[Sheriff?]
No, it’s all right. I wasn’t... I wasn’t in great shape, which I guess you can imagine, but after a couple of minutes, I found the window open in the playroom. I was out with — with Sam and Alex when the deputies arrived.
[But you found Wayne first?]
Yes. I looked for him right off. For all I knew he was still alive.
[Where was he?]
Down in here.
[We’re looking into a door opening off the kitchen; it looks like — the basement?]
Yeah. Wayne killed himself in his workroom. That was his favorite place, where he went for privacy. We used to drink down there, play darts. He sat in a corner and shot himself with a small handgun, which he also purchased that night. It was the only shot he fired from it. He’d shut the basement door behind him.
...You want to see down there?
They sat for a while in the cruiser afterward. Thompkins had brought a thermos of coffee, which touched her; the coffee was terrible, but at least it was warm. She held the cup in her hands in front of the dashboard heaters. Thompkins chewed his thumbnail and looked at the house.
Why did he do it? she asked him.
Hm?
Why did Wayne do it?
I don’t know.
You don’t have any theories?
No.
He said it quickly, an obvious lie. Patricia watched his face and said, I called around after talking with his parents. Wayne was twenty grand behind on his loan payments. If he hadn’t worked at the bank already, this place would have been repossessed.
Maybe, Thompkins said and sipped his coffee. But half the farms you see out here are twenty grand in the hole, and no one’s slaughtered their entire family over it.
Patricia watched him while he said this. Thompkins kept his big face neutral, but he didn’t look at her. His ears were pink with cold.
Wayne’s mother, she said, told me she thought that Jenny might have had affairs.
Yeah. I heard that too.
Any truth to it?
Adultery’s not against the law. So I don’t concern myself with it.
But surely you’ve heard something.
Well, Ms. Pike, I have the same answer as before. People have been sleeping around on each other out here for a lot longer than I’ve had this job, and no one ever killed their family over it.
Thompkins put on his seatbelt.
Besides, he said, if you were a man who’d slept with Jenny Sullivan, would you say anything about it? You wouldn’t, not now. So no, I don’t know for sure. And frankly, I wouldn’t tell you if I did.
Why?
Because I knew Jenny, and she was a good woman. She was my prom date, for Christ’s sake. I stood up at her and Wayne’s wedding. Jenny was always straight, and she was smart. If she had an affair, that was her business. But it’s not mine, now, and it’s not yours.
It would be motive, Patricia said softly.
I took the bodies out of that house, Thompkins said, putting the cruiser into reverse. I took my friends out. I felt their necks to see if they were alive. I saw what Wayne did. There’s no reason good enough. No one could have wronged him enough to make him do what he did. I don’t care what it was.
He turned the cruiser around; the trees rushed by, and Patricia put both hands around her coffee to keep it from spilling. She’d heard speeches like this before. Someone’s brains get opened up, and there’s always some backcountry cop who puts his hand to his heart and pretends the poor soul still has any privacy.
There’s always a reason, she said.
Thompkins smirked without humor; the cruiser bounced up and down.
Then I’m sure you’ll come up with something, he said.
December 25, 1975
In the evening, just past sundown, Larry went out again to the Sullivan house. He and the staties had finished with the scene earlier in the day. There hadn’t been much to investigate, really; Wayne had confessed in his phone call, yet Larry had told his deputies to take pictures anyway, to collect what evidence they could. And then all day reporters had come out for pictures, and some of the townspeople had stopped by to gawk or to ask if anything needed to be done, so Larry decided to keep the house under guard. Truth be told, he and the men needed something to do; watching the house was better than fielding questions in town.
When Larry pulled up in front of the house, his deputy, Troy Bowen, was sitting in his cruiser by the garage, reading a paperback behind the wheel. Larry flashed his lights, and Bowen got out and ambled over to Larry’s car, hands in his armpits.
Hey, Larry, he said. What’re you doing out here?
Slow night, Larry said, which was true enough. He said, I’ll take over. Go get dinner. I’ll cover until Albie gets here.
That’s not till midnight, Bowen said, but his face was open and grateful.
I might as well be out here. It’s all I’m thinking about anyway.
Yeah, that’s what I thought. But I don’t mind saying it gives me the willies. You’re welcome to it.
When Bowen’s cruiser was gone, Larry stood for a moment on the front stoop, hands in his pockets. Crime scene tape was strung over the doorway in a big haphazard X; Bowen had done it after the bodies were removed, still sniffling and red-eyed. It had been his first murder scene. The electricity was still on; the little fake lantern hanging over the door was shining. Larry took a couple of breaths and then fumbled out a copy of the house key. He unlocked the door, ducked under the caution tape, and went inside.
He turned on the living room light, and there everything was, as he’d left it this afternoon. His heart thumped. What else had he expected? That it would all be gone? That it hadn’t really happened? It had. Here were the outlines. The bloodstains on the living room carpet and on the landing. The light from the living room just shone into the kitchen; he could see the dark swirls on the linoleum, too. Already a smell was in the air. The furnace was still on, and the blood and the smaller pieces of remains were starting to turn. The place would go bad if Wayne’s folks didn’t have the house cleaned up soon. Larry didn’t want to have that talk with them, but he’d call them tomorrow. He knew a service in Indianapolis that took care of things like this. All the same he turned off the thermostat.
He asked himself why he cared. Surely no one would ever live in this place again. What did it matter?
But it did, somehow.
He walked into the family room. The tree was still canted sideways, knocked partway out of its base. He went to the wall behind it, stepping over stains, careful not to disturb anything. The lights on the tree were still plugged into the wall outlet. He squatted, straddling a collapsing pile of presents, then leaned forward and pulled the cord. The tree might go up, especially with the trunk out of its water.
Larry looked up at the wall and put his hand over his mouth; he’d been trying to avoid looking right at anything, but he’d done it now. Just a few inches in front of him, on the wall, was the spot where Danny had been shot. The bullet had gone right through his head. He’d given Danny a couple of rides in the cruiser, and now here the boy was: matted blood, strands of hair—
He breathed through his fingers and looked down at the presents. He’d seen blood before; he’d seen all kinds of deaths, mostly on the sides of highways, but twice because of bullets to the head. He told himself, Pretend it’s no different. He tried to focus and made himself pick out words on the presents’ tags.
No help there. Wayne had bought them all presents. To Danny, From Daddy. To Mommy, From Daddy. All written in Wayne’s blocky letters. Jesus H.
Larry knew he should go, just go out and sit in his cruiser until mid-night, but he couldn’t help it. He took one of Jenny’s presents, a small one that had slid almost completely under the couch, and sat down in the dining room with the box on his lap. He shouldn’t do this, it was wrong, but really — who was left to know that a present was gone? Larry wasn’t family, but he was close enough — he had some rights here. Who, besides him, would ever unwrap them? The presents belonged to Wayne’s parents now. Would they? Would they want to see what their son had bought for the family he’d butchered? Not if they had any sense at all.