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Sergeant Tony. The bicycle trip had hardly winded me, and I bounced softly from one foot to the other. Mrs. Donaldson grunted and spoke into a microphone. “Tony, you got a visitor.” Her words boomed out of loudspeakers around the lobby and down the hall in back.
“You can wait over there,” she said, nodding toward the bench.
In a minute, Sergeant Tony came out from in back. He was wearing bermuda shorts again and whistling a tune I didn’t recognize. “Hey! Martha!” he called out cheerfully. “Come on in.” He unlocked the gate in the screen and held it open. To Mrs. Donaldson he said, “Hey, I seen your boy got a hit last night in Little League. He’s gonna be a real slugger.” Mrs. Donaldson looked at him grumpily and turned back to her desk. “Let’s go, beautiful,” he said to me, and he led the way down the hall to his office.
Inside, he held a chair for me and then sat down behind the desk, but a second later, he bounced back up. “Let’s have some privacy,” he said, walking over and flipping a lock on the door. “Just you and me, okay? Nothin’ goes out of this room. Just you and me, okay, beautiful?” He sat down again. “Okay, beautiful, let’s have it. What’s on your mind?”
His energy was deflating me, stealing from mine. How could I keep up with him? I took a breath. “I came to talk about what happened,” I said. “I mean, with Butcher.” It hurt even to say his name out loud.
Sergeant Tony leaned back. “I’m here to help,” he said.
I cleared my throat. This was harder than I’d expected. Talking about it made it real in a way I’d never allowed before. “What I want to say is that I know I did a stupid, stupid thing. Something that’s totally unlike me—I’m not like that at all.” His unflickering eyes were trained on me. His face gave away nothing. “And if there’s any way we could get past this—you know, I mean, let it be forgotten—I’d never be in here again, I promise that. Never. Why, we’d move away if you wanted.”
“Move away?”
“Yes.”
“From Katydid?”
“Yes.”
“Have you talked to your mother about that?”
“Not exactly. Well, sort of. But I know she’d agree.”
“She’d agree to leave Eddie?” A smile teased his lips.
“Yes.” I had to be strong about this. No doubts.
“Another tough call for ol’ Eddie, huh?” He snorted, amused at the thought. I didn’t say anything. He sat up and put his elbows on the desk. “That’s a pretty strange idea of justice, Martha—that you can just promise to be good and leave town and the whole thing will go away. You don’t think things really work like that, do you?”
“I thought, if we talked it out—”
“Have you been reading the paper? Did you see that letter in there about witches? That’s you and your mother they’re talking about, you know. And there’s a petition going around, something they’ve given Judge Horner.” He stood up. “I mean, people are worried about this town, about the way things are developing. They think examples need to be set.” He walked around and sat on the edge of the desk, in front of me. “Let’s face it, a lot of it’s not your fault. It’s your mother. Tom, too, but a lot of it’s your mother. People don’t like the way she acts.”
“She’s all right,” I said softly, staring at the floor.
“A little man-crazy, wouldn’t you say? I mean, if my daughter ran around like that, I’d strap her within an inch of her life.” His daughter is a fat, pigtailed infant, barely out of diapers. He crossed his arms. When he spoke again, his manner had softened. “You know, I knew your father.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, sure. Not well, but I knew him. I used to run into him at the Buffalo—though not the Buffalo so much, actually, that was a little top-drawer for him. More like the Doghouse, the Spa, places like that. He liked to drink.” Sergeant Tony rubbed his chin, pulling on his face. “Yeah, sure, I remember him. He grew a mustache once. A funny little thing, real scraggly, hardly any hairs in it at all. You had to wonder what he was thinking of.” He tickled his upper lip with his index finger. “And then he went away.” He shook his head. “You didn’t know him, did you?”
“No.”
“Neither did Tom, at least not that he could remember.” It pained me to hear Sergeant Tony talk like that, pretending that he was close to our family, that he knew us and knew about us. “A funny guy, your father. I wouldn’t have figured him and Bunny, but you never know. I wouldn’t have figured a lot of Bunny’s men.” He watched me for a reaction, and I tried to make my face go dead. I was breathing through my mouth, drying out my lips.
“Does your mother talk to you about her dates, about what goes on?” His voice was low, but prickly.
“No.”
“What’s she see in those guys? Eddie, Lester, Wayne. Doesn’t she talk about ’em?”
“No.”
“Don’t get upset. I’m just asking. You came here to talk, right?”
“Yes.”
