by Tim Johnston
“I know what they say he did. News travels fast along certain channels. And if there’s a bigger group of gossips you’d have to prove it to me.”
She looked down at the water bottle the woman had given her. She twisted the cap to break the plastic seal but did not remove it.
“As a father,” the lawyer said, and when he didn’t go on she looked up. Trevor sitting there, not quite looking at her. “As a father, under the same circumstances, I can’t say I wouldn’t have done the same thing. Not that I expect that to console you.”
She didn’t know what to say to that.
Trevor adjusted his glasses. He cleared his throat. “It may be a poor time to ask,” he said, “but have you heard anything more about the investigation?”
She told him about the sheriff coming to see her at the house and showing her the pictures.
“He brought you a photo array?”
“Yes.”
“To your house?”
“Yes.”
Trevor frowned, watching her. “And was he there?”
“Sorry?”
“The boy who attacked you. Was he in the photo array.”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t say. They all looked like the same boy to me.”
“Well, don’t you worry about that. It doesn’t do anybody any good if you’re not one hundred percent certain.”
She looked at him, her heart suddenly thudding. “Like Dad was?” she said.
Trevor sat watching her. “How do you know he wasn’t certain?”
“Because he didn’t find evidence. Hard evidence. He found some boy with scratches on his face.”
“Yes,” said the lawyer. “But how do you know that boy didn’t say something to your father? Didn’t admit to it?”
“At gunpoint?”
Trevor almost smiled. Then he looked off toward a bookshelf that ran floor to ceiling, each shelf jammed tight with law books.
“A professor of mine used to say Justice is blind,” he said, “but she also can’t see worth a shit.” He turned back to her. Adjusted his glasses again.
“I guess I’m not sure what that means,” she said.
“It means,” he began, and stopped. Looking at her more keenly. “It means your dad loved nothing more in this world than you, Audrey. And he knew as well as anyone how the system works, and how it doesn’t work. And the clock was ticking, as you know. The clock was ticking.” He shook his head. “I believe he believed he was doing the best thing he could do as a man. As a father. And in my opinion that’s the only thing you need to remember about that. All right?”
She watched him. Then she nodded. “All right.”
“Good,” he said. “Now let’s get to what you came here for.”
He read it aloud, glancing up to meet her eye from time to time, and when he was finished he folded his hands on top of it and sat looking at her.
She didn’t know what she was supposed to say, or do.
“I don’t think he had any savings,” she said. “I think he used everything to pay the hospital bills.”
“Yes, I suspect you’re right about that.”
“And there’s about ten unopened letters from the bank at home. I think about the mortgage.”
Trevor looked down at his desk and nodded. “There’s just nothing like illness to take everything a man’s got right out from under him. Illness and injury. No one is as ready for it as they think they are, and most aren’t even close to ready.” He looked up again. “Be that as it may, and however things shake out financially, Audrey, clearly nothing was more important to him than you finishing college and getting your degree.”
She nodded.
“And what about that boy,” she said.
“What boy?”
“The one he went down there and shot.”
“What about him?”
“Do you think he could go after the house, or anything like that?”
“You mean as compensation for damages?”
“Yes.”
“Possibly. I’m no expert in Iowa law, but I suppose he could get a judgment down there which could result in a lien against the property.”
“A lien?”
“Yes. Meaning, the amount of the damages would be due at the sale of the house.”
Audrey was silent.
“But I don’t think you need to worry about that, Audrey. He’d have to be one dumb buckaroo to go anywhere near a court of law, under the circumstances.”
“Or innocent.”
The lawyer smiled but said nothing.
She turned her father’s watch on her wrist until the crystal was faceup—its tick-tick sound now synced with the movements of its second hand—but when she let go it all slipped away again in a silvery, top-heavy slump. She’d already taken up too much of the lawyer’s time.
“Can I ask you one more thing?” she said.
“Of course.”
“I was just wondering—” she began. Then began again: “I was just wondering if you were involved with a case of his, from ten years ago.”
Trevor adjusted his glasses. “The Holly Burke case?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you mean professionally, as a lawyer?”
“Yes, sir.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“And he didn’t talk to you about it—my dad?”
“Not that I remember. A lot of people talked about it—everybody talked about it. But not your dad.” Trevor waited. “Why do you ask?”
That yellow hair, that long fine girl’s hair streaming in the fast water, just hanging in the light as Caroline swam against the current, as she fought to get back to the car, back to Audrey . . .
“Audrey?” said the lawyer, and she looked at him. She shook her head.
Through the door, or the walls, a phone began to chirp and then it stopped chirping and she could hear the woman, the secretary, speaking.
Audrey looked again at the photograph on the wall.
“How are the twins doing?” she said, and he turned to look at the photograph too.
“Costing me a fortune but doing great.” Smiling when he turned back to her, the smile of a father. He got to his feet. “I’ll walk you out,” he said.
29
He’d damn near missed it—not only the funeral but the news itself, all of it. He hadn’t watched the evening news in years, but for some reason, that Saturday—maybe it was those two girls, the Sutter girl and her friend; maybe there’d been some new development—he’d turned it on, and boom, there it was, the top story: Local ex-sheriff Tom Sutter dead at the age of fifty-one.
Son of a bitch.
He’d thought to call out to someone to come look at this but there was no one to call out to.
Three days later—just six days since he’d talked to Sutter outside the hospital in Rochester—Gordon got out his suit and he worked his tie into a knot at his throat and he wiped the dust from his shoes and he drove the van with its new heater core out to the funeral home and slipped in a few minutes late and took a seat at the back.
Old dusty church smell in the overheated room. Smell of bodies giving off heat, perfume, sweat. Thick smell of flowers. He saw profiles he recognized, backs of heads. Ladies sniffling into tissues. He did not expect to see Rachel Young in the crowd, or her son, and he didn’t.
The coffin was white oak with brass handles, flowers on the curve of the lid. The blown-up photo on the easel was his campaign picture from eight years back, when he’d had to run to keep his job. Before he lost all that weight.
Deputies and cops and sheriffs sat in their uniforms, Ed Moran among them, a sheriff down in Iowa now, and Wayne Halsey, Sutter’s replacement up here. Halsey taking the podium now to tell a quick story, with the mic pushed aside because he didn’t need a mic, and though the story had some laughs built into it, by the end Halsey had to wrap up and step away from the podium before his voice let him down. He was followed by Sutter’s older brother, John, a talky guy with a tanned face, tellin
g about when they were boys, then young men, then men . . . and when he finally went back to his seat in the front row Gordon saw what he guessed was the back of the girl’s head. Dark, glossy hair combed down straight. More family seated to either side of her. Grandparents, maybe. He expected the girl to get up and talk but she didn’t. Finally the director walked to the podium and asked for the pallbearers to meet him at the side of the building.
Gordon sat in the van until the last of the cars and trucks and cruisers had filed out behind the hearse and then he pulled out of the lot and brought up the rear at a good distance, and when they reached the grounds he parked on the shoulder with a few other cars. The mourners ahead of him all took the path to the right but he turned left, following a path that had not been cleared, and when he reached the intersection of a third path he swept the snow from the iron bench there and sat and watched from that distance as the mourners gathered under the blue canopy, some taking chairs, the rest standing.
Old brown leaves chattering in the oak trees. The far-off call of a crow somewhere.
The coffin had already been placed on the straps over the vault and there was no dirt in sight but only the apron of AstroTurf around the grave, bright green and fake in the snow, in the cold. The skirt of the canopy rippling like the side fins of a fish, the roof filling with wind and whopping as though it would pull free of its ropes and fly, but it didn’t, it held. The preacher or whatever he was stood before them in a black overcoat, and Gordon could hear the man’s voice if not his words, and anyway he didn’t speak long before all said amen and then came the ratcheting sound of the lowering mechanism carrying loud and clear across the snow, and he stood up from the bench and walked on.
The stand of oaks that once marked the far border of the cemetery now marked the border between the old grounds and the new grounds, and a white marble stone that had once been the only one out here, ten years ago, had since been joined by twenty-three other stones, all shapes and colors. None of them as old as hers and none of the souls they named as young.
He got down on his haunches and ran his bare fingertips over the engraved words.
Holly Catherine Burke
Beloved Daughter
Two dates and a dash between them. A whole life in that dash. From first breath with blood on her little face to her last. From water to water. Nineteen when she died and almost a stranger by then, but here she is no age at all. She is a smile, she is big green eyes looking up at you. She is giggles. She is the limp little body fitted to your chest, the head that falls into place on your neck as you carry her up the stairs. She is the smell of her face when you kiss her good night.
You could curse God if there was anything left of him to curse. If he were not already dead and gone. In the end it’s you. Just you. You had one thing to do with your life and that was to protect her. To keep her safe.
And you did not. You did not.
30
When the knock came at the aluminum door, a quick rap on the square of glass, the man at the desk looked up from his work and did not wave the other man in until he’d bent once again to his calculator and his receipts. The room was in fact the interior of an old worksite trailer that had been converted into an office, and whenever a body was added or subtracted from it, or crossed from one end to the other, it teetered on its tires like a balance scale. The trailer made its corrections now and grew steady again, and still the man, whose name was Ben Holden, did not look up but instead finished entering a last sequence of numbers into the old calculator, set its works into motion, held the length of paper as it rose from the printhead, ripped it free and said, fussing with the coil of paper, “Yeah.”
Danny Young, having removed his cap, ran his hand through his hair front to back and pressed his fingertips into the cords at the back of his neck. Behind him at a small workbench sat old Billy Ramos, working on an old Hitachi nail gun. Billy had worked for Holden’s father since he was fourteen, and some of the men said he was Holden’s half brother by a Mexican señorita, covering their mouths when they said it because the old deaf bugger could read lips at a hundred yards.
Holden looked up at last and Danny said, “I just came in to tell you I gotta take off, Ben.”
“You gotta take off.”
“Yes, sir.”
Holden looked at the punch clock on the wall, and Danny turned to look too. The clock said 3:45.
Holden said, “You’re telling me you can’t wait fifteen minutes and finish out the day?”
“No, sir. I’m telling you I gotta take off as in I can’t keep this job. I wrapped up early so I could come in here and let you know.”
Holden leaned back in his chair and began a slow rocking, raising the same birdy chirp from the chair’s spring with each backward tilt. Danny watched him, then looked up, as if to inspect at close range the rivets in the metallic ceiling. Outside, in the hollows of the building, men were gathering tools, shutting down compressors, coiling cords and air hoses—all men, this crew, no women. You could hear in their voices that it was Friday. Payday.
Holden said, “I don’t even consider a raise till a man’s been with me six months, but I might make an exception if I knew you were gonna stick around. And I wouldn’t say that to just anyone, so.”
“I appreciate that,” Danny said. “But it’s not the money. This has been a good job. I wouldn’t leave if I didn’t have to.”
Holden’s eyes narrowed. “You in some kind of jam?”
“Jam?”
“Jam. Like the kind where some man comes knocking on that door tomorrow flashing me his badge.”
Danny looked back at Billy Ramos. Working on the nail gun, not watching, feeling the vibrations of the trailer, of Holden’s voice.
“Don’t mind him,” Holden said. “He’s just in here for ballast.”
“No, sir,” Danny said, turning back. “Nothing like that. I just have to go, that’s all.”
“Just go.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You gonna tell me where you’re just going to?”
“Just heading home.”
“Home, as in Minnesota home?”
“Yes, sir. My dog died.”
Holden’s chair stopped chirping. Billy, behind him, paused too in his tinkering.
“Did you say your dog?” Holden said.
“Yes.”
“Thought so. Well.” He resumed rocking. “A man can get close to his dog, sure enough. Can be a real loss. I remember a dog I had as a boy, just an old dumb mutt from God knows where, but the day he died, oh boy . . .”
The letter was folded back into its envelope, and the envelope was folded into the back pocket of his jeans. It had come the day before but he’d opened it today on his lunch break, sitting alone on the far side of the building. Familiar paper, familiar handwriting—even the smell of the air that escaped the opened envelope. Writing first of the weather as she always did and then of the farm, any repairs that had needed doing and how they’d gotten done or if they would have to wait—not mentioning money, never mentioning money, in case he thought she was asking him to send more, had told him over and over not to send any, to take care of himself and not worry—and then writing a little about Marky, one funny thing or other he’d said, before moving on to tell him some news she wasn’t sure she should include but just wanted him to hear it from her first, and this was the two college girls who’d gone into the river in their car, just a few miles south, into the ice, and one of them, the one who lived, was Audrey Sutter, Sheriff Tom Sutter’s daughter, and not a week later Tom Sutter himself, who was in stage four cancer, was dead from a heart attack. The funeral two days ago, the man buried in the same cemetery where so many had been buried: her father and mother, her grandparents, Danny’s father.
Tom Sutter. Sheriff Sutter. The name conjured blue eyes and a small room and the taste of cigarette smoke and the feeling of choking on your own voice.
Lastly, and abruptly, as if she’d been putting off the true point of the letter
and must write it quickly to get through it, she wrote, Danny, I’m sorry to tell you we buried old Wyatt too. It was his time, and his pain is over.
Old Wyatt, that old outlaw. Gone.
Whatever Holden was saying about his own childhood dog, he finished and fixed his eyes on Danny.
“I won’t ask you again to stay,” said Holden. “But I will say one thing since you’re going anyway, and just so you get the whole picture here.”
Danny waited. Billy snapped something hard into place.
“I did a check on you, Daniel Young from Minnesota. Not an all-out background check like I do on some guys. Hell, most guys. But you . . . you were kind of the opposite of most guys.”
Danny said nothing.
“I one time hired this guy, crackerjack framer, and six months later I find out he used to teach poetry at Princeton.”
Danny waited.
“So,” Holden said. “Before I hired you I got on the internet, and lo and behold.”
There was a rap on the door then and the door opened and the trailer rocked on its wheels and a man’s head appeared, but he did not enter. It was Jones, the foreman.
“Give us one more minute here, Vernon.”
“Sure thing, Ben.” Jones stepped back out and the door shut and the trailer rocked once more and settled.
“I was never charged,” Danny said.
“I know you weren’t. I can read.” Holden shrugged. “I just wanted you to know I knew, that’s all.” He sat forward and shifted his calculator to some better angle. “You go ahead and punch out and I’ll cut you a check.”
Danny stood where he was. He studied the inside of his cap. “I guess I just have one question,” he said.
“Why’d I hire you?”
He looked up. “Yes, sir.”
Holden sat staring at the old calculator. “My dad used to say a man can only prove himself once in this business, good or bad, and that’s while he’s your man. I’ve always tried to keep that in mind.”
Danny punched his time card and stood by as Holden entered the figures into the calculator and ripped the receipt from the machine, as he wrote out the check and ripped that from the book and handed it over.