Bix had been in that guest house. He had been with that woman. In this place. The guest house was theirs. I should never have heard of it. I should never have come here.
Would I ever get to leave?
Of course the prospect of going home had its drawbacks, too.
I was stuck here. Not physically, not in Michigan, in the vacation mecca of Mackinac, surrounded by fudge shops. Stuck here in limbo until Sheriff Barrows knew why Bix’s hands had ever laid upon a surface inside the park, but also until I knew what the rest of my life held.
He’d better move fast. The troops were getting thin on the ground.
Malloy.
Paris.
Martha.
Dev.
I tried to set the problem in my mind like a photo. Wide lens on a scene with the shore, the house, the kayaks leaning up against the picnic table, the chairs down at the fire pit, the slim curled grin of land that protruded out into the water. And then I narrowed the focus down and down, until all that remained was the side of the house or one edge of a lone chair at the water’s edge. The periphery, gone. The context, eliminated.
Sam or Hillary. Was that what we were down to? Sam, who I’d been shut in with overnight without even the slightest concern? Or Hillary, who had made herself scarce all weekend, avoiding us all? The guy who attributed the loss of his life’s work to advice he got from the murdered man? Or the woman who claimed to love the dead guy but who might have lost him if he’d actually known her a little better?
Who else was left? Martha? What kind of trouble could she have caused? But she hadn’t been anywhere near the bottle of booze that had caused such trouble for Dev.
I dozed off, then woke to the sound of a phone ringing, Warren’s voice answering. It was time. Time to get myself put back together and go see to the end of this.
I was reaching for the door when someone knocked on the other side.
“Yes?” I said. The robe lay on the floor.
“Sheriff Barrows wants us down at the station,” Warren said through the door.
“Us?”
“He sounded peeved,” Warren said.
I had told Barrows that Hoyt doubted his ability to solve the murder. Did we have to come to the carpet for that? Or had something happened? My first thoughts went to Dev. Then Paris. What if something had gone wrong with Martha and the baby? God, where was Sam? Hillary? All of it came rushing back.
I didn’t want to go. I’d relaxed since being at Warren’s house. I felt safe and—protected? Cared for.
I was afraid of that, too. No. I was afraid of that more than anything. It was definitely time to go.
Chapter Thirty
The lobby of the police station was empty. Warren and I were passed through to the back and escorted into one of the cold interrogation rooms, together.
Warren’s knee bounced under the table as we waited. I caught his eye, and he stopped, glancing down at the logo on the warm fleece he’d lent me. Straits Point International Dark Sky Park, it read in white stitching. My jeans were still damp at the seams.
The door opened. Barrows strode in and motioned for Warren. “Just the man I’m looking for,” he said. He pointed to me. “You stay here. I have plenty to talk to you about, too.”
Warren went with Barrows, throwing a last encouraging smile at me over his shoulder before the door closed behind them. I had been fine with sitting still until the sheriff had taken Warren away, but now I felt caged. I stood and paced around the table once, went to the door and listened at it, took another turn around the table. I had a bad feeling and couldn’t figure out where it was coming from, other than not knowing what was happening. What had happened already. So many lives hung in the balance. They were not lives I had cared about or even known about four days ago, but now we were strung up together. Bound, in the way of hostages.
The door opened. I hurried to sit down.
Officer Cooley entered and sat at the corner of the table closest to the door. She opened her notebook and lay a pen across the empty page, crossed her arms, and finally looked at me.
“Haven’t seen you in a while,” I said.
“Yeah, I was off duty when you sent the last one to the ER,” she said.
“I had no part in— Is he—”
“He’s alive. His girlfriend is not fine, but she’s probably going to make it.” She shot me a look. “And in case you’ve lost count, that first guy is still dead.”
“So what was it? What happened to Dev?”
“Let’s wait ’til Sheriff gets here,” she said. “He’s the one who gets to ask the questions.”
“I don’t care who asks the questions,” I said. “I just want answers to some of them.”
She picked up her pen and leaned over her notebook. I peeked, caught a glimpse of a little dog sketched in the corner of the page. Cooley could be a hard case. Would not say a foul word to save her life and then when she got near me, something barbed and cruel inside her came out. Something about her reminded me of my sister. My big sister who loved me, cared for me, took care of me—and yet charged me dearly for every favor in what she might say about me and my life choices. It had always been this way. Five years older, she treated me like the kid she was sitting whose parents were late to come back. “What’s your deal, Cooley?”
She looked up, surprised. “Maybe I don’t like people coming into my town and messing it up.”
I thought maybe she didn’t like people coming into her town and reminding her that her town wasn’t the only place in the world. She didn’t like the park much, either. In the same way, the depth of the universe must remind her of a shallow life.
“Your town, frankly, can go to hell.” Nice enough place, but I guess the world’s largest front porch didn’t have a seat for me.
The door opened again. Barrows made himself comfortable at what I had come to think of as his usual spot. Cooley flipped the page on her notebook and sat back. “OK,” Barrows said. “Your friend Hoyt shouldn’t have sprung you like he did this morning. I could have him arrested for aiding and abetting, if I had half a mind to—”
“But I wasn’t under—”
“But I don’t, and now you stink a lot less than you did when I put you in there, so that’s all right. Now. Let’s get back to where we were yesterday. In fact, let’s start at the beginning.”
We started at the beginning. The time I arrived at the guest house, in which order I met the others, what I’d heard and learned about each of them as the afternoon passed and I had decided to stay on. Each step drew us closer to the natural end of the story. I began to live in dread of it.
“And you were there to celebrate an anniversary?” Barrows said.
“Celebrate,” I said. “No. That was never the right word. It’s really not right now that I know how his handprint got left here.”
“Hoyt filled us in,” he said. “He was here with another woman?”
“This trip—it was for her,” I said. Cooley had stopped note taking and gazed upon me with what could only be pity. I glared back until she started writing again. “I came here to . . . I’m not sure. Honor—such an Army word. Recognize the little bit of who my husband had been in life, and move on, if I could. But it turns out I was wrong to hold on to even that tiny shred of him. I never should have come here, and he never meant me to.”
“And you had no prior relationship with any of those people? Think hard,” he said. “Not through work, church, met on vacation or—”
“I don’t know them,” I said. “Well, I didn’t. I feel like I know them now.”
“Well enough to have the will of one of them in your suitcase?”
They’d searched my room again? Because of Dev? I’d forgotten about the will. I didn’t know what to say, what to admit to. The truth seemed, at last, like the best bet. “I stole it.”
He nodded. “And why was that?”
“I thought,” I said. “I don’t know—I thought there might be something in there that would help me fig
ure out what was going on.”
He let my words drift in the air for a moment. “And why would you need to figure out what’s going on? Bit of a busybody, aren’t you? A voyeur, maybe?” Barrows said. “I heard you were a photographer.”
Barely true at this point, and he’d said the word distastefully, as though he’d mixed up photographers with bank robbers. Or pornographers. “I’ll allow that I own a camera,” I said. I had, anyway, but maybe it was going to be lost to finger-quotes evidence, as Sam had worried about his bottles of wine.
“We took a look at that camera, as a matter of fact. But there are no photos on it,” he said. “Strange, wouldn’t you say? Where are the photos?”
I looked between them, waiting for a question I could understand.
“The memory card was professional-grade wiped,” Cooley said. “The tech guy took a look.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “No, that was a brand-new memory card in the camera. It’s never been used.”
“You bought it for the trip but haven’t used it?” Barrows said. “People come up here with cameras, they usually don’t hold themselves back.”
I had been trying to tell the truth here. He was begging me to lie. “It’s not brand new. Look, the truth is I don’t take photos anymore,” I said. “I see them everywhere I look, but I can’t—I haven’t, at least.”
“Haven’t what?”
“Pulled the trigger,” I said. “Not since Bix died.”
“Interesting choice of words,” Barrows said. “What did you take photos of before you stopped?”
“Anything,” I said. A smear of paint on a wall that shouldn’t have been there. A shadow falling sharp across a lonely street. A face lit up by a neon sign in the ramen shop window. Chicago provided the canvas. I was drawn to a shiny surface or a rain puddle reflecting a street scene, to scratches and dents and other textures of life. “Whatever caught my eye. Whatever I wanted to pay attention to.” The image of Bix’s stretched smile came to me. Whatever I wanted to understand.
Someone knocked on the door. Barrows winked at me and stood up. He disappeared through the door and closed it behind him.
After a bit of silence, Cooley spoke up. “So you . . . stayed in the jail last night? Rather than go outside in the dark? Looks like you got a cozy place to stay tonight. Whose sweatshirt are you wearing there?”
“You panty-thieves stole all my clothes,” I said. “Warren just—”
“War-ren,” she sang, schoolyard-style.
“—let me sleep in his guest room for a few hours. He’s being nice. So little of that going around,” I said pointedly.
“That’s not him being nice. That’s just him being a hero.”
I sat back. I didn’t want a hero. I’d already outlived one, just barely. “I don’t need anyone to save me.”
“Warren Hoyt’s known for plucking drowning things out of the lake,” she said. “You’re just one more.”
Was I drowning? “Officer Cooley, I think you’ve mistaken me for some kind of damsel in distress.” I glanced toward the door, willing it to open and for things to get moving again. Shadows shifted in the strip of light under the door. “What drowning things has he saved?”
“I was thinking of you more as . . . a sack of kittens nobody wants, but prove me wrong and I’ll apologize.”
“What drowning things?” I said.
“Oh, he rescues people all the time. Mostly drunk b-holes trying to impress their friends on the lake. He’s in the papers practically every summer,” she said, “getting a plaque from somebody.”
She couldn’t even say butt. Yet she had said cutting things to me, harsh things. True things.
In my visits to the park’s info station, Warren’s office there, and now his home, I hadn’t seen any plaques. But then maybe I hadn’t found the right room. God, what if they were on his bedroom walls?
“Is that why you don’t like him?” I said. “He gets too many gold stars, instead of you? He outshines the brightest Emmet County tin star?”
“I didn’t say I didn’t like him,” she said, looking horrified. “Nothing wrong with saving people, even if they are b—”
“B-holes, yes, so then why the attitude?”
Cooley flicked at the corners of the pages in her notebook with her pen. “It’s nothing to do with him. Or you, even.”
“What then?”
“They told me today, official. They won’t get me another pup to train. No room in the budget.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. Are they going to make you ride with another officer, then? The human kind?”
“No, that’s all fine. But— I mean, I don’t want anyone in the car with me if it’s not a dog.”
“But surely a person is better company—well, no. I guess not some people.”
“Dogs are great company,” she said. Her eyes lit bright with enthusiasm as she started to expound—we were suddenly friends again—and then the door opened.
Barrows pointed another officer into the room. He carried a laptop in and set it up with the screen facing me.
“What’s this?” I sat up. The image on the screen was black-and-white, a video, stilled. I recognized the hallway downstairs, the cells lined up two and two, and my own sleeping form curled up on the slab.
“When you’re ready,” Barrows said. The officer, young, buzz-cut blonde—this one’s name tag said Jahlmersson—hit a key on the keyboard. The tech guy, I presumed.
The image didn’t move, but then I did. The me captured inside the cell did. A foot twitched, then kicked, my folded arms squeezed more tightly around my chest.
I looked up at Barrows. He nodded me back to the video.
And then the video-me sat up. The footage had a tint of green in the highlight areas, and so my face appeared pale, sick. The details were lost in the grainy footage. All I could tell was that I was moving, first seated and jumpy, then on my feet and erratic, walking in one direction until I encountered a wall and then another direction. The video had no sound, but I could see my feet shuffling, see my lips moving.
In the interrogation room, watching the footage surrounded by Cooley, Barrows, this Jahlmersson kid, I was cold, despite Warren’s fleece. I did not like myself in pictures, had avoided video of myself as best as I could all my life. I stayed behind the camera for a reason. Watching the green-faced girl on the video sent me somewhere else for a moment, but I brought myself back—click—in time to watch her do what I knew she would do. She went to the door and twined her fingers through the wire hashes of the cell and spoke—
He did this. He did.
But of course the video mouth moved without a soundtrack. I looked like a fish out of water, mouth gasping. She stood at the cell door for a long time, and then stopped, looked about her, returned quickly to the slab, and curled herself upon it.
“That’s enough,” Barrows said.
Cooley’s pen, which she had been holding between her teeth, fell to the table. Jahlmersson hit the space bar on the keyboard to pause the video, picked up his laptop, and headed for the door. Barrows marched around the table until he was directly on the other side of it from me, then leaned on his hands. A slick of sweat had collected on his upper lip.
“Now,” he said. “What was that?”
“A bad dream,” I said.
“A bad weekend,” he said. “I’m no expert, but that looked like sleepwalking to me. Let’s start again. At the beginning.”
Chapter Thirty-One
We started back at the beginning, again, the sheriff and I—back to the moment when I had entered the guest house and stood looking at the pool of water dripping from the pair of swim trunks hanging from the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. Back to the moment before Dev sauntered regally down to meet me. My breath caught, thinking of myself, there at the bottom of the stairs receiving a visit from royalty. I hadn’t known. I’d thought I’d already gone through the worst of it. I had been apologizing and cringing for all that time, wishing away the one terr
ible thing Bix had done that had wiped out all the other good he’d put out into the world. Fine, one of the few terrible things. But the other things had only been done to me, and I had forgiven him. Expediently, as with an eviction, which is what it was.
The sheriff and I went over the story and over it again, but I had stopped being able to tell new information. I couldn’t tell the story the way Sheriff Barrows wanted to hear it: in full, linearly, competently, using the words he expected, that he needed, to hear. When I stumbled over something or got something out of order, he made me start over at the swim trunks, Dev on the stairs. I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it anymore.
“Could I have a drink of water?”
“Let’s just get through this one time,” he said.
“Come on, Jeff,” Cooley said.
He frowned at her. “Fine. Go get her some water.”
“Let’s all take a break,” Cooley said. “Maybe if she had a break, used the bathroom, got some water, maybe got some sleep, we could do better tomorrow?”
We’d been at it for a few hours now. She shouldn’t promise anyone that I would come back better rested. It was a dead end, that promise.
A few minutes later, I emerged from the ladies’ room to find Cooley guarding the door, a bottle of water in her hand. She watched me gulp down half of it. “Better?”
“Thanks,” I said. “For that. I don’t know if I can tell it any better, though. It’s weird how fast stuff leaks out of your memory.”
“You’re doing OK. Seen worse, for sure. Like—well, I shouldn’t name names.”
“Hillary? I bet Hillary is the worst.”
She smiled. “She’s pretty bad. I don’t think she was paying attention to anything other than her good-looking boyfriend.” She looked at me shrewdly. “But you were paying attention—pretty well, actually, even if you weren’t taking the pictures you wanted to take.”
I drank down the rest of the water and then turned to the water fountain to refill it. “You can see how well it’s working out for me.”
“What if you told it using pictures? Like, instead of words?”
Under a Dark Sky Page 25