark curls on a doll-sized
head. A pair of stiff legs rose up and then sank as though pulled
from underneath. The doll swept into the channel between the
bank and the island and then eddied before sticking against a
fork-shaped root. Clarke and King trammeled through the poi
son ivy. They approached the bank of the river and bent down.
River snakes darted toward deeper water. They caught the fig
ure up. It was plastic. Its blue dress had been ripped across the
top, exposing hard smooth breasts.

Dominick went up to the trailer and found the key on the
steps beneath a dead chrysanthemum. Inside, King put the doll
on the kitchen table. They all sat. Clarke put his head on the
table. Neither King nor Clarke moved. Nobody spoke. Domi
nick reached out and put the tips of his fingers on King’s wrist.

When they heard wheels turn into the gravel drive, all three
Sawyer bodies tensed. Dominick’s sister, Annie, drove up in a
hardtop Jeep. A lean-muscled rangy woman with short dark
hair and a husky voice, she moved with the powerful grace of
her brother, of someone riding on top of a bull. “Kids!” she
yelled and the three of them swarmed outside and Annie caught
Clarke around the waist. “Jesus,” Annie said, “you’ve grown.”

She turned to King and picked her up. King pressed her face
against the skin of Annie’s jacket and breathed in. She closed
her eyes. In King’s ear, Annie said, “You look so much like your
mom.” She touched her niece’s dark head and said, “What’ve
you done to your hair?” King opened her eyes and squeezed her
aunt tight. Over King’s shoulder, Annie stared at Dominick on
the cement steps. His hair had been cropped close and his jaw
was deeply stubbled.

“You see a way out of this mess you’re in?” Annie said. The
wind pushed a bit of her bangs into one of her eyes.

The kids hung their heads. Dominick looked at her, eyes level.

“Let’s go inside,” Annie said. “Let’s talk about it.”

“ROSAMUND?” CHARLIE BASIN
spoke
quietly into his phone. He sat in a red-cushioned seat inside
Gate 9 at the Portland International Jetport. He could see his
reflection in dozens of panels of dark glass.

“Where are you, Charlie?” Rosamund asked. Her voice was
nasal and congested.

“At the airport in Portland, Maine.”

“Where are you going?”

“To Rockford, Illinois,” he said. “You’ve got a cold?”

“It’s terrible. Maybe it’s better you’re out of the house,” she
said. “I talked to Charlene’s doctor today. She mentioned her
being released from the hospital. She talked about the need for
a support network.”

“She’s got a support network.”

Rosamund said, “Maybe you ought to come home.”

“I don’t know, Ros,” Charlie said. “She doesn’t want to see me.”

“Yes, she does.”

Over the line Charlie could hear Rosamund walking through
their house. “I’m not sure I want to see her,” he said.

“Of course you do,” she said.

A European voice announced that Charlie’s flight had
begun boarding. He felt comfortable holding the phone to
his ear without saying anything, imagining that she was
listening.

“What’s in Rockford, Illinois?” Rosamund asked.

“This guy’s sister,” said Charlie. “It’s time for me to talk to
her in person.” He got up and stood in line to board the plane.
“You should have seen this house where they were staying up
here in Maine. Pretty nice place.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, sounding as though she was wiping her
nose.

“Somebody wrote our last name in salt,” Charlie said. “In
the bathtub.”

“What for? That sounds dangerous.”

“I have no idea,” Charlie said. “I don’t even know how they
know my name.”

“Who do you think did it?”

“I’m not sure. One of the kids, maybe.”

INSIDE THE TRAILER
home, Dominick stood in
front of a cracked windowpane. He looked down the long lane
of grass, past the scattered trees, to the river where King stood
with a filthy blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Her jeans
were rolled to her knees and her feet were in the shallows. The
setting sun hung in the pale fleshy sky. The pool between the
bank and the island was shaped like an arrowhead. The light
was so dim that what Dominick could see was leached of col
or and nearly two-dimensional so that King looked indivisible
from the pool behind her. She looked thin and frail. His young
er child. A dreamer. So much like her mother.

By her feet, water snakes slithered into the mouths of the
dens between roots on the bank. King waded back to shore and
shook as she flipped the old brown canoe. She stepped into the
boat and, still standing, pushed at the muddy bank with the
flat edge of a rotting wooden paddle. The boat wobbled out
into the river, caught the current, and turned downstream.

Dominick leaned forward and the tip of his nose pushed
against the cold window glass. From this distance, the lowering
sun caught the skin of the water on fire. King’s mouth moved
and then stopped. She made a sweeping gesture with her hands.
Her arms moved back and forth across one another, palm out,
as though signaling no, no, no. Her mouth stretched open and
then closed as though she was shouting at someone.

From the trailer window, the crack in the pane split the scene
in two. Watching his daughter struggle, Dominick wanted to
rush outside into the river. But he stopped and steadied him
self against the wall. He sweat. What could he do to help his
daughter when she faced a problem he couldn’t see?

At dusk, Clarke wandered off the property by himself. He
passed the border of the grass and into the greenery’s bric-a-
brac, where the monkey vines led into the branches of the trees.
There was a lot of garbage. Tin cans. A rusted pie plate. Plastic
gallon milk jugs. Constellations of burned cigarettes scattered
along the edges of a thin path. He counted his steps and esti
mated that he’d walked a quarter mile before the trail flushed
out into a dead lawn beneath a huge tree house. A staircase
spiraled up the trunk of an old oak. Multiple roofs peaked up
there. Asphalt shingles. The river ran behind the structure. The
lawn was sloped and rectangular and on the far end sat a pink
double-wide.

A cold wind caught at the cuffs of Clarke’s pants and at the
nape of his jacket and trickled inward along his chest toward
his stomach. In the tree house, an orange point of light burned
fiercely and then dulled. He stared until the point of light came
again and he waited, unmoving, to let his eyes adjust to the
shadows. Inside the tree house, he made out a figure, a woman,
he thought, lifting the fire toward her mouth.

“You can come up here if you want.” It was a woman’s voice,
or a girl’s, and she spoke quietly.

He looked at the double-wide. A light shone in the northern
window.

“Come on up,” the girl said, “or fuck off.”

“I’m coming,” he said.

The ascent was like vertigo. He wound up the stairs, each
plank of wood burrowed into the trunk, and the whole rickety
affair gave off the sweet woodsy smell of sawdust. He stopped
at the top landing, where a girl slumped in the doorjamb of
the small house. She wore an unzipped sweatshirt that folded
around her and a cigarette dangled from her right hand like
something forgotten. Her nose was pierced with a small silver
star. The tip of the nose was overly bulbous and reddened as
though it’d been recently rubbed, and a spread of freckles on
her cheeks called attention to her pale skin. She wore a thin
flowered dress through which Clarke could see the splayed
angularity of her pelvic bones and the sheeted mounds of her
skinny knees. She looked at him and put the cigarette to her
mouth.

“Who built this?” Clarke asked.

“What, this?” she said. Her leg rose and the yellow flowers
straightened out of their folds and draped against the shape of
her leg. It hovered there, her leg, and then she let it fall so that
her heel knocked against the wood floor. “My uncle, he built
it.” She was quiet and he waited her out, unmoving. She said,
“He was like a giant fat child.”

“He lives in the pink house?”

“I live in that pink house.”

“With your uncle?”

“No, he’s dead.” She brought the cigarette to her lips again.
He watched her mouth open and her tongue flick out and her
full lips purse together and wrinkle up. Everything she did was
a little too slow.

The pink screen door on the pink house screamed open. A
large woman in a beige housedress stuck her head out of the
door. “Elsie!”

“Who’s that?” Clarke said. Again too much time passed, and
the woman yelled again, and Clarke said, “She sounds like a
band saw.”

The girl crossed her arms over her chest. “We haven’t been
properly introduced,” she said,

“I’m Clarke,” Clarke said.

“Get the hell down from there!” the heavy woman yelled
from the door.

“Elsie.” She held out her hand in front of her so that Clarke
had to squat and fold his arm to take her hand.

The woman yelled, “Who the fuck is that boy up there with
you?” Then she let the door bang shut.

Elsie’s hand pulsed gently around his. She let her free arm
fall out to her side so that her hand rested like a cup against
the wood. Her chest arched forward until her breasts pushed
against her flowered dress. Her eyes were an intense blue pep
pered with black filigree. “You want to kiss me?” she said.

“I guess so,” Clarke said. “I do.”

“You want to kiss me,” she said, “you’d kiss anybody.”

“No,” he said. “I like that you move so slow.”

“I don’t always move this slow.”

“I didn’t always want to kiss you.”

She put a finger to her lips. “Down here,” she said. He bent
forward at the waist and she stretched upward and their mouths
met wetly in the middle. Her breath tasted charred and bitter.
Their lips pressed together, and hers opened greedily and wide,
and her mouth was hot and smoky and fouled.

When they broke apart, Clarke asked, “What’s wrong with
your aunt?”

“For starters,” said Elsie, “she’s a bitch.”

“Does she always yell like that?”

“Since my uncle died,” Elsie said, “sometimes she won’t talk
for a few days.”

“Why doesn’t she come up here?”

“She’s too fat.”

“I guess so,” Clarke said.

“I don’t really want to live here,” Elsie said. “Do you?”

“I don’t live here,” he said. “We’re just staying for a lit
tle while over there.” He pointed. Their bodies were pressed
against one another. He could feel her breathing quickly.

“Where’re you from?” Elsie said.

“Pennsylvania.”

“What’s it like there?”

“I don’t know. There are more hills. How old are you?”

“I’m seventeen.” Her gaze was as flat as the Illinois country
side. “How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

“You’re jailbait,” she said. She touched his lips with her fin
gers. “My dad went to jail a few years ago.”

“What for?”

“He hurt my mom. Bad. It wasn’t an accident.”