Dentman had been talking too fast for Strohman’s pen to keep up; the chief of police had simply set it aside midway through Dentman’s statement and merely listened, his hands in his lap, one leg over the other. After a moment, Strohman had Dentman repeat the story, which he did verbatim, before suggesting they bring in Veronica to corroborate it.
“You’ll have to wait in holding while we talk to her, of course,” said Strohman, closing his notebook.
“Then she won’t talk to you.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because the last thing I said to her was to say she’d been sleeping. Until I sit with her and tell her otherwise, that’s all you’ll ever hear from her.”
A small chuckle began to rumble up through the chief of police. A similar rumbling could be heard from his men throughout the viewing room.
“That’s a neat trick,” Strohman said after his chuckling had subsided. “You know we can’t have you two—”
“Bring her in here now. With me. With all of us. I’ll sit right here and tell her to tell the truth.”
Strohman sucked on the inside of his left cheek. Then he clapped, startling everyone except Dentman, and said, “All right. Let’s do it. But I need to take a piss first.”
Outside on the front steps, a group of us burned through cigarettes and shuddered against the cold.
“Coldest fucking winter in a decade,” McMullen said, digging around in the seat of his pants. “Miserable godforsaken place.”
Five minutes later, we were all gathered in the viewing room as Veronica was brought in, unshackled, and placed in a chair midway between her brother and Chief Strohman.
Flipping to a clean sheet of notebook paper, that goddamn pen beginning to jitterbug in one hand, Strohman started asking Veronica questions.
Her responses, never changing, started out almost comical . . . then turned sad and somewhat frightening. “I was asleep.”
“Veronica, your brother just told me you—”
“I was asleep.”
“You need to understand—”
Pulling her hair and shouting like a child: “I was asleep! I was asleep! I was asleep!” She slammed her hands down on the table, her nails digging audibly into the wood.
A good number of us cringed.
“Fuck’s sake,” Strohman uttered.
“Wait,” said Dentman. With surprising tenderness, he clasped one of his sister’s skeletal hands in both of his. The sound of his thumbs rubbing along the back of her hand was like the crinkling of carbon paper. “Darling,” he said quietly, “it’s time to tell the truth now.”
Trembling like a day-old fawn, Veronica drank her brother in, scrutinized him, as if he were a stranger she was supposed to know. A second before the tears came, I could sense their arrival. They began streaming down her sallow, colorless cheeks, her lipless mouth quivering. The tendons in her neck stood out like telephone cables. “He . . . hit his head . . . on the stairs . . . on the lake . . . blood . . . on me, on him . . . carried him back to the . . . the house . . . blood everywhere . . . went to . . . went . . . turned my back . . . when I came back . . . gone . . .”
No one said a word. All eyes were locked on the fragile woman who was breaking apart right in front of us. Her words suddenly didn’t matter. Her brother’s words, either. It was on her face, all of it. I prayed for someone to say something—anything—and only hoped that until they did the silence wouldn’t crush the life out of me.
In the interrogation room, Strohman closed his notebook.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Adam dropped me off that evening. Weakened, spiritually fatigued, I entered the house with no greater designs other than to crawl beneath the stream of a warm shower and wash the tiredness from my marrow.
Jodie was standing at the foot of the stairs, half-cloaked in shadow.
The look on her face immediately froze my blood. “What?”
“I think . . .” She looked around—a blind child suddenly given the gift of sight. “I think . . . someone was in the house.”
“What are you talking about? Were you asleep?”
“Yes. But noises woke me. Thumping noises. Like an animal in the attic or trapped behind the wall. I got out of bed to see what it was. I thought maybe you’d come home and I hadn’t heard the front door. So I called your name.” I watched as a chill zigzagged through her. “Oh, Jesus.”
“What? Jodie . . .”
“I called your name, and then I heard someone run across the living room and slam the front door.”
“Babe.” I went to her, embraced her. “You were dreaming.”
“No. I was awake.”
“There’s no one here. I just unlocked the door now. It was locked.”
“Are you sure?”
“I swear it.”
“Jesus.” She laughed nervously against my collarbone. “Oh, Jesus.”
In the morning, Adam showed up with a document for me to sign. It looked very official and said Consent to Search at the top. “Strohman wants your permission for us to dig up your lawn once the ground thaws a bit.”
“He thinks Elijah’s buried in the yard?”
“He thinks if David Dentman could brainwash his sister so easily to lie to the police the first time, what’s to say any of what was said last night was the truth.”
“Are you serious?”
He handed me the consent form and a pen. It was serious, all right.
“They’ve both been charged.”
“With lying to the cops?”
“With murder,” Adam said. “David’s still at the station. He’s being charged as an accessory. Veronica’s being shipped to a hospital over in Cumberland this afternoon. She’s been practically catatonic all night.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“What is it? You look sick.”
Truth was, I felt sick. “It feels wrong.”
Taking the signed form from me, Adam folded it in halves, then slipped it into the back pocket of his chinos. “Vindication’s a little harsher than you’d hoped, huh?” He went to the door.
“Hey, you really think they’re going to find the body buried in the yard?”
“I don’t know what to think,” Adam said and left.
I called Earl and told him everything I knew. He would be the first to break the story.
“What do you do now?” he asked me after I’d given him all I had.
“Nothing,” I told him. “My part in this is over.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
February was angry and eager and shook us to our souls. Once again, the whole world seemed to freeze. But by early March, the snow had receded, and the gray slope of our lawn rose as if out of ash. The blustery winds grew tame and warmed up. We celebrated Jacob’s eleventh birthday, and he dazzled us with card tricks. Jodie finished her dissertation and looked forward to receiving her PhD in May. She had verbally accepted the full-time teaching position at the university, and although it wouldn’t start until the fall, she went out one afternoon with Beth to shop for a whole new wardrobe.
Sales for Water View continued to climb. The whole Dentman ordeal nearly a month behind me now, I began to feel the writing bug edge closer and closer again. That was good; like the parent of a child gone away to summer camp, I had been eagerly awaiting its safe return.