It is seven o’clock in the evening, but Deputy Melinda Powell decides not to go home quite yet and instead sit with Marcus as she finalizes some work. After all, it took so long to find him; seems weird to just leave him there.
Irv has only told her tangentially what happened at the lake and she’s hoping Marcus will open up and share the rest, but the longer she sits at Irv’s desk—still in the opposite jail cell—the more certain she becomes that the likelihood of Marcus uttering even a single word is very low.
“Do you like Thai food?” she asks him.
Marcus looks up.
“Thai food. Do you like it?”
“I guess so.”
“You must be hungry for some hot food, living out there in the woods like that for a week or more. What did you eat, anyway?”
“There was no Thai food.”
“Well . . . you’re in luck then. Because they deliver. The Thai people. Who I think might be Irish.”
Melinda orders a few appetizers and three main courses. It’s much more than they need, but she can put it on the station’s tab and squirrel away the leftovers in the fridge, which is now working again.
When the food arrives she makes Marcus a plate and hands him chopsticks from her adjoining cell.
“Irv says the Thai don’t use chopsticks; they use a spoon and sometimes a fork to push the food onto the spoon.”
Marcus nods as he uses the chopsticks.
“I don’t want you killing yourself with those or trying to make a prison break or anything, OK?”
She accepts his silence as agreement.
Melinda makes small talk as Marcus eats. “I doubt a lot of people—even the most highly motivated—have what it takes to off themselves with chopsticks. They’re quite brittle,” she says. “I guess you’d have to bunch them together and then hold the sharpened tips against your chest right between the ribs and have a good fall on them. Impale yourself through the heart. That would be the winner.”
Marcus stops chewing and looks at her.
“You didn’t hear it from me, though. In fact, give them back when you’re done, OK?”
Melinda notices that Marcus, who had been utterly expressionless since being placed in the jail cell, now has something akin to a smile on his face.
“What are you getting all hysterical about?” she asks.
“Your sheriff was right. You Americans keep talking, don’t you? I’d never really noticed.”
“You’re just used to us by now, that’s all.”
Sheriff Irving Wylie surrendered his three-bedroom Victorian in the divorce with an understanding that—when the house was eventually sold—he’d receive half the sale price. He didn’t mind moving out and liked the idea of his daughter having the stability of the home she’d been living in since they moved there fifteen years before.
He bought a two-bedroom in a modern building with an elevator and a decent view of the distant hills from his fourth-floor balcony. The condo is tastefully furnished. The living room has a blue area rug, an indigo velvet chair of a modern design, a tan leather sofa, and a wingback armchair in a green patterned fabric. The coffee table is glass. There are bookshelves along the walls filled with both novels and academic tomes. A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin. On Law, Morality, and Politics by Thomas Aquinas. Santaland Diaries by David Sedaris.
Sigrid reaches for the Sedaris book but stops when her eyes fall on pictures of his ex-wife and their daughter at all different ages. There is a Yamaha acoustic guitar in the corner of the room slightly askew on a steel stand.
Taking her shoes off, she picks up the guitar and flops onto the sofa with it, laying it across her lap. Irv pours two glasses of red. She strums her E chord. “You planning to wear that gun all night?” she asks him.
“That’s got to be the sexiest question I’ve ever been asked.”
Irv walks over and hands her the glass. He places his on the coffee table. He slips off his shoes, his gun belt, and his outer shirt. His white T-shirt has seen better days. He sits on the velvet chair and crosses his legs.
“To a job well done,” he says, raising a glass.
“You’re not done,” Sigrid says.
“What does that mean?”
“You told Melinda and Reverend Green to come up with a plan. She said they did.”
“Oh?”
“You’re going to go back to that church and tell the people there what really happened. And you have to be humble and respectful and make them believe you.”
“You mean the black church?”
“I mean the church filled with your constituents. Reverend Green says they need to hear from you. They’re in pain and, he believes, only the truth will help. You’re going to tell them what Marcus told you.”
“Swell.”
“Can you play this thing?” Sigrid asks.
“I can almost play ‘Handle with Care’ by the Traveling Wilburys. Do you know it?”
“No. Are you going to press charges against Marcus?”
“No.”
“You believe his story?”
“Turns out that it doesn’t matter. Apparently you told Melinda to find out what Chuck—our one and only eyewitness—was doing on the street corner when he saw Marcus run over to Lydia. As it happens, he was selling crack.”
“How do you know he was selling crack?”
“She asked him. Oh yeah, and she wanted me to tell you that sometimes the investigative question and the interview question are actually the same. Does that mean something?”
“It means she’s growing,” Sigrid says, smiling. She hands Irv the guitar and slips her feet beneath her. She sips the wine.
“The assistant district attorney says we can’t use Chuck. Melinda has also been up to the sixth floor of that building and she couldn’t find anything other than a lot of footprints. And while we could probably match some of them with Marcus’s and Lydia’s shoes, he’s not denying they were there. What we can’t do is prove that Marcus pushed her and since no one here has Smilla’s Sense of Dust, those footprints aren’t going to tell us what happened by themselves.” Irv gently strums the D-C-G chords of the song. “That, and Melinda probably stepped on some of them. The ADA says the case against Marcus is too weak. Ambiguity favors the defendant because of the presumption of innocence.”
“It didn’t for Jeffrey.”
“That is not lost on me,” he says, trying for the tricky B7 chord.
“I leave tomorrow,” Sigrid says.
“I know.”
“I’m going to take a shower. How about you bring that guitar into the bathroom and sing your song to me?”
“You won’t regret it,” says Irv.
Faith
The next morning, at the station, Sigrid makes her rounds and shakes the hands of various officers by way of good-bye as Melinda leads them to the jail cell in the back, which smells like peanuts on account of the pad thai. Melinda explains that Sigrid’s mentorship has meant a lot to her and has really changed her thinking about investigation, her own career path, women in the police, and how best not to lose people in bathrooms. Melinda says she wants to be like Sigrid when she gets “old” and she hopes they can stay in touch. Sigrid makes her rounds and shakes the hands of various officers.
In the back, Marcus is sitting on his mattress with his feet up and arms crossed and does not stand when the cell door is opened.
“You are free to go. According to the sheriff you are not provably guilty and should go away. And never return.”
Marcus looks to Sigrid, who explains that they do indeed have tickets for Norway and should now go. And they need to get moving because they have to take a bus and then three planes.
“You’re carrying the guitar,” she says to him.
“Everything here is the same as it was when I was by the lake. Nothing’s changed. If they release me, now that they have me, there will be riots.”
“The sheriff and Mr. Green have a plan to solve all of that.”
> “What kind of a plan?”
“A good one.”
“How do you know?”
“The sheriff stopped talking for a while and was really listening.”
Irv waits in the parking lot for Reverend Fred Green. They both decided, this morning, that it would be best if they rode in Fred’s car for a change. A sensible light blue Toyota Camry pulls up beside Irv, who is dressed in his sheriff’s outfit but without his sidearm. It may be a violation of a rule not to carry it while on duty. Luckily he doesn’t care.
Irv pops open the door and settles into the passenger seat. The interior smells like Newports and aftershave.
“Is this a 2005?” Irv asks.
“No, 2004,” Fred says. “Same front end.”
“Toy-o-ta,” Irv says to the passing trees outside as they head toward the church.
They drive without the static of the police radio or the pleasure of the stereo. At a long light Irv chases the quiet away by pointing to a CD sticking its silver tongue out of the slot.
“What are you feeding that thing?”
“Bill Withers.”
“Did you know,” Irv says, “that ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’ is only a touch over two minutes long? That’s half the length of your average pop song.”
“Goes to show what a man can do in two minutes if he does it right,” says Fred Green.
“I was just making small talk, Fred.”
“You should be thinking about what you’re going to say.”
“It’ll come to me.”
“I’m not playing, Sheriff.”
“I know perfectly well what I’m going to say, Reverend. I just don’t know how I’m going to say it. It’ll come to me. Always does.”
Sunday Services at First Baptist are scheduled for nine-thirty in the morning with a Bible study class at eleven. Normally these early-morning services draw around fifty people unless there is an occasion. Today, with a few calls from Fred to key people in the community, there are more than triple that number.
Jeffrey Simmons and Lydia Jones were both baptized here and both laid to rest here too; beside each other in the cemetery three and a half miles to the northeast. Lydia’s parents had bought plots for themselves years ago to save money. Their daughter and grandson used them instead.
Fred and Irv crunch into the reverend’s personal parking space by the door. They are forty minutes early but the parking lot is already a third full. Irv sits in the car and looks out at the entirely black congregation making their way inside past a half-dozen men, smartly dressed and smoking like high-schoolers by the trash can. Others mill around outside talking. There is a thick pane of glass between Irv and what they are saying to each other.
“A lot of kids,” Irv says, more to himself than the reverend.
“It’s a church, Sheriff.”
“Yeah, I know—I just had this picture in my head of a room full of adults with stern faces ready for a serious discussion about politics or something.”
“Maybe the pictures in your head need to be adjusted.”
Irv whistles. “Wow. Did you and my ex-wife attend the same course or something? I mean . . . damn, Fred.”
“All those kids out there, Irv. You’re their sheriff. Go meet them.”
Irv looks at them running around, skidding about on the tiny pebbles of the parking lot, their shirttails coming out and their mothers trying to tuck them back in while they’re on the move.
“They’re all so short,” Irv says.
Fred Green leads Irv inside, and together they sit in the pastor’s office as the parishioners file in and silence themselves. The reverend leads the service as Irving sits to the side in the chancel like a choirboy. While Irv waits for his turn to speak it occurs to him—the proverbial pebble dropping—that perhaps he should have prepared what he was going to say and maybe Fred was right.
A lot of people do that, he’s read. Prepared people. People who go home afterward feeling good about themselves for what they’d said rather than what they might have said, which they think about to avoid the actual memory of what they did say. As Fred speaks to the congregation, Irv imagines what it might be like to be one of those people.
And then he stops thinking about it because it’s never going to happen.
Reverend Fred Green wiggles two fingers at Irv, indicating that he’s to step to the lectern now. Irv removes his hat and leaves it on the chair behind him.
He shakes Fred’s hand and Fred whispers, “John Eight: thirty-two, Sheriff,” as Irv trades places with him. “And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
“Yeah, I was thinking that too,” Irv says.
Irv looks out at them without speaking. The audience is silent. They are waiting for something. He rests his hands on the edges of the lectern and slides them back and forth and back again, feeling the space where Fred had, moments earlier, done exactly the same thing. The edges are still warm from the reverend’s hands. In the audience, in the fourth row to Irv’s right, sits the Jones family. Beside them, the Simmons family.
And that is when Irv figures out how to begin:
“If you ever get the chance,” he says to the packed room of a hundred and fifty faces, “to place your hands on this podium here, you can feel how the edges are slightly worn down. You can’t see it from where you’re sitting because of the angle. Can’t really even see it well from here. You have to feel it. They’ve been polished smooth by speaker after speaker in preparation and practice and worry about what to say. The wood is worn down by the emotions of people trying to talk meaningfully from this spot. I didn’t have this thought or know this until right now. That’s because . . . well . . . because I’ve never placed my hands here before. Which is, in a roundabout way, what I’m getting at. Despite being your sheriff I have never been here before to try and say something meaningful like everyone else who’s worn this thing down over time. And as I stand here, I have to ask myself, Why? Why didn’t I come here earlier?”
Irv pauses. The children are fidgeting. Older women are fanning themselves. The air conditioning is on but it is no match for the high summer sun, the worsted wool, and the full room.
“I remember thinking,” Irv continues, “that Jeffrey was killed across an invisible line separating one county from another, which meant it wasn’t my jurisdiction. There were so many emotions around it that I didn’t want to touch it, and I was glad my people weren’t implicated. Two months later Lydia died. That was on my side of the line. But somehow I didn’t let it touch me. I treated it as a mystery to be solved while keeping my distance. That made it a second time I didn’t come here to talk to you. I find this painful to admit, but I think the reason I didn’t come talk to you is because I was afraid to. I mean . . . I didn’t think anything bad was going to happen, but I was afraid of all the emotions. The anger. The grief. The way that people who speak from their hearts can sometimes say some pretty mean things and lay some heavy blame, and sometimes the wiser move is to avoid the conversation because it’ll only make things worse. I went through that in my marriage. But I also know that my marriage failed, so I obviously did something wrong.
“I don’t think that being afraid of all those emotions makes me a bad man, but I do think it might make me a coward. I feared walking in here and being treated like a villain in a story I didn’t write. My mistake, my failure as your sheriff and as a man and as a Christian, was thinking I had a choice. That somehow it might all go away and blend into all the other noise. What my cowardice proves to me is that I lacked faith. Faith in God, and faith in you. Because what I also learned from my failed marriage is that angry people, people who shout at you and accuse you, and vilify you, often do it to try and change you. Which means they think it’s possible. Which means they have faith in you. Which means they can imagine the New Jerusalem. And to avoid that, to walk away from that, is to turn your back on the Kingdom of God.
“I can’t help but wonder,” Irv says, “whether I might have made a small d
ifference to Lydia if I’d have come here when Jeffrey was killed, or maybe when that grand jury verdict was read out. I wonder if, had she seen me here trying to serve this community better by being a part of it, whether she might have had more hope. I don’t know. But what I need to do now is tell you truthfully what I know.
“Lydia Bethany Jones, Ph.D.,” Irv concludes, “was not murdered. She also did not commit suicide, if anyone has that thought. It is my conclusion—backed by the evidence we have collected—that she accidentally fell off an unfinished building from the sixth floor. The reason she was there at all was to try to help a friend understand something about Jeffrey’s world and what that verdict meant to her. Something that was, for him and at that moment, beyond his capacity to understand. In trying to explain that world—with an actual view above it—she lost her footing and fell. The man she was with tried to save her and he failed. He is, right now, devastated to the point of self-destruction, because he loved her even if he didn’t understand her—though in my experience that’s often the way it is for the lot of us.
“It occurs to me now, as I’m telling you all this, that Professor Jones died as she lived: as a teacher. In her last publication, which I’ve read, she expresses a loss of faith in what the future might bring for this country. In her head, she was not convinced that we can fundamentally change. But in her deeds, in her actions—and to me, that means from her heart—she risked her life to bring understanding and grace to the world by giving everything she had to change one single mind. And that is not the action of someone who has lost faith. It is the essence of faith itself.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come to see you earlier. For what it’s worth, Lydia sounds like she was a remarkable woman. I wish I’d known her.”
A Misunderstanding
Morten Ødegård’s children haven’t been in his car together in more than thirty years. He can’t help but enjoy it.
Sigrid sits up front with him and Marcus sits in the back, the opposite of how it used to be. Before they arrived, Sigrid had written him a long email—and called to be sure he’d received it—before they boarded the plane in America so that Morten would understand and be prepared for the gravity of the situation they now face as a family. His role, as father, might have been to collect them at the terminal and receive them gravely while transporting them to their childhood home for a period of reflection and reconciliation. But Morten Ødegård is a single parent with his healthy children in his car beside him and he cannot remember the last time he has been so unconditionally happy.
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