“You’d get one phone call if you’d been arrested,” he said. “I didn’t arrest you last night. You’re not officially here.”
“What?” I said.
“I brought you in here to sober up and think a little.”
I should have been grateful, but instead I just got angry. I stood up, and immediately my blood pressure rose, making my head throb. “You think I want favors from you?” I said. I held out my hands as if for handcuffs. “If I did something wrong, arrest me. If I didn’t, then let me out.”
Kenny shook his head.
“No, arrest me if you think I deserve it. Then at least I can call someone, make bail, and get out.”
But Kenny shook his head again. “I don’t want to do that today for the same reason I didn’t last night,” he said. “I don’t want you to have an arrest on your record, because it could hurt your chances.”
“Chances for what?”
“For being a cop,” Kenny said.
I let my hands fall. If he had said, For the space program, I couldn’t have been more surprised. My voice, when I spoke, was faint. “Are you kidding?” I said.
“You’re too smart to be a miner and too mean to be a college girl,” Kenny told me. “You’ve got a lot of energy and it’s all going nowhere. You need a job you can pour it into.”
“You’re not serious,” I said. “They don’t need people here, anyway. There probably isn’t even a vacancy in the every-other-weekend citizen’s reserve program that you do.”
“No, there isn’t,” Kenny said. “But they’re always looking for good people down in the Cities.”
“You’re serious,” I said.
“Yes,” Kenny said.
For a moment I didn’t even feel the ache in my temples. Kenny thought I could be someone like him, and this amazing realization made all my anger drain away. He was wrong, of course.
“Listen, Kenny,” I said, “thanks, but I’m not cut out for it.”
“How do you know?” he asked.
“I just do. You’re reading me all wrong.” After another moment I said, “Really, I’m sorry.”
When he saw I meant it, Kenny fished for his keys.
Weeks passed and September came. Kenny had gone back to his work, patrolling the mines during the week and the streets and jail on the weekend. I went back to what I did best, drinking on the weekend nights.
Around 3 A.M., after a typical Saturday night, I was in a familiar position: kneeling over the toilet bowl. When you throw up on a fairly regular basis, you lose your distaste for it. Afterward, I wiped the corner of my mouth with my hand, swaying slightly on my knees, feeling the dampness of unhealthy sweat on the nape of my neck, grateful for the cool night air from the open sash window. I’d just brushed my teeth and was splashing water on my face, when outside the window, a woman screamed.
I froze, completely still except for the water droplets crawling on my face, and then I went to the window.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Is someone out there?”
The bathroom window looked out onto a grassy slope, which led up to the railroad tracks. It was dark there, except far to my right, where I could see the signal lights on the tracks.
“Hey!” I yelled again. There was no response.
“Goddammit,” I said, fumbling for my towel. I wanted to hear drunken tittering, or a sour voice saying, Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. I wanted to feel irritated. It was preferable to feeling worried about someone in the dark who’d screamed and now wasn’t answering.
Back in my room, I undressed and pulled back the bedcovers, instructing myself to forget about it. I told myself that animal noises could trick you sometimes. Like bobcats, for example; they sounded a lot like women screaming. Or barred owls.
It wasn’t any bobcat. It wasn’t any owl.
If anyone was out there, and really was in trouble, they’d have screamed again. They’d have answered when I called.
You don’t know that.
For God’s sake, what help would I be? I was still half drunk. Surely someone else, nearer, had heard it as well. Someone else would look into it.
You can’t be sure of that. You don’t know that anyone else heard. You only know that you heard.
“Son of a bitch,” I said tiredly, and started looking for sturdier clothes to wear than the ones I’d worn drinking.
My only weapon back then was a Maglite, but it was beautiful, four D-cells long with a body of anodized cherry-colored metal. As I went up the slope behind the house, still a little unsteady on my feet, I swung it in arcs, illuminating the brush and shadows. “Is anyone out here?”
When I’d finished searching behind the house, I doubled back. The scream might have come from the front of the house, a trick of acoustics bouncing the sound waves off the slope and back toward the bathroom window. I retraced my steps down the slope and went out into the street. Walking toward town, I shined my light low onto lawns and into front entryways, careful to avoid the darkened windows beyond which people slept. Then, as I got into town, I found myself looking into alleyways and at the front steps of businesses. Nothing. There was no sign of any trouble, and the streets were quiet as a movie set by night.
I ended up standing in the town square, completely sober and totally alone in the center of town. The night was nearly gone. Dawn would come in an hour.
Kenny was dressed for church, in a coat and tie, with his hair slicked down, when I knocked on his door at seven-thirty in the morning. He took in the sight of me at his door, Maglite still in hand, with a mildly quizzical expression.
“I think I want to be a cop,” I said.
28
“I don’t see a case here,” Kilander said.
It was the morning after Marlinchen and I had our drinks out by the lake, and I was doing something I’d done a number of times since the morning I’d told Kenny Olson I wanted to be a cop: conferring with a prosecutor over the feasibility of criminal charges.
It was, though, on an unofficial basis. Kilander and I were spending the lunch hour in his office, eating takeout I’d brought up: a curried chicken salad over lettuce, dinner rolls, and iced tea. I’d just told him what I knew about the Hennessys: Hugh’s beatings and Aidan’s exile, the inexplicable animosity Hugh felt toward his eldest son.
“It’s an ugly story, no question,” Kilander said. “But the purpose of juvenile and family law isn’t to punish, it’s to intervene. No agency would try to prosecute a parent for past child abuse that didn’t result in permanent injury.”
“I know that,” I said, tearing my previously untouched roll in half and spreading butter on it. More than anything else, I was stalling. What I was about to tell Christian Kilander, I hadn’t even shared with Marlinchen yet. “What I’ve told you is essentially background. That wasn’t the end of the story.”
“Ah,” Kilander said. “Should I cancel my one o’clock deposition?”
He was teasing me; I’d known he’d do that. I’d known he’d play devil’s advocate, too. It didn’t bother me. That was partly what I’d come to him for, his sharp and reductive mind.
“Sarah?” Kilander prompted.
“I think Aidan shot himself with his father’s gun,” I said, setting the roll down uneaten. “I think Hugh covered it up.”
For the first time, Kilander smiled. “You come up with the most amazing theories,” he said. “Do tell how you arrived at this one.”
I told him about Aidan’s missing finger and the explanation Marlinchen had given me for it, the neighbor’s vicious dog that had supposedly bitten the three-year-old boy, causing him to be away from home for what Marlinchen had called “a long time” and to return without a little finger on his left hand.