The Detective's Garden (7 page)

A penlight. A sheaf of bills in a silver money clip. A rattle
made of apple wood. A half-filled canteen. A woman’s golden
ring.

Their father woke as they slipped into the truck. His leath
er satchel lay back at his feet. He put the truck in gear and the
boredom of the road set in quickly. They were uncomfortable,
squeezed together on the seat. King sat in the middle. They
had odd conversations. For King’s sake, Clarke talked about
curiosities.

“I’ve seen a picture of a girl who was born with three legs,”
Clarke said. “Do you think she could walk?”

“Wow!” King said. “Three legs?” Her voice was hushed, al
most reverent.

“She couldn’t walk,” Dominick said. “No way.”

King asked, “How tall is the tallest person in the world?”

“I’m not sure,” Dominick said.

“Eight foot something,” Clarke said.

“Hey,” Dominick said, “you think somebody could be eaten
by bees?”

“I don’t know,” King said.

“They can’t,” Clarke said.

“Maybe they can,” said Dominick. “I don’t know.”

“Come on, Dad.”

“Remember all the bees around the house?”

“The mud daubers,” Clarke said. “You had me clean nests
off the porch.”

King, whose eyes were closed, did not open them. She did
not move her head. She said, “There are wasps down by the
river.”

“I mean the honeybees in the clover,” Dominick said. “And
the carpenter bees drilling perfect little holes in the wood? And
the hive in the crotch of the plum tree?”

King’s head rose from the back of the seat. “Mom hid things
by the plum tree,” she said. “And in the attic and the hollow
pine and under the woodpile, too. That was fun.”

The drive from New York to Maine took eight hours. The
Ford hummed along the road like a hungry insect. The sun
traveled in an arc overhead. Dominick turned the dial on the
radio until he found news programs, or weather advisories, or
bluegrass. The lines on the road spun out eternally before them,
winking on and off in a kind of promise that movement might
unite what had been broken. They drove through farmland, and
wooded country, and small towns that hunched inward against
time and decay. They drove alongside a river and startled her
ons and egrets into low desperate flight. They saw a dark plume
of smoke circling into the sky, distant but blowing their way.
They stopped and bought turkey sandwiches and boiled eggs
from rundown convenience stores. They drove through entire
states and read the signs aloud. Connecticut. Massachusetts.
New Hampshire.

Clarke considered his father’s profile, its hard and defined
edges, and the way that his sister’s body conformed against her
father’s shape, the way she looked up at their dad, the ancient
need gathering like sand in her eyes.

They drove past suited firefighters running from an explo
sion in a cement fire-training house. They saw four men brace
their feet against the recoil of a giant hose. Three of the men at
the hose listened to the shouts of the fourth and Dominick re
membered his sergeant stripes and the responsibility for others’
lives, and the smell of goat flesh and tire fires. He felt again that
he should go back to Afghanistan, back to his privates, Benny
Ward and DeJesus and Floyd. Back to swapping MREs and the
sun and the heat and all the privations like the long walks with
pack mules and being tired and being sore and being shot at
by snipers in low mud buildings until they all flopped and hid
behind their dying mules, passing a canteen of hot water and
shouting into the radio until the Apaches came riding in with
their chain guns.

As they drove north, the early spring receded into late win
ter. The trees hardened into a dull gray-brown. The crocuses re
treated back into bulbs in the earth. The temperature dropped.
They began to pass remnants of heavy snows pushed into dark
gray piles on the sides of roads and parking lots. Protean clouds
swirled above. Though the road remained clear, the thinnest
film of snow appeared on the ground and then thickened grad
ually as they progressed, as if ice grew like mold upon the
ground. They pushed forward and Dominick kept his eye on
the rearview mirror. He drove the speed limit. They passed a
police car hidden behind an overpass and they all froze beneath
the air that lashed like a giant tongue around the truck’s cab.
They rode on. They waited. But the police lights did not turn
on. The chase, which they feared as they feared the inevitable,
did not begin.

PULLING INTO HIS
driveway in the D.C. suburbs,
Charlie Basin leaned over the passenger seat to pull his gun
from the glove compartment. It was late. Maybe he shouldn’t
have come home. In the front window, his wife stood in a white
gown. Startlingly beautiful and eerily thin. Pale skin and dark
lips looking down toward something that he could not see. Her
nightgown was gauzy and her skin seemed pinkish and trans
lucent. How could someone so important to him seem even
momentarily insubstantial? He put a hand against the passen
ger seat to push himself back up. He wanted to trace the three
lines that trailed from the corners of her eyes. He wanted to
run his fingers over her lips. He wanted to take her chin in his
hand but he sat in the car with the gun in his lap. The moon
behind the roof caught at the edges of things. On the peak of
his roof sat a nighthawk with its wings stretched open. It was
large. Its head turned toward him and its neck moved in small
increments, like something mechanical. Its beak was hooked
at its tip.

Charlie Basin called his boss, Andrew C. Fry, who had clear
ly been deep asleep. “I’m back in D.C.,” Charlie said. “Domi
nick Sawyer has split. He’s likely out of Pennsylvania entirely.
I put out the APB.”

“You sure he’s gone?”

Charlie shrugged. Then he said, “Sure enough.”

“He killed the local sheriff?”

“Looks that way. He’s driving a truck. I think he had his kids
in the cab when he killed the cop.”

“Jesus. You tell me what you need to go after him, Charlie.”

The lights went out in the house and Charlie opened his car
door. He felt like a stranger walking across his own lawn. He
went inside, undressed, and stood on the chilly blue tile of the
shower stall. He let the cold water run over his face. He hadn’t
lived the family life that he had once wanted to live. Did he
care? How often did a father need to speak to his children?
How close did he need to be? Charlie dried himself on a plush
Turkish towel, folded it, and hung it back on the bronze warm
ing rack. He put on no clothes, held the shivers off by force of
will. He turned the doorknob gently and peeked in the bed
room at how his wife’s dark hair was overwhelmed by the white
down comforter. He slipped in beside her, tired but waiting.
The blanket seemed to float above him. The bed worked on
him like an oven. He held still, moving toward her only after
the deep, aching cold had left his body alone.

JUST INTO MAINE
they saw a sign advertising Wells
Beach and pulled off the highway. Dominick directed the pickup
toward an ocean they couldn’t see. They cracked their windows and
smelled bacteria and fish and salt and decay. The kids had their feet
resting on the dash. Clarke breathed deeply. “It kind of stinks,” he
said. Dominick smiled, his hands tight against the wheel.

A small road ran parallel to the beach. On either side sat houses.
Older square clapboard and cedar-shingle homes sat among out
sized modern renditions with more windows than walls. Visible
between houses, a cement retaining wall and then a long stretch of
wet sand and the gray water lapping at the beach. Ahead, distant
rock faces topped by hunkered pines. The truck bumped along. A
red fox, quick and furtive, ran from a salt-sprayed rose shrub and
stopped in the middle of the road and raised its head to stare them
down. Dominick slowed the Ford and the fox’s hair bristled; its
eyes were huge and dark and wet. They all felt the great trapped
wildness in its gaze, its curiosity about their naked skins. Its dark-
lipped humor at their ungainly two-legged shapes. Each creature’s
perpetual foreignness to the next.

They pulled into an empty parking lot outside a small
sewage-treatment plant, the low beige buildings lumped to
gether behind a chain-link fence. The Ford’s doors squealed
open and crashed shut. They all took their shoes off and rolled
their pant legs. They followed a small sanded trail. The wet
air pushed across their faces. Beyond the houses, the beach
opened up on either side. A frail mist hung over the sand.
A light winked on in the house just behind them but they
didn’t see another person anywhere on the beach. At the wa
ter’s edge, King and Clarke stopped. King stripped off her
shirt and pants and stood there in her panties and her thin,
angular childhood. A door of the house behind them opened
and two dark-coated women came to stand on the retaining
wall. One of them raised a pair of binoculars to her eyes. Dom
inick stood behind his kids. “Go on,” he said and King waded
in and began to hop, first on one leg and then the other.

“It’s so cold,” King said. She hadn’t ventured in past her
knees but the reddening of her skin crept upward to her thighs.
The water stretched out before them, pounding in and pulling
back, and King felt the mixed signals of its desires. She asked,
“Stuff really lives in here?” Clarke began to wade out toward
her to make sure she’d stay safe and Dominick dug his toes
into the cold sand. Clarke waded to his knees and stopped and
crossed his arms over his chest and turned to look at his father
on the sand. King’s body shivered and goose-bumped, but she
waded deeper. “Dad,” she called, “come on!” She arched her
skinny body in a diving posture. “Get in here, Dad!” Her voice
did not shake when she yelled, “I’m going in.”

When they got back in the truck, King’s teeth chattered.
They dried themselves with blankets. The cab felt tight with
the three of them, but already it had become a kind of home.
They sank into the seats. When they were warmed, Dominick
turned the engine off so that the fan sputtered out and the
blowing heat began to fade away. He said, “I need you to wait
here.” He adjusted the holstered pistol beneath his belt and
covered it with his flannel shirt. He zipped his dark red vest.

King’s arms were wrapped around her chest. She said, “I
don’t want you to leave us.”

“I won’t.”

“Okay,” King said.

“I’ll be right back.”

“You will?”

“We’ve got to take care of each other, King.”

“All right.”

Dominick opened the door and stepped out and walked out
of the parking lot and onto the gray street. The wind began to
blow, and the mercury dropped, and the warmth of the ocean
rose up and lifted the clouds above them into dark castellated
towers. Clarke opened a can of mandarin oranges with his Swiss
army knife. Here he was again, sitting about while his father
left him behind. The air loosed a long howl. They wrapped
themselves in blankets. They waited.

“If I took off, would you come with me?” said Clarke.

“Took off where?” King asked. “What about Dad?”

“He’s always been fine without us.”

“No, he hasn’t,” King said.

They tightened the blankets around them. Cracks of frost began
to grow on the windshield. Grains of sand skittered across the glass.

To make his way back to them, Dominick had to lean against
the wind. His range of sight wasn’t more than thirty feet. The
children saw him slowly materialize. First a coalescing series
of darker and lighter spots out in the blowing sand and mist.
Then a single darkness. Then a shifting shape thickening and
lengthening and thinning into the silhouette of a man. His
head was wrapped in a black scarf. He leaned forward unnatu
rally against the wind. His hand reached out for the door.