by David Bell
“Oh, yes,” she says. “A few somethings.”
“Would you like to come inside?”
“I thought we’d talk down at the station,” she says. “My car’s running and warm. And I’ll bring you back when we’re finished.”
“At the station? Is that necessary?”
“It is.”
I try not to stutter. “Yeah, but I don’t know—”
“It won’t take long.”
My eyes roam longingly to the back door of the house. Inside are warmth, sanctuary, calm.
“I have to let Grendel out,” I say. “He’s been alone all day.”
“Go right ahead,” Bowman says. “He might burst if you don’t. I’ll wait here.”
Bowman stays rooted in place, watching me while I approach the door. I’m hoping like hell Grendel barks when my key goes in the lock. It wouldn’t be the best look to have Madeline sitting inside the house waiting for me with Bowman standing in the driveway.
But Grendel barks, just like it’s any other day, which it certainly isn’t.
I toss my bag on the kitchen table. It takes no time at all to get the leash on Grendel and bring him back out the door into the cold. He’s been holding his water for hours, so despite the cold weather, he’s only too happy to get outside and find relief. And I think then what I’ve thought many times—if Emily and Jake were still alive, they’d be helping with Grendel. We always talked about getting a dog but never did, and I wish we had while they were alive. I wish they’d been able to enjoy having him around as much as I do. Emily and her family always had dogs when she was growing up, and she volunteered at the animal shelter here in Gatewood. Several times she dragged me along with her, and we always talked about adopting a dog someday. We just never did.
Grendel doesn’t acknowledge Bowman at all. Once he’s seen a person up close and spent a little time with them, he doesn’t feel the need to bark at them. And once someone’s been in the house a few times, he never barks at them again. Bowman could have been a snowman or a bush for all Grendel cares.
He hikes his leg and sends out a healthy stream that looks like it might peel a few layers of bark off the small tree he’s aiming for. When that’s finished, he sniffs around. I’m about to hurry him up since Bowman is waiting when the detective clears her throat.
“You walk him around the neighborhood here?”
“Sure.”
Bowman keeps watching me, the sky turning red behind her. She looks like she expects me to say more.
“We go for a longer walk in the morning and then again at night. That’s about all the excitement he can handle at his age.”
Bowman blows on her hands and rubs them together. “You ever go to the dog park over by Gatewood South High School?”
“Sure. We used to go there.”
“But you don’t anymore?”
“Not really.”
“Why’s that?” Bowman asks.
I can’t tell if she’s asking just to pass the time while we watch my elderly dog decide if he has to piss again. And he probably does. Or if she’s working up to something again. The paranoid part of my brain says Bowman has never had a casual, random conversation in her life.
“It’s the other side of town,” I say. “And Grendel’s getting old. If I take him for a long walk, he gives me a look that says, ‘Are you trying to kill me?’ ”
Bowman watches me. Face calm. Cheeks red from the cold.
She knows how much her silence induces people to talk. I know it too, and I know it’s a ploy. But I fall for it.
“I used to go there when I first got Grendel, and when I was still . . . you know, a mess over my losses. I just wanted something to do to distract me, so the drive over and back didn’t bother me. I have more going on now, a little more control of my life. So I prefer to just walk him here. It’s more convenient.”
“So you went over to the dog park when you were drinking more and not at your best emotionally or mentally. Is that what you’re saying?”
It feels like she’s putting words in my mouth, but I don’t know what else to say. “That sounds about right. Sure.”
“I see.”
“Is there a reason you’re curious about my dog-walking habits?”
Bowman points to Grendel. “It looks like his tank is empty.”
Grendel is pulling against the leash, trying to drag me up the stairs and back into the house.
“Feed him or whatever you need to do,” Bowman says. “Then come on back out. It’s getting late.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Our ride to the station is about as awkward as it gets.
Bowman says nothing. The local public radio station plays the news—a series of disasters in China, Africa, America. Bowman keeps her eyes on the road. The headlights illuminate the road stained by salt, the traffic going against us streaming away from downtown. But the car is warm, and I follow Bowman’s lead by keeping my mouth shut.
She pulls around to the back of the station, where marked and unmarked vehicles are scattered. I’ve been to the station once before. When Emily and Jake died, I came down to answer a few questions that the authorities in Maine needed to have cleared up. I walked in the front door, and when I gave my name, the detective handling the case locally—a woman who retired about a year ago—met me at the front door and treated me about as gently as anyone ever has. We sat in her office while I answered all of her questions.
Did your wife and son know how to swim?
Had they been kayaking before?
Why were they in Maine?
Did anyone want to hurt them?
I answered truthfully. But my mind was reeling then, like someone had placed electrodes on both sides of my head and left the juice on for too long. I probably shouldn’t have been driving. I probably shouldn’t have been allowed to shave myself. My mind swam with memories of them. Everything. Meeting Emily our senior year of college at Michigan. The three of us horseback riding at Mammoth Cave when Jake was nine. The endless hours he and I spent in the driveway shooting baskets.
When Madeline disappeared, Bowman came to my house. And while her questions then had been pointed, the story and the police interest quickly faded away. With no leads and no real evidence, Madeline’s story moved to the back of everyone’s minds.
I suspect this trip to the police station will be different.
Bowman leads me to a heavy metal door plastered with enough warnings to scare anybody off. She waves an ID card over the electronic lock and leads me through, still not speaking. We pass two uniformed cops who nod to Bowman but don’t look at me. What must they think? That Bowman is bringing in yet another pedophile or drunk driver or embezzler?
We go down a short hallway and turn right, and Bowman opens the door to a small conference room. She points for me to go inside and then speaks for the first time since we were standing in the driveway. “Do you want something to drink? Coffee? A Coke?”
“I’m okay.”
She leaves, closing the door. And I’m alone in the cold, windowless room. It has a small table, and there’s a screen in the wall they can pull down for presentations. I have nothing to do, so I sit. And wait. Fifteen minutes later, Bowman comes back, offering no apology or explanation for keeping me there.
“Is something wrong, Detective?” I ask, trying but failing to keep the impatience out of my voice.
Bowman stands at the head of the table. She looks surprised to hear me speak. “You tell me. Is there?”
“I don’t know why I’m here.”
“I’m about to tell you.” She sits down and slaps a steno pad onto the table. She clicks her pen open with an exaggerated flourish and looks at me. “I just need to follow up on our conversation from this morning. You don’t mind, do you?”
“I don’t seem to have any choice.”
S
he affects a casual air, like we’re two friends sitting in a coffee shop. “You can go if you want. Is that what you want to do? Leave?”
“I just want to know why I’m here.”
Bowman taps the pen against the pad. She looks lost in thought, like I’m not here. Until she says, “You already kind of answered one of the questions I wanted to follow up on. When we were back at the house.”
“I did?”
“I asked you about the dog park, and you admitted you used to take Grendel there.”
“ ‘Admitted,’ ” I say. “That’s a strange word to use about my habits. I don’t think I was admitting anything. I was telling you something fairly mundane I used to do with my dog.”
The pen in her long fingers taps. Tap tap tap.
“Do I need a lawyer, Detective?” I ask.
“That’s your right. Would you like to exercise it?”
“I’m just trying to understand why you care where I took my dog two or three years ago.”
Bowman stops tapping and lifts her hand in the air. “So you took Grendel to the dog park. Did you always stay inside the dog park? Or did you sometimes walk him in the neighborhood around the dog park? I know some people do that. Maybe they get bored just standing there, watching the dogs run around. Maybe they want to get some exercise themselves. Did you ever do that? Walk Grendel around the neighborhood there?”
Again, it seems like an odd question. And I know Bowman is once again building to something.
“Yes, I did. When I first got Grendel, he didn’t socialize well with other dogs. So I’d let him spend some time in the park with the other dogs, and when he’d had enough of that and started to get cranky, I’d put him on the leash and walk around the neighborhood. I work with a guy who lives a few blocks from the park, so I kind of knew that area. Grendel never liked to walk very far. I do the same thing in my neighborhood now. He didn’t really like the dog park or my attempts to get him to play well with others. So I gave up eventually.”
“And this time you were going to the dog park . . . that was about two and a half years ago or so?”
“Yes.”
“It would have been in the summer about two and a half years ago?”
“I can remember going there in the summer, yes. Summer and a little into the early fall. That was part of the appeal. The weather was nice. It was good for me to be outside. Grendel too.”
“Got it.” She pauses a moment, then says, “You see, Sophia Greenfield lived one block from the dog park. And you were going there during the time she died. So I need to know exactly where you used to walk when you went outside the park.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
It’s been so long, I’m not sure I can remember the exact route I followed.
And even if I did remember, I’m not sure I should tell Bowman. I’m not sure I should tell her anything. Ever.
But I didn’t know Sophia Greenfield. And I didn’t kill her.
“I’m going to try to remember,” I say, “and after I tell you, I’m going to leave.”
“You can leave before you tell me, if you want,” Bowman says. “I already told you that.”
“There’s a street that runs parallel to the park,” I say. “I’d start there. But I don’t remember what it was called.”
Bowman stands up. She goes over to a built-in cabinet beneath the projection screen. She opens a drawer, removes something, and comes back to the table. It’s a map of Gatewood, and she unfolds it on the table between us. Her long index finger with a nail painted light pink lands on the dog park and then slides up a fraction of an inch.
“This street? On the north side of the park?”
I study the map in the bright light. “Yes. That’s it. Cherokee Street. They’re all named after Native American tribes, right?”
“Yes. Whoever built the neighborhood wasn’t very woke. So you started on Cherokee. . . .”
“And we’d turn right on the next block.” I point to the map. “Iroquois.”
“And how long would you stay on Iroquois?”
“For a while. Three or four blocks. It dead-ends at that point. See? It dead-ends into Creek.”
“So you’re on Iroquois from the four hundred to the eight hundred block,” Bowman says. “Let’s stick to that. Sophia Greenfield lived at Five-oh-seven Iroquois. And you didn’t know her? Could she have been a student of yours? She didn’t get a degree from Commonwealth, but she took some classes there toward a master’s. She never finished it.”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “I can’t promise you I remember every student after all these years. But I don’t think so. I saw her picture online today. After you came to the house, I briefly read about her murder. I’m going to be honest with you, Detective, she looked a little familiar to me, but I haven’t been able to place her in my mind. Did she spend time in the dog park? Maybe I saw her there.”
“And you wrote a book with a freakishly detailed account of her murder.” Bowman leans back in her chair and rubs her eyes. She tosses the pen onto the table. “Here’s the problem I have, Connor. You spent time in her neighborhood. You wrote about her murder, although you claim it was a coincidence. She kind of looks familiar to you, but you don’t remember from where. And a student of yours disappeared two years ago, and you were the last person to see her alive.”
“Wait a minute,” I say. And it’s as if the room has turned upside down, done a loop de loop with me strapped into my chair and no way to get off the ride. “You can’t start laying all that on me. You talked to me back then.”
But Bowman is up and over at her magic drawer again. And I realize that she doesn’t normally just keep stuff in there. She’s planted these objects. She’s planned this whole discussion. With props.
She brings back a thick manila folder stuffed with papers. She flips it open on the table and starts paging through, turning the documents over with crisp efficiency.
“I don’t know what you’re getting at, Detective.” But even as I say it, I should have known it was coming. Madeline. Sophia. The book. Except I know Madeline is alive. And I don’t know Sophia at all.
Do I?
I run my mind back through the trips to the dog park. Admittedly I wasn’t in the most social frame of mind back then. Yes, I talked to the other dog owners, made small talk about the weather, politics, the university. The dogs.
But I rarely learned names. Never made lasting connections. No one invited me out for a drink or a coffee or a meal. I’m sure I seemed closed off, shut down. And if I gave my name, people might have even recognized it. They might have known or heard about what happened to Emily and Jake, and then I’d no longer be the quiet guy at the dog park. I’d be the “poor man whose family died.” I’d be set off by quotation marks, an object of curiosity and sympathy and even a little fear. After all, what do you say to a guy who lost his wife and son to the ocean? A guy who mopes around with his only companion, a wheezing, arthritic beagle-husky mix?
But there is something else.
There is the blue house that must have been on Iroquois. The blue house with the perfect lawn and the perfect yard. And the perfect couple inside . . .
There was something about them. . . .
“Here it is,” Bowman says, poking the paper with force. “We interviewed Sophia Greenfield’s husband, Zachary, quite extensively. He was the person who could really be Sophia’s voice after she was gone. And do you know what he told us?” She taps the paper again. “He told us Sophia was nervous. Scared even. She said there was a guy who used to walk his dog on their street in the evening, and do you know what that guy used to do?”
The perfect blue house. The perfect yard.
The blond woman. The dark-haired man with the neatly trimmed beard.
And I would see them working in the yard, the two of them, laughing together. Or through the windows of the hou
se. Watching TV as I walked by. Having a drink on the porch.
“She said he used to . . . watch them,” I say.
“She told her husband she thought the man with the dog was behaving strangely,” Bowman says. “Creeping around. Watching them. Watching her. And after she died, we all tried to find that man, but we couldn’t.” Bowman looks pleased. She smiles. “Spoiler alert, Connor. I think I just found him.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CONNOR
SUMMER, TWO AND A HALF YEARS AGO
I’ve always looked inside other people’s windows.
When I was a kid, I used to ride my bike home from basketball practice on winter evenings, the cold air rushing against my face, my legs pumping faster in the growing darkness. I passed house after house in my neighborhood, the windows glowing with an internal light, the TVs playing, the families gathering in a kitchen or a dining room. Instead of watching the sidewalk in front of me, my eyes trailed across the lawns, hoping to catch a glimpse of what went on inside.
Why?
My parents divorced when I was six. My dad came around, most of the time, and he always sent the support payments for my sister and me. I always envied those kids with complete families, the ones I imagined talking and laughing around a bountiful table. I even fantasized about the father stepping in and telling one of the kids to finish their peas or not to talk so loud. I didn’t care because the father was there, the family was complete.
I watched those houses go by, and even the blue TV glow looked like a beacon of warmth and love.
When Jake was born, I continued to look in windows. When I was on runs through our neighborhood or coming home from work, my eyes were still drawn to the light from inside other people’s houses. They looked tranquil and safe and warm. . . .
Until one day I took the garbage out to the curb at our house. And when I turned around to walk back up the driveway, one of those moments occurred—they’re rare, but they do happen—when I saw my life, my house, the way everybody else did. I saw the warm glow from the kitchen. I saw Emily holding Jake. I saw the TV glowing blue in the corner. And I understood that my life looked like those lives I’d been observing all those years. Why did I need to spy on others when my own life was the nest, the hearth, the cocoon?