Mikel and I had been sitting together, in the room he shared with the eldest Larkin boy. I’d been trying to do homework, taking comfort in having him close. When Mrs. Larkin stuck her head in to tell us that Detective Wagner was here, Mikel put his magazine down and told her we’d be right there.
“What does he want?” I asked him as soon as she was gone.
“He wants to know what we saw.” He said it all flat, trying to be bored by the horror of it all. “Dad’s going to be on trial and stuff, and he wants to make sure that he really killed Mom.”
“But he already asked. We already told him.”
“He wants to check it.”
“I didn’t really see,” I said, after a moment. “I was going back to the porch.”
“You saw enough.”
“But I didn’t really see it, Mikel.”
“I did.”
“He just ran her over?”
He nodded, slowly, as if leery of the memory, then got off the bed. “We should go down.”
I followed reluctantly, trailing after him down the stairs. The detective scared me, the thought of talking to him again, remembering again, disconcerting. I was still having nightmares, and having to listen to questions that would force me to see things I hadn’t, make me recall things I was trying so hard to forget, filled my feet with lead.
But Mikel, he was tougher, and if he was scared, it didn’t show, and that made it easier when I followed him into the kitchen. Wagner was at the dining table, with a smile this time, and Mrs. Larkin guided us to him, put us in chairs.
“I just want to check some things, all right?” he told us.
“Sure,” Mikel said.
He started by asking where we were when it happened, what we were doing. Wanted to know how long Mom and I had been working on the pumpkin in the driveway, wanted to know how she’d been acting. If she was upset with me, perhaps, or maybe just upset about something else entirely. My answers were sullen, one-word, a string of nos.
“He picked me up on the corner,” Mikel told Wagner.
“Where were you going?”
“Meet some friends.”
“And your father saw you?”
“He stopped the truck. He was mad. He doesn’t like my friends. Told me I had to come home.”
Wagner asked some questions about Mikel’s friends, and my brother confirmed that they sometimes got into trouble. Sometimes they broke things, sometimes they took things, but it wasn’t like it was ever anything someone would miss, it wasn’t ever anything important, Mikel said. Wagner asked him if he was still getting into trouble, and after glancing to Mrs. Larkin, Mikel confirmed that, too. Not embarrassed, almost defiant.
“What about you, Miriam? You staying out of trouble?”
“Trying,” I said.
“That’s good.”
I looked at Mikel, longing to be tough like he was, to be strong and act like I didn’t care. Wagner made more scribbles on his pad, flipped pages, asked a couple more questions. He asked if Tommy ever hit our mother, if he ever hit us.
“He never hits Mim,” Mikel told him, by way of an answer.
Joan was saying my name, and Van was standing at the door, ready to take me home, and I got off the couch, feeling caught by the memories.
Joan gave me a hug and a kiss, and I thanked her for everything.
“I mean everything,” I said.
“You’re worrying me, Miriam,” she said, and then told me to call in the next day or so. She’d be back in school, teaching again, but she said she’d try to keep her evenings free.
The top was up on Van’s convertible, and when she switched on the engine the stereo began blaring Radiohead, and she lunged for the button to turn it off. There wasn’t much of a point to the silence; we didn’t have anything to say to each other.
She drove me home, and I got out of the car, thanked her for the lift.
“I’m having a thing at my house,” Van said. “Tomorrow night. If you want to come.”
“You mean a party?”
“Just for fun. I’m keeping it small.”
“I’ll probably give it a miss,” I said.
“Thought I’d offer.”
“I don’t really hate you, you know that, right?” I said.
“Sure you do,” Van told me. “Just not for the reasons you think.”
There was a new mess to clean up after I’d changed into comfortable clothes, and I went through my bedroom and bathroom, mopping up the spills and finding the top to the bottle of Jack, trying to ignore the smell. I brought it downstairs and poured a small shot before putting it in the pantry with its brothers-in-proof, then checked the phone for messages while I took the drink. The voice-mail lady told me there were two messages, which I took to mean that the press had found a new story to pursue for the time being.
The funeral home had a question about the bill, but said it could wait until tomorrow. The other one from Hoffman had been left only ten minutes before I’d gotten home. She said she had some questions for me, and would I please call when I got the message. She left her home number.
Chapel would throw a fit, but if Hoffman had questions for me, maybe I could ask some questions of her, maybe get an idea about what was going on with Tommy. That’s what I told myself, anyway.
“This is Tracy.”
“It’s Miriam Bracca, I’m calling for Detective Hoffman.”
“This is she.” She sounded surprised. “Didn’t think I’d be hearing from you.”
“You left a message.”
“I’ve got some questions I’d like you to answer.”
“I don’t know. I’m thinking I should probably talk to Chapel, first, or at least have him present.”
“Look, you’re not a suspect, and I’m not going to try to trick you into anything. I’ve got some questions, I’m hoping you can help me find your brother’s killer, that’s all this is. Chapel would just complicate it.”
“Is my father still a suspect?”
“Are you willing to talk to me?”
“Yeah, if it’s actually a conversation and not an interrogation.”
“Are you at your home?”
“Why?”
“Could I come over there? I’m in Sabin, it’d take me about ten minutes or so to get there.”
“You’re sure I’m not a suspect?”
“You’re not a suspect,” she assured me.
“Then why do you want to talk to me?”
“I’m hoping you can help me find a new one.”
It made me laugh, I don’t know why.
“Sure,” I said. “Take your best shot.”
CHAPTER 22
I’d left the porch light on, and it was her, and I shut off the alarm and let her in, saying, “Did you speed?”
“Why else become a cop?” Hoffman said. “For the perks.”
“The perks?”
“I get to shoot people, too.”
“Oh.”
I peered past her at the street, not seeing much but Hoffman’s car—it was a VW Passat, either black or blue or green, I couldn’t tell—and my trees. I stepped back in and locked up once more, but didn’t bother with the alarm, this time. After all, she had perks.
“We towed the Chevy, if that’s what you’re looking for,” Hoffman told me.
“No. Just keeping an eye out for reporters. What’d you do with the car?”
“Evidence of a crime, we brought it in, had the lab go over it. It was the receiver base.”
“So now you guys have voyeur video of me.”
“We should be so lucky. All of the storage devices had been removed from the car. If you’re on tape, you’re on tape somewhere else.”
“You know who owns it? The Chevy?”
“It was stolen out of Roseburg back in May.”