The Detective's Garden (34 page)

A half-mile from the home he’d built, Dominick pulled
the Continental onto an old logging road and stopped. He
yanked the duffel bags from the car and walked with his son
and Elsie back to Flint Valley Road. Loosestrife trailed along
the roadside. They stepped on dark green shoots and smelled
wild onion. From the road, Dominick looked back to see that
the Lincoln was fully hidden, and then they moved through the
shadowed woods and followed the splintered deer trails toward
the A-frame.

Dominick slowed when the trees thinned, the cabin just
visible beyond the crush of trunks. He set the duffels on the
ground and knelt beside them. Low black mushrooms crushed
under his knees and dark clouds of spores drifted. He pulled
out the Springfield Armory rifle and the Beretta pistol. He
slipped into the tactical vest.

Clarke watched him. Elsie touched the small of Clarke’s
back with the palm of her hand.

“I’ll take a gun,” Clarke said to his father.

“No, you won’t.”

“I’m going to get her back, Dad.”

“I know you are,” Dominick said. “But way before you made
that commitment, I made one to you.” He dropped the duffel
and moved forward and wedged himself behind a mossy boul
der. “I won’t see you hurt.” Light slanted against the A-frame.
The red tulips his wife had planted were in bloom beneath the
conifers. He studied the house, the doorway, the woodpile and
the gravel drive, and the darkened empty woods. “They’re not
here yet,” he said.

“This was your house?” Elsie whispered.

“Dad built it.”

“Maybe they’re not coming,” Elsie said. “Maybe we should
get out of here.”

Dominick balanced the rifle in one hand. He glanced up at
the boughs of the trees curled protectively over them. He sight
ed the rifle over the boulder toward his own house. “We wait
here,” he said. “We stay quiet.”

“That’s all we do?” Clarke asked.

“When they come, I’ll get King back.”

“What about us?” Clarke said.

“You stay here. You stay safe.”

Charlie Basin stood just behind King as she knocked on
Jon Howland’s door. The girl’s knuckles were small and indent
ed and reddish. The wood door sounded solid. When it opened,
they smelled mildew and old leather. Jon Howland wore a red
shirt with three buttons at the neck. He put a hand to his kind
low-slung face, the skin falling in curves as gentle as melted
wax. Then he said, “Hey, girl. Didn’t expect you back so soon.”

“This is Charlie.” King pointed with her thumb. “He
brought me.”

“Was that nice of him?”

“I asked him to.”

The wind blew and the long grass behind them bent over
and then straightened. Howland said, “You want to come in?”
He looked at the suited man with his lean face and deep wrin
kles beside his mouth.

“I don’t think so,” King said. “Can I have the stuff you got
from the woodpile?”

“Sure, sure,” said Howland. “Hold on.”

Howland came back with a glass perfume vial, a red-beaded
crucifix, a photo of King and her mother and a box turtle, and
a linen handkerchief. He passed them to King. Charlie Basin
stepped up to see.

King unscrewed the glass vial of perfume and put her nose
near the tip. Her mom touched the back of her neck and called
her pumpkin. King put the crucifix and the photo into the
pockets of her jeans. Then she unfolded the handkerchief.
White going on yellow. It had something written on it. She
looked at the pale marks she saw on the linen. A rough map of
their property took shape—the kind of thing her mother used
in treasure hunts. There was the hollow pine. The cabin and
the woodpile. The field and the river. A small star beside the
plum tree.

Howland put his hand on King’s shoulder. He asked, “Is it
worth anything to you?”

King turned her face up toward Jon Howland and some
thing passed between them, some silent commiseration. An
amalgamated memory of King standing before Howland on
that same threshold in a hundred other moments, a figure on
a smaller scale. Sometimes towing a sled and wearing a tas
seled wool hat. Sometimes in a raincoat and galoshes, swallows
wheeling in the air behind her. Sometimes there of her own
volition, sometimes sent by her mother and clutching a plas
tic-wrapped loaf of zucchini bread or raspberry cobbler whose
feel and smell traveled along the corkscrew of time until it
found Jon Howland and King together again on the stoop, car
rying a waft of sadness so heavy that both of them blinked their
eyes to clear the blur.

“I’m ready to go,” King said to Charlie Basin. “Will you take
me to my house now?”

Behind the boulder in the wood, Elsie wrapped her arms
around her chest. Her feet would not stay still. She looked from
Clarke to Dominick and to Clarke again. “I can’t do this,” she
said. “I’ve got to leave.”

From behind the boulder, Dominick watched his house. He
heard the engine first, the low even rumble of a V8. A dark car
with darkened windows. Sunlight fracturing off chrome hub
caps and wing mirrors. Dominick couldn’t make out much past
the windows but pale shadows, a dark human smear in the driv
er’s seat. He believed his daughter was the sense of movement
in the rear. He felt the others stir beside him. “Stay down,”
he said, motioning with a flat palm. “Don’t move.” The black
truck ground against the gravel drive that led to the east side
of the A-frame. The sky was an overheated almost rabid col
or of blue. Dominick’s chest tightened. The A-frame shivered.
Something dark massed in the windows, something that gath
ered, then poured through like syrup and withered the hya
cinths in their beds and sank into the ground and bled outward
toward him, running underground in the bedrock, until he felt
it move upward through the soles of his feet and sweep into
his capillaries and veins and intestines and heart. Dominick
breathed deeply and his chest pulled taut beneath the tactical
vest. He knew that this was his daughter come home. He knew
that, in a flickering moment, they’d be together again and that
there was nothing at all that could not be forgiven.

The gravel crunched under the Suburban’s wheels like
sand between teeth. Charlie Basin pushed the brake pedal and
the truck pulled to a stop. He slung one arm over the leather
passenger seat and turned back toward King. “You’re home,”
he said. “How’s it feel? Good?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry, kid.”

“It’s okay.”

Charlie killed the ignition and the car shuddered once and
stilled. The air conditioner cut out and the fan spun a moment
longer. The sun cut in hot rectangles through the windows,
making shapes in their laps.

“How’re you going to help me find your father?” Charlie
asked.

“It’s going to be easy.”

“How so?”

“He’s already here.”

Clarke hunkered behind the boulder with one arm around
Elsie. Blades of grass sprouted in patches around his shoes.
Why were there little holes in the dirt? What lived in there?
What was his father doing above him? Why was he always, al
ways below? And why did the thought of losing Elsie pale next
to the thought of losing his sister? He heard a metallic click.
His father’s gun against rock? Elsie hunched beside him, her
spine curled forward, her cheeks wet. She was looking at him.
Something wet hung from her rounded nose. Her hair shone in
the overly bright light.

From near the house, he heard a car door creak open and
then slam shut. His father shifted above him, standing so that
his head rose just above the top of the rock. Looking up, Clarke
could see the length of his father’s blue jeans and the long black
tactical vest and the bottom of his father’s beard and the sharp
underside of his nose. His father’s leg pressed against him,
heavy and solid and muscled, and then pulled away.

“No,” Charlie Basin said, “he can’t be here. No.” He
scanned the house as he spoke, the field, the line of trees. He
pulled his phone from his pocket and called the field office
for backup. Then he opened the door and stepped out into the
sheer white light. He stood behind the door and shaded his eyes
with one hand. Right away he started to sweat. He reached up
and pulled his tie loose. He was conscious of the weight of his
pistol on his hip. He surveyed the grassy field and the derelict
apple orchard and the single plum tree. Deciduous trees mixed
with great chunks of stone. There’s no one here, he thought. No
one. The girl hadn’t moved from the backseat. Charlie put his
hand near his gun, cocked his head to one side, and listened.
The wind pushed warm air. A grackle scrambled out of a nest in
the cabin’s eave. The spring peepers sounded like sleigh bells. A
very distant gunshot, small-bore, probably a hunting rifle. The
crack and squeal of the rear door of the Suburban.

Charlie turned back. The girl slid out of the seat backward,
stepped onto the running board and then to white gravel. Skin
ny, doe-eyed little kid. Her dyed hair so dark. What could he
offer? What could he say to make any of this better?

King’s eyes darted up his legs and past his right hip, away
toward the low dark wood and the boulders among them. Her
eyelids did not widen. Her eyebrows stayed flat. One cheek
crinkled upward so that her left eye squinted and Charlie Ba
sin heard it then, or felt it, a rhythmic thud. Something heavy
pounding the earth. He spun on one heel and his hand slid
down to his belt, to the worn familiar FBI-cant holster that
cradled his gun.

When the Suburban’s rear door opened and the dark-suit
ed FBI agent turned toward King, Dominick slung the rifle
over his shoulder and ran forward. He hadn’t wanted to take
the shot. Why not? Because he needed to spare his children’s
eyes? Because he wanted the chase to end? Because he wanted
to be as close to this as he could? Regardless of reason, his feet
hit the ground hard. Each step was an explosion that propelled
him forward and sent tufted grass and dirt and dangling white
root arcing back toward his older son. King stood on the grav
el. She wore dark unfaded blue jeans and an orange shirt. The
FBI man turned too quickly, reached for his gun with a smooth
unfumbling hand, and began levering it up to level. Dominick
knew it wouldn’t matter. He could feel it. He’d thrown himself
forward too hard to be cut off now. Who was this man who had
bought his daughter new clothes? There were only ten yards
between them. The FBI agent did not waver. The gun was up,
flat between then, so that they were connected and the muzzle
yawned and spat fire. Dominick felt the soft bite low against
the vest, and he didn’t even slow.

KING HEARD THE
gunshot. Her eyes were watering
hard enough that the dark suit in front of her was a blur. She
held on to the cold metal of the car door. She wanted to hurt
her father for his sins, she also wanted to save him. She tucked
herself into a ball and hurled herself against the back of Charlie
Basin’s knees. A dark marble of a girl who rolled across the
gravel and disassembled into a torso and a pile of limbs. Charlie
folded at the knees and rose again.

But her father was there, a human avalanche hitting Charlie
head-on, knocking him sprawling. Her father pressed forward
against the falling man, reached out and hauled him up by the
arm and throat and tossed him against the log house so that the
frame trembled.

Charlie slid down the logs like a child’s doll. Overhead, a
flock of migratory birds. The thinnest wisps of clouds like cot
ton batting stretched to webbing. The wide arc of sky a pain
fully bright blue. Is this what it was to die? To hear your blood
like a great cataract? To have lost authority over the vessel of
your limbs? To have your diaphragm spasm, your mouth gasp
like a dying fish? To feel the earth rise up and gently cup your
back? Charlie struggled to breathe. He saw the woods and the
fields. King running through tall grass toward a plum tree.
The great backlit figure of a giant man reaching down for him,
slapping his face, putting his wet lips too close to his ear.