The Narrows (36 page)

Eddie peered at the hood of the car then looked up at Ben and shrugged. “What about it?”

“That stuff doesn’t remind you of that gunk that was stuck to Porter’s dead cows?”

“I guess.” Eddie seemed unimpressed. “That stuff on the cows was like jelly, though.”

“Well, maybe this stuff had time to dry out.” Ben scraped at some with his fingernail, and the grayish flakes were scooped up by the breeze like dandelion seeds.

Overhead, the sky darkened. Eddie looked up warily. The smell of rain was in the air. “Perfect,” Eddie muttered.

Ben stuffed the shotgun shell in his pocket. He moved down the length of the car, searching for more of the strange greenish substance or any other evidence. There was none. He crossed over to the Pontiac and checked that car out as well. Still nothing.

“Christ, Ben. You don’t really think Maggie shot him, do you?”

“I don’t have an opinion on anything just yet.”

Eddie shook his head, his eyes like searchlights. He looked like he wanted to throw up.

“Grab some rubber gloves from the car, would you?” he told Eddie.

“Rubber gloves?”

“They’re in a box in the trunk.”

Confused, Eddie mumbled, “Okay…”

Ben followed the twin trenches in the dirt until they disappeared in the grass. Damned if those trenches didn’t look like the impression someone’s heels might make if they were to be dragged somewhere…

Ben walked through the grass, his eyes scrutinizing the ground. The trail was lost here. He looked up, his eyes following the slope of the property to the billowing willow tree and, beyond the tree, the chicken-wire fence that surrounded the property. Directly overhead, thunder growled.

Ben stopped. There was something small and black on the ground next to his shoe. Ben picked it up. It was a cell phone.

Okay…so what was this about? A domestic situation gone awry? Evan’s out here yelling about the dent Maggie put in the Pontiac, the fighting escalates…a shotgun makes itself known?
It was a leap, though stranger things had happened.
Would Maggie have gone back into the house to get the gun? If she’d shot him right here, where’s the blood? Where’s the body? And it’s not like she did anything to cover up her tracks, so why not admit to it back at the Morelands’ place?

He slid the cell phone into the breast pocket of his uniform as he approached the willow tree. Its tendril branches seemed to finger the air, summoning him with a come-hither gesture. There’d once been a similar tree at the corner of the Journell property when he was a young boy. It had been the perfect tree for climbing. Once you were nestled securely in the upper branches, no one could see you. You were hidden from the world. Sometimes, as a kid, Ben would sit up there for hours.

Like separating a curtain, Ben brushed the spindly branches aside and stepped under the umbrella of the tree. It was incrementally cooler and darker in its shade. He bent and examined the earth around the base of the tree and then he examined the tree itself, searching for anything—though he knew not what—that he might perceive as out of the ordinary. He hadn’t liked the way Maggie had been talking back at the Morelands’ house and he didn’t much care for the shotgun and spent shotgun shell he’d found out here in the yard. He didn’t much care for the blood sprayed along the side of the car and smeared on the windshield, either.

If she shot him…where the hell is he?

Back by the cars, Eddie handed Ben a pair of latex gloves. “What are these for?”

“So we don’t leave fingerprints and corrupt the scene.”

Eddie frowned, his eyebrows knitting together. “Fingerprints on what?”

“Let’s go check the house,” Ben said.

3

Yet, with the exception of a broken wineglass in the kitchen trash, the house was otherwise undisturbed. In the basement, Ben located a box of slugs that matched the brand of the shotgun shell he’d found out in the yard. After twenty minutes of fruitless searching, Ben and Eddie returned to the yard just as a light rain began to fall.

“Let’s bag up the shotgun as evidence before the rain washes away any prints,” Ben advised, and the two men began wrapping the shotgun in a sheet of plastic tarp Ben kept in the trunk of his squad car.

4

The rain was coming down in sheets by the time Ben returned to the Moreland house. Eddie had already left in his own car to bring the shotgun back to the station and to write up the chain-of-custody form he would have to send to the county police, along with the shotgun, in order to have it dusted for prints. It was the most action Eddie had seen in a long time and, to Ben, he seemed both nervous and excited.

Beverly Moreland was in the kitchen preparing dinner when Jed let Ben into the house. Jed looked utterly exhausted. He worked a toothpick around one corner of his mouth as he shook Ben’s hand. “She’s on the back porch,” he told Ben. “Didn’t want to come inside. Said she wanted to keep watch on whatever’s out there.”

“Thanks for keeping an eye on her, Jed.”

“Bev gave her a Valium. It seemed to calm her down. I hope that was okay.”

“That’s fine.”

Jed led him out onto the back porch but didn’t follow him out. Maggie was perched like a bird on the porch steps, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes trained on the downpour that was already filling up craters in the earth. Cornstalks heaved and swelled in the wind like ocean waves.

Ben folded his arms and leaned against the porch railing. He was quiet for quite some time, watching the rainwater sluice down the eaves of the porch’s roof. Eventually, he cleared his throat. “What were you and Evan fighting about, Maggie?”

She looked up at him, her stare as lifeless as a wax dummy’s.

“Maggie?” he said when she didn’t respond.

She turned back and looked out over the cornfield. “He accused me of sleeping around on him.”

“Had you been?”

She didn’t answer.

“Where’d the shotgun come from?”

“It’s Evan’s. He keeps it in the basement.”

“I meant, why was it out in the yard?”

“Evan had it.”

“Did he threaten you with it?”

Silence.

“Maggie? Did Evan threaten you with the gun?”

“I…can’t remember…”

“Think harder.”

“He was yelling at me. He was sitting on the car with the gun in his lap, yelling at me.”

“Did someone fire a shot?”

Again, she said, “I can’t remember.”

“There’s blood on the car, too.” When she didn’t respond to this, he added, “Do you know whose blood it is?”

“I guess it’s Evan’s.”

“Did you shoot Evan?”

“No.”

“Are you sure you don’t—”

“I didn’t shoot him. I didn’t kill my husband.”

“At least one shot was fired from that shotgun, far as I can tell right now. Who did it?”

“It must have gone off when…when he was being attacked…”

“Evan, you mean? Attacked by who?”

She trained her dark, vacuous eyes back on him. “I don’t know,” she said in a barely audible voice.

“Didn’t you see the person?”

“No.” She looked back at the rain.

Ben sighed and leaned on the railing. “Let’s talk some more, but not here, okay?”

Maggie stood up sharply from the stairs. “I don’t want to go back to my house.” There was genuine fear in her eyes.

“We’ll talk down at the station,” Ben said.

5

She was silent for much of the ride from the Morelands’ house to the barracks. The only visible sign of life came when she turned her head to look out the passenger window at the carved roadway that was Full Hill Road trailing up into the wooded hillside. To assuage his discomfort, Ben turned on the radio. R.E.M. came on, singing about the end of the world. He snapped the radio back off.

“Am I under arrest?”

Though there was enough probable cause to lock her up right then, he said, “No, ma’am.”

They got soaked going from the car to the station. Ben pointed to a restroom and told Maggie she could go clean up in there and he’d see if he could locate some towels. In the dispatch office, Shirley Bennice sat at her desk reading an issue of
People
magazine. She looked up at him as he came into the office and made a
tsk tsk
sound. “Lord, Ben, you’re soaked.”

“It’s coming down in buckets now. We got any towels?”

“There should be some clean ones in the storage closet. I’ll run and grab some if you want.”

“Sit tight, I’ll get them. Did Eddie come back yet?”

“He’s at his desk.”

In the Batter’s Box, Eddie sat curled over his desk filling out the chain-of-custody paperwork for the shotgun in large block letters. He wrote with the intensity and concentration of a schoolboy, his tongue cocked into one corner of his mouth.

“I brought Maggie Quedentock back, gonna ask her a few more questions,” Ben said, opening the storage closet. There was a stack of clean white towels on the bottom shelf. He bent to pull two out when the cell phone he’d found in the Quedentocks’ backyard fell out of his pocket and clattered to the floor. He had forgotten about it.

“This whole thing gives me the creeps,” Eddie said from his desk.

Ben flipped the phone open. The phone was on but the battery icon in the corner of the screen was red, indicating that it needed to be charged. Was there enough juice left to make a call?

“I’m gonna dial your desk phone,” he told Eddie. “Tell me whose name appears on the Caller ID.”

Eddie swiveled around in his chair and watched Ben dial. A moment after he hit Send, Eddie’s desk phone rang. Eddie leaned over and examined the narrow digital screen on the top of the phone. “That’s weird,” Eddie marveled. “It says
Tom Schuler
.”

Ben ended the call and flipped the phone closed.

“He’s my goddamn mechanic,” Eddie said, turning back around in his chair to face Ben. “How come you got Schuler’s cell phone?”

And then it hit him: Tom lived off Full Hill Road, up the hill on the outskirts of town—the same road where Maggie’s accident had taken place last week. On the night of the accident, Maggie had claimed to have been heading home from Crossroads in town. Full Hill Road was not only out of her way, it was at the other end of town.

What had she told him back at the Morelands’ place?
He accused me of sleeping around on him.
And when he’d asked her if this was true, she hadn’t responded.

Things in his head began to turn and snap together with a series of nearly audible clicks.

“Ben?” Eddie stood. “You okay?”

“Wasn’t that Tom Schuler’s car that Dorr Kirkland had towed recently?” Ben asked, though he already knew the answer.

“Yeah, Ben. What’s wrong? What’s that mean?”

Maggie appeared in the doorway. Her face blotchy and her hair stringy and wet, she looked like a corpse that had just washed up on a beach somewhere.

“What happened to Tom Schuler?” Ben asked her from across the Batter’s Box. Eddie’s eyes jumped in her direction.

“Maggie?” Ben said.

Maggie said nothing.

Ben turned to Eddie. “Go out to Tom’s place, see if he’s home.”

Eddie picked his campaign hat up off the corner of his desk. “Sure thing.”

“You won’t find him,” Maggie said from the doorway.

“Where is he?” Ben asked.

“He’s gone, too. Just like Evan.”

6

After Eddie left, Ben sat opposite Maggie at a table in the small kitchenette that also functioned, when needed, as an interrogation room. He asked Maggie various questions—about her relationship with Tom Schuler, about the argument with Evan, about whether or not she believed Evan had done something to Tom or if Tom had done something to Evan—but she provided no responses. Her eyes grew increasingly distant. Ben began to think that she could no longer hear him speaking, that his words were barrages of nonsense that whistled uninterrupted and undigested through the hollow space at the center of her mind. After ten minutes of this foolishness, Ben told Maggie to stand up. He had to repeat this command two more times before she actually complied. It wasn’t that she was being deliberately insubordinate; to Ben, it seemed that some vital fluid was slowly leaking out of her, leaving nothing but a glaze-eyed zombie wearing Maggie Quedentock’s clothes.

He led her into lockup. Poorhouse Pete still occupied the third cell, and as Ben and Maggie entered, Pete perked up and watched them intently, like an owl in a tree. Maggie said nothing when Ben led her into the first cell. She went and sat down on the bench and stared out at him with dead eyes as he closed and locked the cell door.

I think I’m currently witnessing someone on the verge of losing their mind.

“My baby did it,” she said, startling him. “That’s the big secret, Ben. That’s what got Evan and what got Tom, too. My baby.”