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Under the unwavering eyes of the officers, flanked by their large and uniformed bodies, she sensed the weather in the room had changed. She crossed her arms for warmth, heart fluttering.
“Okay, then. Moving on. There’s nothing taken—”
“The stuff of my daughter’s—”
The sergeant shook his head. “Which she may well have misplaced.”
“Not her treasure box,” she insisted, shaking her head vehemently. “That race car-shaped box? That’s got her treasures. That’s what she calls them. My treasures.”
“Children lose things.”
“Not that! She wouldn’t.”
The sergeant gave a deep, put-upon sigh, and started ticking off items on his fingers.
“No fingerprints, no footprints, no tire tracks. No sign of a car. No forced entry. No injuries inflicted by this person.”
“He wore gloves. White ones. Plastic.” Her voice sounded breathy, and she tried to bring it back to a normal register. “He could’ve been waiting, like I said. Hiding in the house until we went to sleep. I know it’s not a lot to go on, but…I told you who he was! And then there’s the toilet seat that was up. The flat tire. And the kids saw him, too. That night.”
“You said he manages the sandwich shop.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
The sergeant’s eyes were hard and cold. “We talked to the lady who owns the place, ma’am. She’s never had a manager there. Just her and three girls running things. She’s never even had a man on the payroll.”
Her mind was sucked back to that August day, replaying her memories as if fast-forwarding a film, the things the manager said, the way he introduced himself, his staring. Her visceral, instinctual fear.
It was him. It was him.
“It’s impossible, he must’ve said he was the manager even though—”
The sergeant leaned closer in a way that made her shrink from him. “You see where I’m going with this?”
Yes, she thought.
“No,” she lied. “He was here. I saw him. The kids saw him. What did my kids say?”
The sergeant crossed his arms and leaned back. “That you told them there was a monster. They say this ‘Corner’ ”—the sergeant put air quotes around “Corner”—“came straight out of their dreams. They said that’s what you told them. ‘Monsters are real, and there’s one in the house.’ ”
She hung her head, stared at her bad hand clenching and unclenching. She imagined the children looking up at the sergeant, at their grandfather, so hopeful. She understood their longing.Maybe it wasn’t real, they were thinking.Wouldn’t that be nice? Maybe it was a dream. And we were safe all along.
“The kids heard him, they saw him,” she muttered. “No matter what their grandfather’s managed to convince them of.”
“They mainly remember you,” the sergeant said. “They said you were frightening. Violent.”
Her face clicked up to him, mouth open.
“No!”
“Ma’am, you admitted that yourself.”
“I didn’t hurt them. I just…pushed them away from me. So I could get out. Get help.”
“That’s not how they remember it.”
That’s not how you remember it, either. It was awful. So awful.
Her throat thickened.
