The Watcher

by Jennifer Pashley

  All at once, the bailiff, the officers on guard at the front of the room, and everyone sitting behind me who was listening just a minute ago are up and scuffling at the back of the room. The original officer who came with me and Kateri—the boy cop—cuffs me right away, forcing my arms behind my back. He holds me that way, the way you’d hold a dog in a harness.

  Hurt stands with his feet planted apart, gun drawn and aimed at my mother.

  THIRTY: KATERI

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3

  Kateri stands when she sees who they have—that they have brought Pearl Jenkins into the courtroom, alive, beaten, and bald.

  She has a few weeks of hair growth on her head. Longer than a buzz cut, and fiery red like Birdie’s. The hair has grown into and around the wounds to her skull, the worst at the very back, where the skin has not come together right and where the bone has been broken. Her clothes hang on her, damp and filthy, but when she looks up at Shannon before the judge and then at Kateri, her eyes are bright, sharp.

  “He didn’t do it,” Pearl says.

  Little Birdie lets go of her mother’s shirt and runs toward Shannon, who cannot embrace her with his hands shackled. Instead, she leans into his leg, and he says, “Hey, Bird,” with a catch in his throat.

  Pearl Jenkins has a long but seemingly shallow cut along the left side of her head, dried with blood, caked over with dirt and scabbing.

  The judge raps his gavel once. “Detectives,” he says, unaware that Kateri has been placed on leave, “please conduct your investigation outside my courtroom. This has clearly taken a turn.”

  “Why’d you come back?” Shannon asks his mother, while Hurt puts cuffs on her and Mirandizes her.

  Pearl hangs her head, her teeth clenched, possibly in pain, Kateri thinks, looking at the wounds on her head and hands. Defensive wounds.

  “I heard about the arrest,” she says. “I couldn’t.” She stops and coughs, and then straightens her back to look up at her son. “I couldn’t let you go down too.”

  * * *

  The judge, with his eyes on Pearl Jenkins, alive and harmed but here of her own free will, tells Shannon that he accepts his not-guilty plea and will release him on ten thousand dollars’ bond.

  Shannon weeps, his mouth open, his eyes raw.

  “There’s money in my car,” Pearl says. “From him.” She does not elaborate; she just looks at Shannon.

  “Where did you get the car?” Shannon asks.

  “From Jane,” Pearl says. “You know him.”

  “The car’s a piece of shit,” Birdie says, and Shannon unexpectedly laughs.

  “It kept overheating,” Pearl says. “It would just turn off. And we’d have to wait. We didn’t make it to Canada,” she says. “And then I heard the news.”

  They take them in separate directions, Pearl off to booking and Shannon to a holding cell, while the cash is extracted from the Buick and his release paperwork is processed.

  They send Birdie with Kateri.

  She is not assigned to the case any longer, and the chief made it clear that Hurt would close it. There was no plan made for who would take custody of the child if Pearl came back alive, but Kateri tells the judge she should be with her family.

  “Her family?” the judge says.

  “Her brother,” Kateri says.

  The judge frowns, shuffling papers. Nothing is in place. He grants temporary custody and sets a date for family court in ten days.

  It’s Hurt who walks Pearl down to an interrogation room. When everyone else is dismissed, Kateri takes Birdie by the hand and meets Mandy Donovan in the hallway.

  Kateri stops her. “Please,” she says, and “I’m sorry,” handing Birdie off to her. “Just for a while, here in the building,” she says. “I need to be in that room.”

  * * *

  Hurt doesn’t give Pearl the benefit of the softer room with the stuffed chair and the bookshelves; he takes her straight to Interrogation B, with its metal table and cold cinder blocks. Pearl is quiet, compliant. She flinches when the guards come to take her clothing, when they strip her naked and search, when they shine a light into her mouth and inspect between her legs. She’s covered in stab wounds on her body and defensive slashes on her arms.

  “Who gave you the car and the cash?” Hurt asks Pearl, before he asks her anything else.

  “He goes by Jane,” Pearl says.

  “Did he attack you?” Hurt asks.

  “No,” she says. “Kyle Metzger tried to attack me.”

  Kateri leans over the table. “Ma’am, he did some significant damage,” she says.

  “You should see him,” Pearl says, smug.

  Kateri is afraid of pushing her. Pearl is beaten, dehydrated, exhausted. But Hurt keeps going. He just hammers her with questions so she has little time to think in between.

  She was attacked by Kyle Metzger, a kid the same age as Shannon, who she bought drugs from, who she’d known since he was eight years old. She didn’t owe him money.

  “I didn’t owe him a fucking thing,” she says to Hurt, her eyes wide and indignant. “He had no reason to come there the way he did.”

  Hurt points to the defensive cuts on Pearl’s hands and forearms. “And then?” he asks.

  “I beat his ass,” she says. “I fought back. I’m not going down for Kyle fucking Metzger. They were coming for my house.”

  “Who was?”

  “The county. I needed to get out of there, so I took advantage of the situation.”

  “How so?” Hurt asks.

  She rubs her nose with the back of her hand and then coughs, and Kateri pushes a plastic cup of water toward her so she can drink.

  “I wanted to make it look like he killed me,” Pearl says.

  “Inside the house?” Hurt asks.

  “No, with the bones,” Pearl says.

  “You planted the bones,” Kateri says. “And burned them,” she adds. “Where did they come from?”

  “From Jane,” Pearl says. “I don’t know what they are. I thought they’d be unidentifiable. But you know,” she adds. “Suspicious. Maybe enough. Enough for me to take Bird and run.”

  Hurt scribbles away on his open pad, his handwriting urgent, slanted, but small and neat. Kateri thinks of the map. Pearl and Birdie got as far as Brasher Falls, which is almost to Canada. She could have parked the car, crossed the border on foot through the woods. There are plenty of unpatrolled places to cross over.

  “Why did you come back?” Kateri asks. It’s almost a whisper. She can’t imagine what this woman was thinking, so close to her own freedom with her little girl.

  “Fuck,” Pearl says. She cranes her neck back, looking at the ceiling, and when she comes up again, she looks like she’ll black out from the rush, like she’s ready to collapse from the physical beating, the stress, the fleeing. “Fuck,” she says again.

  “Pearl,” Kateri prompts. She refills the plastic cup from a larger plastic bottle.

  “I saw it on the news,” she says. “At a Stewart’s, where they had the TV on behind the ice cream counter.”

  “Your disappearance?”

  “Shannon’s arrest,” she says. “I can’t,” she says then, and her face breaks, and Kateri thinks she will start to cry, but she doesn’t. She can’t be broken, Kateri thinks. Kateri watches her chew at her lip, mouth folded in on itself, and Pearl says, “I couldn’t let him go to jail for something he didn’t do.” Her shoulders go soft all at once, like she’s deflating. “I did it to Park,” she says. “And I couldn’t do it to Shannon.”

  Hurt drops his pen on the table, and the clatter in the quiet room makes Kateri jump. “Did what to Park?” Hurt asks.

  “Let him take the fall.”

  “For what?” Hurt asks.

  “The fire,” Pearl says. “The fire at the farmhouse when Shannon was little.” Hurt lets her wait, and Kateri watches her face closely. Her eyes well up finally, then, when she talks about her son. “I just wanted to end it,” she says. “I hated all of it. The shit
ty house, living with Park, and taking care of a baby. I was twenty years old,” Pearl says, “with a three-year-old. Shannon didn’t have shit to look forward to,” she says. “In this town, with no money. But then we made it out. He kept screaming for me, but it was Park who pulled him out, and I crawled after him, hurt but alive, and when the cops came to investigate, I … I blamed it on Park. I let him take the fall,” she says. “And let Shannon think it was Park who tried to kill us.”

  “But it was you,” Kateri whispers.

  “It was me,” Pearl says.

  * * *

  They find the man that Pearl calls Jane at his listed address. He opens the door without question, wearing a soft dress shirt, open at the collar, gray dress pants, and black shoes. He moves aside to let them into the kitchen, a small room, tidy and bright, with a bouquet of bird feathers on the table and some sun-bleached animal bones. Kateri recognizes the mandible of what looks like a deer and the stump of an antler. She nudges Hurt’s arm, juts her chin in that direction. Jane pauses; it seems to catch his breath, though he’s barely moving. Kateri thinks he looks weak, diminished. She noticed how thin his wrists are, how the bones of his face are all visible underneath his sallow skin.

  She shouldn’t be here. She should have stayed home the way the chief instructed, but when Hurt left in a squad car to talk to Jane, she rushed after him.

  “Fisher,” he warned.

  “I have to,” she said. She slid into the car without asking.

  Now, in Jane’s kitchen, she lets Hurt take the lead.

  “Sir, we need to ask you some questions regarding the disappearance of Pearl Jenkins, the abduction of her daughter, Sparrow Annie Jenkins, and the murder of deputy Craig O’Neil.”

  “None of this is Shannon’s fault,” Jane says.

  “He’s being released,” Kateri says.

  Jane sinks into a kitchen chair, deflated, exhausted. “Thank God,” he says.

  Kateri sees Hurt jot something down on a plain white notepad, but she can’t make out what it is.

  “You were released from Clinton Correctional in May,” Kateri says. “Did you come right to Spring Falls?”

  “I don’t have any family,” Jane says.

  “But you knew Park Jenkins,” Hurt says. “Did you know Park Jenkins before you were incarcerated at Clinton?”

  “No.”

  “You must have become quite close,” Hurt says. “To move to where his family lives. Were you expecting his release?”

  Jane crosses his legs and folds his hands on top of his knee. “I expected to die first,” he says.

  Hurt scribbles more on his pad. “Dramatic,” Kateri answers.

  “Is it?” Jane asks.

  “You helped Pearl escape after she was attacked,” Kateri says, and he nods. “Did you sign Sparrow Annie out of Mercy Hospital?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  She runs her finger along the smooth edge of the jawbone on the table. “Where did you get the bones?” she asks.

  He motions out the window, and she knows the woods are full of bones. Off trail you might stumble on the entire skeleton of a deer, a bear. You can buy pelts and bleached, preserved skulls in some trading shops. Mounted antlers, a completely taxidermied fox.

  “She wanted to throw them off her trail. If it looked like she was dead, she’d get farther,” he says. “She planted the bones, the shoes, the bracelet. She thought they’d catch Kyle and she’d be gone.”

  “Why help her at all?” Kateri asks.

  “It wasn’t about her,” Jane says. “I wanted—” he begins, and stops to cough, a deep, dry, burning rattle in his chest. “I wanted to set Shannon free,” he says.

  “From his mother,” Hurt fills in. “From the secret kid and the paranoid TV screens.”

  “Yes,” Jane says.

  “Why, though?” Kateri asks.

  His cheeks color, the redness out of place on his pale skin. “I was quite fond of Shannon,” he says. His mannerisms are genteel, his voice soft.

  “Did you kill the cop?” Kateri asks. “In order to get to the girl?”

  His face falls, then, and he rubs his fingers along his brow, shading his eyes. Then he sweeps his hair off his forehead with his fingers, blinks, looks Kateri in the eye when he answers. “I didn’t see another choice,” he says. “I regret that. The cop had nothing to do with this. You can arrest me,” he says, and Hurt laughs a little at his permission. “But you need to arrest Bear Miller as well,” he says.

  Kateri is about to answer when Hurt asks, “Why?”

  “He sent the kid to attack her,” Jane says. “He paid Kyle Metzger to kill Pearl.”

  “Why?” Kateri asks.

  “You’ll have to ask Miller,” Jane says.

  “Miller is dead,” Hurt answers.

  Jane smiles slightly.

  “Hiring a hit man to kill someone is capital,” Hurt says. “So is killing a cop.”

  “I already have a death sentence,” Jane says.

  Kateri perks up, alert, the second time he says it. She watches his face, the way the sun through the kitchen window catches his blue eyes. His skin is sallow, his upper lip sweaty. He folds his hands, and his fingers are like bones, laced together.

  “What do you mean?” she asks. She narrows her eyes and cocks her head, listening.

  “I’m dying,” he says, and looks her in the eye. His eyes are sharp, the brightest thing about him. “Do you want the details on how and why? I don’t have anything to lose,” he says, suddenly fired up. “I couldn’t get to Birdie any other way. I’m sorry for that.”

  Hurt huffs. “Yeah, sorry’s not going to be enough,” he says.

  “You can do whatever you want with me,” Jane says. “I’m done.”

  * * *

  They book the stranger for murder, kidnapping, and endangering a child. Kateri walks him down to his cell after, where he refuses to eat but asks for an extra blanket. His head is sweaty, his hair damp, and his lip trembles. Kateri watches his face, and he appears to breathe rapid, shallow breaths.

  She wonders for a minute if she should call medical, have him transferred to the hospital with Pearl, but before she asks him, he answers her.

  “I’m fine,” he says. “Just leave me alone.”

  She hands him the blanket—a rough gray wool blanket like you’d keep in a car for sitting on the ground, nothing that gives any comfort—and he wraps it around his shoulders.

  “Listen,” he says.

  She waits at the door.

  “The law office in town has my will,” he says.

  “Okay,” she says.

  “I left everything to Shannon. It’s not a small amount. I don’t have any family. I want to take care of him.”

  She feels a cold weight in the room, a heavy energy that appears to be filling the space.

  “Just make sure he knows,” Jane says. “I don’t want to be left on a shelf.”

  * * *

  It’s Hurt who goes to arrest Kyle and finds him not at his own address but at his father’s house, which is a single-wide trailer with a large addition on it. Kateri has seen it. She’s heard calls there for domestic. It’s a dirt yard with dogs and baby toys, a plastic pool in the summer, a rusted-out swing set. Kyle’s father, Tim Metzger, is still in county waiting for his own arraignment.

  She’s surprised that he looks a bit like Shannon. They are similarly built, but Kyle is wiry where Shannon is lithe, Kyle’s hair is a dirty dark blond where Shannon’s has a reddish hue. He’s the youngest of the five Metzger boys, who mostly grew up without their mother, who died when Kyle was still a baby.

  He doesn’t want to talk. It’s late by the time Kateri meets Hurt back in the investigation room, the camera running again. Hurt announces who’s present and why they are interviewing Kyle Metzger.

  “You knew Pearl Jenkins,” Hurt says.

  Kyle nods, tense. He seems literally reluctant to open his mouth. “You were selling her oxycodone,” Hurt says. “How did you meet Bea
r Miller?”

  Kyle purses his lips before he starts talking. “He came into the diner,” he says, slurry, and that’s when Kateri notices that he’s missing two teeth, recently, to the left of his front teeth.

  She points to his mouth. “That happened during the struggle with Pearl,” she says.

  He appears to bite down on his tongue and nods.

  It was Kyle’s tooth they found, not Pearl’s.

  “What happened at the house?” Hurt says.

  “I couldn’t do it,” Kyle says. He slouches back in the chair, his knees wide.

  “Couldn’t do what?”

  “I was supposed …” He stops. “I can’t,” he says.

  Kateri leans forward on the table. “Did Bear Miller hire you to kill Pearl Jenkins?”

  “The money is gone,” Kyle says. “I have … I have a kid on the way.”

  She hears Hurt let a long breath out. “What happened at the house?” Hurt says again.

  “I just couldn’t.” He ruffles his hands through his hair and then over his face, and Kateri sees that his hands are rough, dirty, like he has always worked outside with machinery. “I see Pearl all the time,” he says.

  “Because you sell her drugs,” Hurt says.

  Kateri nudges him under the table. She’s curious to hear this kid’s answer and she doesn’t want Hurt to deter him.

  “She’s like … I don’t know,” Kyle says.

  “Your mom died when you were little,” Kateri says, soft.

  Kyle nods. “I just couldn’t. She’s like, the same kind of—” he says. “I mean, she’s a mom. The kid is still little. The girl,” he says.

  “How much did Miller give you?” Kateri asks.

  “A lot.”

  Hurt says, “Miller was killed.”

  “Oh,” Kyle says. “Oh, wow.”

  “Were you friends with Shannon Jenkins?” Hurt asks.

  Kyle huffs. “No,” he says.

  “You were in school together,” Kateri says.

  “I’m not friends with fucking faggots,” he says.

  “But you’ll accept money,” Hurt says.