The boys wrestle each other and Barrel.
The heat thickens.
Miranda feels as if centuries pass. Summers are always slow, but this particular Sunday is lasting forever.
A van inches down the driveway. The logo of the Hartford television station is bright and gaudy on its side. A big professional camera pokes out the open passenger door.
“Get out!” screams Miranda. “Get out! Get out of here!”
The camera points at her. Probably the sister of the killer is pretty good copy too.
She wants to attack the van. Beat her fists on it. Kick it. But they will film her and the evening news will show proof that both Allerdon girls are violent.
Geoffrey appears. His towel is wrapped skirt-style around his waist. His bushy hair is wild, half wet, half dry. He walks slowly up to the van, squinting, as if the huge logo is difficult to read. He is not an authority figure. His hands dangle at his sides. They are huge hands. Football hands. His body, although large, does not yet match the size of the hands.
He stands by the open window like a big galoot. The towel falls to the ground, revealing green-and-black-striped swim trunks. With his huge football hand, Geoffrey grips the snout of the camera and wrenches it away.
“Hey!” shouts the crew.
Geoffrey swings the camera loosely in his huge fingers, as if he might drop it and say, Oh, goodness. A smashed camera. What a shame.
The crew is cursing now, telling Geoffrey he’s a thief.
“Drive out,” says Geoffrey in a bored-sounding voice. “I’ll give it back to you when you’re out in the road. The public road. Where you belong.” He has his cell phone in his other hand. His fingers are so large Miranda can’t imagine how he manages the keypad. Into the phone Geoffrey says, “The police just left the Allerdon property but we need them back. There are trespassers.”
“We’re going, we’re going!” yells the van driver, reversing and making a tight circle. They want their camera more than they want to film Miranda.
Geoffrey walks ahead of the van, leading it up the drive, and they disappear beyond the trees. Miranda tries to see through the trees; see if the TV van is really leaving. All she can spot are glittering bits of glass high on the hill. Stu’s half-hidden house. Is he watching?
She is filled with horror. The world is watching. The world is waiting with sick bated breath to see what else happens with Lander Allerdon and her family.
Geoffrey comes back.
The police come back.
Miranda wants to faint. Go, go, go, go! she thinks. Everybody, go.
At last everybody but Geoffrey and the little boys are gone.
“Are we still going to walk Barrel?” asks Henry hopefully.
Geoffrey sighs. “First, lock the house, Miranda.”
He’s handsome, actually. Miranda is amazed. How has she not noticed this? The big features are coming together in a big way: when all his body parts catch up to each other, Geoffrey is going to be a hunk. Miranda is embarrassed for not noticing before and even more embarrassed that she’s noticing now. “I’m not sure where the key is,” she admits.
“I’ll wait while you find it,” he says, like an older brother, complete with irritation.
“I know where it is!” shrieks Henry. He dashes inside, returns with a key and proudly locks the front door.
Geoffrey sighs again. “You can’t just lock the front.” He takes the key, goes in again, bolts the back two doors that open onto the screened porch, walks out the front, key-locks that door and hands Miranda the key.
“Thank you,” she whispers. “Thank you for everything, Geoffrey.”
But she feels ill. The cottage truly does lie open. Little children know where the keys are, neighbors pee in their toilet, TV stations know where the drive is.
She has a sense of a thousand mistakes that nobody in the Allerdon family even knew were mistakes. All their bad choices are piling up, making mountains and cliffs, and they’re going to fall off that cliff, and it will be their own fault.
The boys share Barrel’s leash and tumble after the dog. They could be exploring a jungle, they are so excited. What a day! TV vans, police cars!
Miranda trudges after them. Geoffrey seems to be waiting for something but she is too tired to look back at him.
I have to solve something, she thinks. Although a person who doesn’t even have the key to her own cottage probably won’t find the key to an unsolved murder.
She puzzles about the package of cocaine left in the boat. She doesn’t know anybody who does drugs or would ever deal them. But statistically, that cannot be true. She must know plenty of them, and is too dense to see, or they are too clever to be seen.
Why would Jason abandon the package? And how did he get safely away before the police came, while Lander didn’t?
The boat in which Jason and Lander arrived at that little swamp has been towed by the Coast Guard, and—of course—somebody has videoed this and put it online, and everybody has seen the Water Fever. It’s just a little skiff with a single storage compartment.
Maybe Jason couldn’t risk Lander seeing the package. Didn’t dare lean into the skiff, grab a plastic bag filled with white stuff and say, Just getting my coke. Back in a minute. Stay put, Lanny.
But if Lander could go along with a murder, she could surely go along with a package.
It’s all so stupid.
Maybe that’s what crime is. Things go wrong, everybody panics, they do stupid things, and Miranda can’t look for a rational explanation because nothing was ever rational.
Hayden has to pee, so the walk ends after a few hundred yards and everybody goes into the Warren house, including Barrel. Mrs. Warren stops folding little jeans and T-shirts and offers a cold drink.
Miranda believes that Mrs. Warren meant to love domestic life; she meant to homeschool her children, take up quilting and make her own jam. But in fact, Mrs. Warren hates all this stuff.
Surely if the Warrens were drug runners, they would be rich, and they would hire somebody else to fold the laundry.
Mr. Warren thanks Miranda for bringing the boys home, because now they are going to hike in the nature preserve. It isn’t Miranda’s impression that the Warrens like nature any more than they like housekeeping. She is touched that they love the boys enough to risk tick bites for them.
Or they’re making a drug drop out in the woods.
Miranda heads home, with Barrel and without the boys. She doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the way she suspects everybody in the entire neighborhood. She remembers at last that she meant to check everybody else’s Facebook page too.
Silly.
The neighbors are just living their lives, making sandwiches, playing video games, watching the river, brushing their teeth. They’re not drug traffickers. And if they are drug traffickers, there won’t be a statement on their bios.
Her mother’s ring tone sounds. Miranda gets her cell phone out of her pocket. She’s calmer with that rectangle in her hand. She feels purposeful, as if just holding a cell phone is a solution. “Hi, Mom.”
“We’ve seen her.”
“Is she okay?” This is a stupid question. Miranda doesn’t know why she asks it.
Lander can’t possibly be okay.
“No. She looks awful. Sort of grimy and wasted.”
“Oh, Mom! Did you get to hug?”
“No. No, she’s—behind—well—they’re sort of separate rooms. We weren’t really in the same room. Glass. Little shelves, sort of.”
Her brilliant, articulate mother cannot describe a partition. Her daughter is on the other side of a barrier. The criminal side.
“And what did she say?”
“She said she loves us.”
Lander does not deny the charges.
Miranda stops walking. Leans on a tree trunk. It’s an oak, and the striated bark is rough against her skin.
“We met again with the lawyer. The arraignment is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. Monday. I
t’ll be on Monday. Tomorrow.”
“What happens at an arraignment?”
“Well, it turns out that the police arrest a person, but the prosecuting attorney brings the charges, and that is done in front of a judge. The person is formally advised of the charges against them and told what their constitutional rights are. It’s a very short event. The person doesn’t say anything except ‘not guilty.’ ”
The person.
Miranda weeps for her parents. “Is that when they set bail?” she asks. “Can we afford bail on the money we’re getting from Grandma?”
Her mother is openly crying now. “There might not be bail. They don’t usually have bail for homicide charges. She has to stay there, in that jail, behind those bars. Without us.”
The arraignment will be in a courtroom. There will be no partitions. Miranda is definitely going to this. She will sit directly behind Lander. She has seen this in many TV shows.
Maybe it was an accident, she thinks. Lander and Jason accidentally killed Derry, but they didn’t know it was Derry, and Jason ran off and she stayed. Except that Lander wouldn’t just stand there if somebody was hurt. She’d love to stanch a bleeding wound. She’d love to rip her T-shirt into bandages while calling 911.
“Your father and I are driving back to West Hartford to get us all good clothes for the arraignment.”
How desperate her mother must be, pretending that how the family is dressed will favorably impress a judge in a homicide case.
“We’ll stop by and get you, honey,” says her mother.
Since the quickest route to West Hartford is on the other side of the river, picking up Miranda is an hour out of the way. “No. I’m fine here. I’ve been playing with Henry and Hayden and Barrel.” As if she, too, is a seven-year-old on a happy summer day. As if she is not involved in Lander’s nightmare. “I love you,” she says helplessly.
And she does love them. The shocking fact of their disregard for the future, specifically Miranda’s future, is easy to table. At least, for now.
She and Barrel stumble home. Coming down the driveway, seeing the cherry-red siding of the little cottage, the green shutters that sag, the torn screened door, she thinks, If Lander never comes home, we might as well sell the cottage. We’ll want to sell it. It will be nothing but the place where everything went wrong.
The lawyer discusses the arraignment.
How Lander will face a judge on Monday afternoon.
How her parents are bringing clothing so that she will look her best.
How she will be transported.
How she is to address the judge. “Your Honor,” not “sir” or “ma’am.”
How she is to say absolutely nothing except “not guilty” when the time comes.
The lawyer’s face swims in and out of view.
Lander whispers to this woman her parents have chosen, “But I don’t know what happened. I was there, but I don’t know. What if I am guilty?”
This is the question she screams silently at God. Am I a killer? Don’t let me be a killer. Don’t let Derry be dead because of me!
Do I really think God will go back in time and change my actions? Change the results? she asks herself. Or am I facing real consequences for the first time in twenty-two years, and I want God to be responsible instead of me?
The lawyer, like the police, has no patience with Lander’s self-indulgent whining. She leans into Lander’s face. “Your response is ‘Not guilty.’ Do you grasp this?”
With her free hand, Lander reaches for a tissue from the box on the table.
“Lander!” snaps the lawyer. “Toughen up. It’s not going to get easier. Tears don’t soften judges.”
She is not expecting to soften anybody. The pitiful truth is that she, Lander, is soft.
She has always seen herself as a woman of courage. A woman who marches through any difficulty, shrugs off any burden. A woman who could practice medicine in the midst of some distant civil war, saving lives while bombs drop. Instead, she is a weakling who needs her own tissue box just to cope with the loss of her cell phone.
Seeing her parents earlier in the day was an ordeal.
Her father looked terrible. He was nicely dressed, which is always the case. He loves clothing. He has more clothing than any of them. He loves shirts with collars and heavy starch. He loves ties and bow ties, vests and bright socks. He loves shoes. But the body inside this fine clothing was hunched and awkward. He tried to smile, but it didn’t work. His face twitched.
Her mother looked worse. Her clothing was all ajumble, as if she couldn’t find the buttons, couldn’t fasten the necklace, couldn’t pull the brush through her hair. Her mother was confounded by the barrier between them and several times put her hands against the thick, soiled glass, as if hoping it was a mirage.
They didn’t know how to question her.
They said, “We love you, sweetheart,” which is what people say when there is no point in addressing the situation.
She loves them back. She loves them so much she cannot believe she has ever ignored them, disobeyed them or shrugged them off.
She could not comfort them. There was no solid truth to set down in front of them, a daughter’s lovely gift of innocence. “I love you, too,” she told them. “Thank you for coming. Give Rimmie a hug. Tell her she was right about everything.”
“Right about everything?” echoed her father.
“Rimmie knew all along that Jason was bad company,” she explained, aware that a court verdict might be that she, Lander, was the bad company.
She was relieved when they left. Being in a cell was better than facing her terrified parents.
STILL SUNDAY AFTERNOON
The cottage is exhaustingly hot. Miranda can’t stand being shut in. She opens every window, exposes every screen, unlocks every door. Not one shiver of breeze enters. But at least she doesn’t feel like a trapped animal.
Lander is a trapped animal.
Miranda feels like having ice cream, but after two days of eating nothing, perhaps she should have a little something prior to dessert. In the kitchen she spots Mrs. Crowder’s casserole. It’s been sitting out since yesterday, in the hottest room in the cottage, facing the hottest sun. She lifts the lid. It stinks. It’s totally gone bad.
Now on top of everything else she has to get rid of eight or ten helpings of something Mrs. Crowder slaved over.
The cottage doesn’t have a garbage disposal.
She can’t feed it to Barrel.
They don’t even have garbage pickup. It’s easier to lug a plastic bag back to West Hartford than to haul big trash cans up to the road, where they are out of sight, and the Allerdons forget them, and wind blows them into the middle of the road.
Her mother phones again. “I need your advice. What clothes should I choose? I don’t know what to wear. I don’t know what she should wear. I don’t know what you should wear.”
“What did Lander say to get for her?”
“She just shook her head.”
“Meaning she doesn’t care?” Caring is the hallmark of Lander’s existence. She cares about grades, achievement, schools, success and all the accessories needed to display them.
“Oh, honey, I think she’s in shock. She’s hardly saying a word.”
They’re all in shock. But at least Miranda is at the cottage, not in a cage.
Lander seldom wears a dress or a skirt. So although those would be formal, and perhaps formal is good in front of a judge, Lander’s best outfits are suits. “How about that pale-gray silk suit?” says Miranda. “The pants are solid and the jacket has tiny white dots and the cut is businesslike. And she could wear her white silk tee. Maybe a scarf. Not too much color in the scarf maybe. And those black strappy sandals? Because in heels she’s five eleven. Maybe she’d look threatening? We want her to look, you know, sweet and girlish.”
“I’m standing in front of her closet now. Yes, I see the suit. Good choice. And maybe the scarf that’s white with turquoise streaks? She
likes turquoise.” Her mother’s voice is brighter. Way easier to think about color than arraignments.
“Okay, then,” says Miranda. “You’ve got the clothes. Bring her shampoo and conditioner and makeup. I think they let a person get ready. Now let’s decide what you’re going to wear. How about that navy dress with the silver chain belt? The one that’s so flattering because of the way the skirt hangs. It would be perfect for you.”
This may be the most ridiculous statement Miranda has ever made. On Monday, nothing is going to be perfect for her mother.
But they settle the clothing issue.
“I’ll iron everything,” says her mother, eager for a chore at which she can succeed. “I’ll have it all on hangers.” As if wrinkles matter. “We’ll set off in about an hour, so we’ll be at the cottage by nine. Lock the doors, honey. And the windows. I know you’ll be hot and it will be awful. But…”
It’s too late to lock up. There’s no point in locking up. You can’t lock out bad things. Look at Lander. She fell among bad people and fell into bad things and locks had nothing to do with it.
Miranda imagines the locks that now surround her sister.
Her mother presents another plan. “Maybe Daddy and I should just come and get you and we’ll drive back here and sleep in the air conditioning. Yes. That’s better. We need to be fresh and rested for tomorrow. We’ll see you soon.”
Normally Miranda never wants to be in West Hartford if she can be in the cottage, but it is so hot and she feels so awful. Is it hunger or despair? The prospect of her parents’ arrival and an air-conditioned house ought to cheer her up, but it doesn’t. Maybe she’s past cheering up.
With a dish towel, Miranda wipes sweat off her face, considers again what to eat and again is confronted with Mrs. Crowder’s rotting casserole.
The Crowders have an excellent position for drug dealing. Their house is virtually invisible, the way they’ve let the trees grow. A car can just slink up their driveway and disappear. Of course the same thing is true of Miranda’s cottage. And the Warrens’.
I’ll check out the Crowders on Facebook next, she decides.
It’s energizing to have a plan, even a dumb one. She carries the heavy dish through the screened porch, down the steps, onto the grass and over to the cliff stairs. She unbolts the gate and carefully descends. If she spills now, she will also have to clean up the dock. Kneeling on the dock, she sets the lid down and lowers the casserole into the water, swishing it around. It’ll be fine for fish, who don’t seem to mind rotten anything.
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