She sucked on her straw until the air rattled the ice at the bottom. “It was Ray’s—”
“You think he’ll lose any sleep killing your daughter?” Angie said. “Helene.” She reached across the table and grasped Helene’s bony wrist. “Do you?”
“Cheese?” Helene said, and her voice cracked. “You think he had something to do with Amanda’s disappearance?”
Angie stared at her for a full thirty seconds before she shook her head and dropped Helene’s wrist. “Helene, let me ask you something.”
Helene rubbed her wrist and looked at her soda cup again. “Yeah?”
“What fucking planet are you from exactly?”
Helene didn’t say anything for a while after that.
Autumn died in technicolor all around us. Bright yellows and reds afire, burnished oranges and rusty greens painted the leaves that floated from the branches, collected in the grass. That vibrant odor of dying things, so particular to fall, creased the blades of air that cut through our clothing and made us tense our muscles and widen our eyes. Nowhere does death occur so spectacularly, so proudly, as it does in New England in October. The sun, broken free of the storm clouds that had threatened this morning, turned windowpanes into hard squares of white light and washed the brick row houses that surrounded the tiny yard in a smoked tint that matched the darker leaves.
Death, I thought, is not this. Death is directly behind us. Death is the grungy kitchen of Wee David and Kimmie. Death is black blood and disloyal cats who feed on anything.
“Helene,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“While you were in the room with Kimmie looking at pictures of Disney World, where were Wee David and Ray?”
Her mouth opened slightly.
“Quick,” I said. “Off the top of your head. Don’t think.”
“The backyard,” she said.
“The backyard.” Angie pointed at the ground. “Here.”
She nodded.
“Could you see the backyard from Kimmie’s bedroom?” I asked.
“No. The shades were drawn.”
“Then how’d you know they were out here?” I asked.
“Ray’s shoes were filthy when we left,” she said slowly. “Ray is a slob in a lot of ways.” She reached out and touched my arm as if she were about to share a deeply personal secret with me. “But, man, he takes care of his shoes.”
11
GTwo Hundred[* + *]Composure[* = *]Child
“Gee two hundred?” Angie said.
“Two hundred grand,” Broussard said quietly.
“Where’d you find that note?” I said.
He looked over his shoulder at the house. “Curled up tight and stuck in the waistband of Kimmie’s lacy Underalls. An attention grabber, I think.”
We stood in the backyard.
“It’s here,” Angie said, and pointed at a small mound by a dry and withered elm tree. The dirt was freshly turned there, the mound the only ridge in a plot of land that was otherwise as flat as a nickel.
“I believe you, Miss Gennaro,” Broussard said. “So now what do we do?”
“Dig it up,” I said.
“And impound it and make it public knowledge,” Poole said. “Tie it, through the press, to Amanda McCready’s disappearance.”
I looked around at the dead grass, the burgundy leaves curled atop the blades. “No one’s touched this place in a while.”
Poole nodded. “Your conclusion?”
“If it is buried there”—I pointed at the mound—”then Wee David kept it to himself even though they tortured Kimmie to death in front of him.”
“No one ever accused Wee Dave of being a candidate for the Peace Corps,” Broussard said.
Poole walked over to the tree, placed a foot on either side of the mound, stared down at it.
Inside the house, Helene sat in the living room, fifteen feet from two bloating corpses, and watched TV. Springer had given way to Geraldo or Sally or some other ringmaster sounding the cowbell for the latest cavalcade of carnival freaks. The public “therapy” of confession, the continued watering down of the meaning of the word “trauma,” a steady stream of morons shouting at the void from a raised dais.
Helene didn’t seem to mind. She only complained about the smell, asked if we could open a window. Nobody had a good enough reason why we couldn’t, and once we did, we left her there, her face bathed in flickers of silver light.
“So we’re out of this,” Angie said, a note of quiet, sad surprise in her voice, a sudden confronting of the anticlimax that comes when a case ends abruptly.
I thought about it. It was a kidnapping now, complete with a ransom note and logical suspects with a motive. The FBI would take over, and we could follow the case through the news like every other couch potato in the state, wait for Helene to show up on Springer Time with other parents who’d misplaced their kids.
I held out my hand to Broussard. “Angie’s right. It was nice working with you.”
Broussard shook the hand and nodded but didn’t say anything. He looked over at Poole.
Poole toed the small ridge of dirt with his shoe, his eyes on Angie.
“We are out of this,” Angie said to him, “aren’t we?”
Poole held her gaze for a bit, then looked back at the tiny mound.
No one spoke for a couple of minutes. I knew we should go. Angie knew we should go. Yet we stayed, planted, it seemed, in that tiny yard with the dead elm.
I turned my head toward the ugly house behind us, could see Wee David’s head from here, the top of the chair he’d been bound to. Had he been aware of the feel of his bare shoulder blades against the cheap wicker backing of the chair? Had that been the last sensation he’d acknowledged before the buckshot opened up his chest cavity as if the bone and flesh were made of tissue paper? Or was it the sensation of the blood draining to his bound wrists, the fingers turning blue and numb?
The people who’d entered this house that last day or night of his life had known they’d kill Kimmie and Wee David. That was a professional execution back in that kitchen. Kimmie’s throat had been sliced as a last-ditch effort to get Wee David to talk, but she’d also been killed with a knife, out of prudence.
Neighbors will almost always attribute one gunshot to something else—a car backfiring, maybe, or, in the case of a shotgun blast, an engine blowing or a china cabinet falling to the floor. Particularly when the sound may have come from the home of drug dealers or users, people who are known by their neighbors to make odd sounds at all times of night.