AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The usual exhaustion rolled over her at the sensation of being a specimen sliced and pressed between glass. And despite telling herself,Just stay quiet, she muttered, “Yeah. It wasn’t great. But you get used to it.”
“Mmm,” the sergeant hummed, eyes flitting to the rearview mirror for another look, an all-too-familiar glance that said, “How could anyone ever get used tothat?”
People are creatures who can get used to anything. That’s the best way to define us.
She leaned her cheek against the cold window. Tried to focus on that chill through the blasting heat of the cruiser.
They pulled into her driveway. The sergeant shut off the engine and turned to face her through the Plexiglas partition of the police car.
“I understand you’re still dealing with some”—he waved a hand in her direction—“medical things. So if you need help, need a minute, just say so. The point here is for you to tell us if you see anything out of the ordinary. Anything that isn’t yours, that’s out of place, that’s missing. Something that’s been moved, anything that makes you remember anything new. Anything at all, oh-kay? And that means outside, too, all right?”
“Sure, right.”
He drove up the driveway slowly, looking back at her to make sure her head was on a swivel, checking out the trees, the snow.
“It’s plowed,” she said. “I hope my plow guy didn’t mess anything up. Evidence or whatever. He’s scheduled to come super early if there’s snow.”
“Don’t worry about it. We took a look at the driveway before it was cleared. We’ll start inside.”
They parked. The path to the door hadn’t been shoveled, but boots had tamped the snow into an uneven walkability. The boyish officer went into the house and came back with a pair of her boots. She tried to hide the pain of putting them on her ruined feet.
They started in the garage, where the officers told her that her husband’s car battery was dead.
“That likely died awhile ago if, like you say, you hadn’t been using it,” the sergeant told her. He pointed out that her car, parked in its usual spot in the garage, had a flat tire. “We made a note of this. But it doesn’t appear to have been done on purpose, see?” The sergeant tapped a spot on a back tire. “Looks like you caught a nail.”
At least you didn’t run for the car, at least that turned out to be a good choice. But…the Corner must’ve done it?
“I used my car earlier that day, though, and everything was fine. You don’t—” She cleared her throat. “You don’t think he did that? Seems like a pretty big coincidence.”
“It’s possible, but no way to know. Had a flat myself last week. It happens.”
Going inside, she first felt the too-bigness of the rooms without the children. The house had its same smell, same not-quite-warm-enough temperature. But there was something unplaceable, distant, that felt crooked. An open window letting in the wet, maybe. An unquiet that meant the mice had been active.
The Corner.
Stop that. Focus.
She sat down to take off her boots, looked around for her slippers, and remembered that they were lost somewhere in the snow. She left on the sticky-bottomed hospital socks, hoping the tour ofthe house wouldn’t take long enough to aggravate her feet, still unruly in their swollenness.
“Can you please take off your boots?” she asked the officers. They exchanged a look but complied.
Together they went into the basement, damp and spider-webbed as always.
“I wouldn’t really be able to tell if anything was different. I never come down here unless I absolutely have to. It’s too gross and dark.” She paused. “Wait—I smell—do you smell cigarette smoke?”
The officers raised their noses like bloodhounds, then shook their heads. “Nah,” the sergeant said. “Hope you’ve got a dehumidifier somewhere down here, though. Musty.”
In the kitchen, the antique pine floors, the ones she kept pristine, the ones she’d cleaned of blood, were deeply scratched. She gave a mournful “Oh!” over the damage.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” the sergeant said in a voice that struck her as not sorry at all, lip service to what he saw as an overreaction to something unimportant. “That’s from my guys walking through.”
Don’t lecture them. You need their help.
Filling the silent spaces while she looked through the house, they asked new questions (“Anyone you can think of who might have had a grudge? Is this door always bolted?”) but mainly they repeated the same questions the sergeant had asked her in the hospital (“Any prescription drugs in the house? Why didn’t you go this, that, or the other way? Why didn’t you do this, that, or the other thing?”). Her pounding brain, eager for the painkillers she was denying it for purposes of lucidity, of being able to drive to get the children, started to think that they were stupid, forgetful, asking and re-asking in a slightly different way.
On they marched. They repeated their prompts: “See anything? See any changes? Anything missing? Anything different?”
“No,” she said again and again, “nothing, nothing, no.”
