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In his hard gaze she thought she saw the old man say, “I know you must have done something to deserve this,” saw that despite his losses, he still didn’t understand that suffering and misfortune fall as wide and uniformly as snow, melting out of visibility but leaving their pain behind.
Drinking coffee back at the house with the boyish officer, sheheard the children’s happy hide-and-seek screams trickling down the kitchen stairs and tensed involuntarily.
Trauma doesn’t end when the trauma ends.
“Right now we need them for evidence,” the boyish officer said, “but at some point we’ll be able to return your daughter’s things. That he took.”
She thought of the clothes, the teddy bear, her daughter’s underwear and ballet tights. The tin car treasure box. The Corner contaminating it all.
“I don’t want anything back but the treasure box.”
Some things are replaceable. Some aren’t.
She talked to the boyish officer about chance. Her son’s fear of ghosts, her husband putting up the wildlife camera in response, the device’s solar-paneled long life, the fact that the Corner had turned one way instead of the other at the top of the kitchen stairs, the one in a million path of the bullet. She could come up with a near infinite litany of chance that had saved her. Chance that formed the thin little wisp of fabric separating her from the devastation of those other families.
The boyish officer cleared his throat, fumbled with his coffee cup. “It wasn’t just luck, you taking him out. You’re a fighter. Don’t sell yourself short.” He shrugged. “Things happen for a reason.”
She didn’t challenge the boyish officer, aware that she was naturally uninclined to think well of herself. That unlike him, she didn’t see some skill, some force that had helped her yet failed all those others. She wasn’t better than they had been, wasn’t more deserving of survival. So she stayed quiet, knowing how deeply people hated to admit or recognize the oversized space chance takes up in life. And, worse, in death.
“And after all,” the boyish officer went on, “you had some bad luck, too. You were dealt a bad hand. Your husband. This guyfixating on you. We can’t figure out how he made his…choices. He can’t seem to explain it himself. And then—no evidence, no tracks, fingerprints? Your blood alcohol.” The boyish officer shook his head over the series of events that had made her unworthy of belief. “Figuring out explanations? Even after we had him in custody? It was difficult. That neighbor of yours, putting whiskey in your drink to warm you up that night. Who would do that? Who would even think to ask? That he pretended to work at that café, so you misidentified him? The sap? It’s just not a weapon we see. Yeah. Some bad luck you dealt with, too.”
Her teeth gritted. She tried to force her voice into an even tone, but couldn’t help sounding clipped and cold. “Most of that wasn’t just bad luck, though, was it? Because there was the nail in my tire. The cigarette smoke. My daughter’s missing things. The way the hide-a-key had been moved. How we felt watched. The lifted toilet seat. My phone in the wrong place. The baby monitor switched off. Ignoring all that, setting that aside, that was a choice.”
Easier to believe a woman’s lying than that bad things happened on your watch. Easier to believe the simplest thing is always correct. And it’s simple to say a woman is crazy.
The boyish officer winced. She wondered what admissions he was allowed to make. What instructions he’d been given. What he could admit to himself.
“It was…unfortunate,” he said. “An unfortunate series of…unexpected, unlikely, things.” In a clear effort to change the subject, he asked, “You think you’ll let your kids visit their grandpa? He seemed to want that.”
“I thanked him. I’ll mail him a check to cover the time they stayed with him.”
“I mean, he did step up. Maybe give him a chance?”
She tipped her head at the boyish officer, momentarily baffled athow her father-in-law’s keeping her children from her, accusing her of murder, of child abuse, the constant beratement, the not-so-whispered comments, the assault, could be outweighed by a few weeks of looking after his own blood. But then, of course, she remembered that although she felt utterly, completely altered, the world around her hadn’t changed.
“It’s not enough,” she told him. “Not even close.”
The boyish officer looked like he was going to scold her, then thought better of it.
“So, there’s some developments in your case.” He tapped nervously on his coffee cup, and she was struck with a sense of déjà vu, recalling the way she and the sergeant had sat together a few weeks after her husband’s death drinking coffee, sitting in these same seats. “The smaller thing is we figured out where he must’ve hidden.”
“Didn’t you already tell me? In the basement?”
“Well, that’s not a hundred percent. But we think he hid in the basement day of. Given the…cigarette smell you and the alarm guy mentioned.”
“Mmm.”
“So. Because we recovered the SIM card from your camera, we know he got to your house just before noon the day he broke in. Waited for you to leave with the kids on schedule. Then, like I said, probably he hid in the basement. We haven’t found the copy of your key among his things, but safe assumption he copied the key from the hide-a-rock—impossible to know when, but sometime before it snowed. Based on your timeline, he probably came upstairs around midnight. Call came in from your neighbors around five a.m. And of course, the video shows him again the next day around two a.m. leaving down the path, hiding his tracks by walking in the footprints left by you and our guys.” The boyish officer’s brows knit atthese acknowledgments of police fallibility. “That means he left twelve hours after we finished searching. I mean, after seeing that secret room, it was a pretty intense search. But what we figured out was he climbed into your beehive oven. Hid there. We found a hair, and sure enough, it matches.”
She recalled that as she’d sobbed on the couch, devastated, she’d noticed ash smudged around the fireplace and ground into the carpet. Thought it simply another sign of police carelessness in her home.
“Is that even possible? The beehive oven door is tiny.”
“Yeah, exactly!” The officer nodded vehemently. “That’s why we missed it. How does a guy that size hide from a police search that thorough, you know? Finally we thought…maybe in there. Then we searched and found that hair. One of our guys, big guy, volunteered to try and get in that oven. It was a tight squeeze, but he managed. Said it was claustrophobic as hell. Getting out? That was a scene.” The boyish officer chuckled. “Nearly got stuck. We thought he was going to pass out. Still…he did it. At some point we’ll get to interview him about your case again and confirm all this. It’s just that now, with these other cases—”
“Of course,” she said, ceding priority to the missing, the dead, the shattered, even as this information caused painful strobe light pulses of imaginings.Flash, the Corner folding his limbs into the oven like a cave spider.Flash, him hearing her children in the hidden place.Flash, him gnashing his teeth, wondering if he had time to get to them.
“That means he must have heard the kids, doesn’t it? That night. After I ran? They were hiding right there.”
