What if you were never here? you think.
What if you’d not gone through the park at all?
What if she just vanished and no one ever knew?
No, sir, it didn’t happen like that.
How did it happen, Danny?
It didn’t happen.
Why did you drive up to your cousin’s cabin, Danny, after you got home?
To go duck hunting.
At two thirty in the morning.
Yes, sir. So we could get an early start.
Could you get rid of the truck, a whole truck, just make it disappear—into the river, or into the lake far away?
Don’t be stupid. Don’t be crazy. Take the hose and spray it all down, plate and bumper, tires and undercarriage. Uncle Rudy has a cabin up in the woods and Cousin Jer has the key and by the time you get up there, going over the dirt trails and across the stream and through the mud there won’t be anything left of anything you might’ve missed…
But to not see her? Not feel the impact?
And what if she’s still alive…?
Tell me about Holly Burke, Danny.
What about her?
What did you like about her?
What do you mean?
Sutter taking a last drag on his cigarette and mashing it on the heel of his boot and dropping the butt to the floor. You know what I mean.
I’ve known her a long time. Our fathers were business partners.
Did you ever date her?
No, sir.
Did you ever want to?
And he thought then not of Holly Burke but of Katie Goss, and felt again that bang in his heart when the sheriff had asked to see his cell phone, hours ago, up at the cabin, because Danny had remembered then—only then—that Katie had called him when he was in the park, and he’d thought somehow that the phone would tell the sheriff where he’d been when she called, like some kind of tracking device, and he had not understood that what the sheriff really wanted to see was had he called Holly Burke, or had she called him. And now he could use that same phone to show the sheriff that not only had they not called each other—at least not on any cell phone—but that she was not even in his contacts!
But there’d been plenty of time for him to delete every trace of her from the phone, the sheriff would point out, and anyway Danny had already told him he didn’t think he had to show his cell phone to anyone if he wasn’t under arrest, and the sheriff had said that was true, and at last he answered Sutter’s question, No, Sir, I never wanted to date her.
Never?
No, sir.
An attractive young woman like that? Never thought about it—ever?
And with the flashlight in one hand and the hose in the other you stood up then and you saw her, your mother—standing at the window and looking right at you, and how long had she been standing there, how much did she see? Where is the square of cloth?
It’s in one of your pockets.
Put the flashlight down and finish rinsing the dog. Rinse your hands. Take a good long drink of the cold water and shut the water off and take the dog inside and tell her you gotta go back out and help Jeff, he needs a jump and you gotta go and you’ll be right back. Just go back there and look, that’s all—the truck is clean, or as clean as you can get it, so drive back now, your heart pounding, and see from the edge of the park that there are no cops, no flashing lights, and drive all the way through the park and all the way back and no sign of her anywhere, and was it some kind of joke, that piece of cloth? A gag executed by drunk girls just to mess with you?
Other scenarios, other possibilities, won’t even enter your mind until later, when you are driving north toward Cousin Jer’s, strung-out and seeing things—figures, young women, running out of the darkness into your headlights—and thinking you will never make it, that the lights will come up fast in the rearview and the colored lights will go off like bombs in the early morning darkness and that will be that.
But that’s later. First—get back home and get your stuff and go, because you need to get away from here and you need time. You need time right now like you need the air to breathe.
You can say it, Danny. She was a good-looking young woman and you desired her. You wanted Holly Burke.
No, sir.
You wanted her, and so you offered her a ride, cold night like that, her dressed like that, and she gets in. But then you try something in the park, you get grabby and there’s a fight, and she gets out and starts walking, and that’s when you hit her with the truck—maybe not on purpose, but you hit her. And you panic. You see her lying there and you think you killed her and you’re drunk and you panic. You need to get rid of the body—but how…?
No air in that little room, as if Sutter’s voice were using it up with each word, and that voice so thick in Danny’s head like smoke—expanding like smoke until his brain was swimming in it, spinning in it—
… and next thing you know you’re lifting the girl in your arms, and you’re walking her to the riverbank and she weighs nothing, and all you can think is how cold she must’ve been, out here with no jacket, nothing but that blouse… and you lay her down again, and with a push you send her over, and down she goes, her face rolling once, twice to the sky before there’s the splash and the waves go rippling out and the body in its white, flimsy blouse lingers, the blond hair spreading, the body pulled slowly out into deeper water, stronger current… and the last you’d see is a pale shape of fabric on the surface of the water, air-filled, trembling in the wind like some living creature, before even that went under, sinking into darkness and you could not take it back you could never take it back and it was no nightmare, it was real, and you’d done it…
No, sir, Danny heard himself say. Shaking his head, shaking off this vision.
But you hadn’t killed her, Danny, Sutter said. She was still breathing when you pushed her into the water. And that right there—that’s not manslaughter. That’s not even vehicular homicide, Danny. That’s murder.
Sutter watching him, no expression whatsoever on his face, in those blue eyes. The camera watching. The men behind the glass watching.
The room spun. His stomach pitched. He thought he might be sick.
Sutter picked up his pen again and tapped it twice on the notepad.
Talk to me, Danny. Tell me about that night. Tell me what happened.
The room came to rest. Danny took a breath and let it out slowly.
I’m ready for that lawyer, he said. Either that, or I walk out of here right now.
And in the few seconds you had before she stepped into your room—Danny, we had a deal!—you pinched the cloth up from your jeans pocket and opened up the textbook and laid the cloth flat between the pages and put the book up on the shelf and you can’t even say why. Just down the hall sat the perfect solution: a contraption that filled itself with water and emptied itself with gravity into a four-inch waste pipe as dark and forever as the bottom of the sea.