“No, I expected you might.”
“Took a shower too. Maybe the best one I ever had.”
He looked back at the van and said, “I got the luggage in the back of the van there. Your backpack. I don’t know if there’s much left you can use but I took it all anyhow. I think they put these clothes through some kind of wash but I don’t believe they ever heard of detergent down there. Thought I’d run them through again.”
“I can do it.”
“All right.” He looked at her. “You best come inside now.”
“All right.”
“I can take you on home later if you want. The gas and electric are back on.”
She stared at him, her eyes stinging. “Mr. Burke…”
“Mr. Burke nothing. I asked the woman there at Water & Gas, ‘Ma’am, what do you think is gonna happen to the waterpipes when you turn off the heat?’ She just looked at me.” He shook his head. “So then I go back to the house to light the furnace and water heater and guess what I see?”
“What?”
“I see that someone has left all the faucets dribbling.”
“Someone must’ve broken in.”
“That’s what I figured.”
She looked into her mug, the pale tea. Dark curve of sediment down there like a letter C against the white.
“What are you drinking there?” he said.
“Tea.”
“Tea,” he said. “That’s gotta be over ten years old. Come on now,” he said. “Let’s get you inside and get some food in you.”
HE MADE SPAGHETTI with meatballs and she ate two plates of it and wiped the plate clean with the last slice of garlic bread and ate that too, and then with her cup of coffee she ate a slice of store-bought cherry pie that had been warming in the oven and when that was gone she pushed the plate away from her and puffed her cheeks and blew.
In the utility room off the kitchen her clothes were tumbling in the dryer. Zippers and jeans rivets ticking irregularly on the drum.
She was looking around the kitchen and he looked too, as if he’d never done so before. Spare and neat and not much in the way of décor to suggest a wife and a daughter—their coming and going, their cooking, their teasing, their arguing. Their standing shoulder to shoulder at the sink. The sight of one or both of them at the window when he’d come home from work and was crossing the cold path toward that light, that warmth. He’d seen that, she knew. Felt that.
He began to fuss with the plates and she said, “Let me do it. You drink your coffee,” and she stood and took the plates to the counter.
“There’s a good dishwasher there,” he said.
“I’m a good dishwasher. Is that OK?”
“Can you manage with that cast?”
“I can manage anything with this thing.”
Steam rose from the sink and she scrubbed the silverware first, thinking, Did Holly Burke hold this knife, eat from this fork? Her own reflection was in the window, but beyond that a skewed rectangle of light lay on the snow, her shape in the center of the rectangle like some parallel girl looking back at her. She said, “I had such crazy dreams. When I was sick.”
“Fever dreams.”
“I saw my father clear as day. He sat there on the bed and called me Deputy.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a dream.”
She turned to him. “You believe that?”
“Doesn’t matter what I believe.” He looked down at his coffee, and she turned back to the sink. She watched her good hand moving white and slow under the suds.
“When I went into the river that day,” she said, “when we went through the ice and we were in the water, I think I must’ve drowned. I think I must’ve died.”
He said nothing. She heard him return the mug quietly to the tabletop. She turned around again. “I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have said that.”
He shook his head and made a face that said it was nothing, no harm done.
“What makes you think you drowned?” he said.
“I saw things under there, in the water. I don’t know how else I could’ve seen them otherwise.” Before he could ask what she’d seen she said, “My dreams were like that, when I was sick. It was like being in that river all over again.”
I felt her heart, she would’ve liked to tell him. All its pain but all its love too.
He sat watching her. The laundry thumping and ticking.
“I remember looking out the window upstairs and seeing two men standing in the snow talking,” she said.
“That wasn’t no dream,” he said. “I come back upstairs and there you are lying on the floor by that window, and the window wide-open.”
“Sorry.”
He looked into his mug again. She turned back to the sink and began scrubbing the saucepan.
“You hear what those two men said?” he said.
The saucepan slipped out of her grip and splashed in the water. She retrieved it and resumed scrubbing.
“I heard,” she said, “but I thought it was just part of the dream.”
“What did you hear?”
She worked at the saucepan. Then, without turning around, she told him what she’d heard—about the deputy, about the piece of cloth. Feverish, crazy things.
Gordon was silent. She rinsed the saucepan one-handed and racked it.
“You heard all that?” he said, and she turned to him again.
“That was Danny Young,” she said.
“Yes, it was.”
“I didn’t think he lived here anymore.”
“He doesn’t. But he’s back now. Came out here to tell me he didn’t do it. All these years later.”
She leaned against the counter and dried her good hand with the dish towel.
“Do you believe him?”
“I don’t know.” He put his hand to his forehead. “I went down there and talked to that deputy. Sheriff, now.”
“What did he say?” she said—and heard herself and said, “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.”
“He said what you’d expect him to say,” Gordon said. “Had an answer for everything.” He looked up again. Watching her standing there. “What?” he said.
“What what?”
“You were gonna say something.”
She shook her head, but then she said it: “My dad didn’t like him.”
“Who?”
“Ed Moran.”
“The world’s full of people who don’t like each other.”
“I know. But I think—”
He waited.
“I think he knew something about him,” she said.
“Like what?”
She thought about that, but there was nothing specific, no single thing she could put into words. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I asked him one time why Moran was leaving the department and he didn’t say. He said it was none of my concern.”
“Was he wrong?”
She shook her head again. “But it was the way he said it. Like there was something there he didn’t want to talk about. Not with me, anyway.”
Gordon narrowed his eyes at her. “If you’re trying to say he knew about this…”
“No, not about this,” she said quickly. “Not about Holly. I mean—” she said, but then lost her voice in the rush of her thoughts… because if her father had known that Moran might’ve been involved in Holly’s death, if he’d had any suspicion whatsoever, then he never would’ve let him go down to Iowa like that—he’d have kept him in Minnesota until he had his case. Until he could bust him and hold him. And he certainly would not have allowed him to become an Iowa deputy… and so whatever he’d known, or whatever he’d suspected about the deputy, it hadn’t been enough to act on, and it hadn’t been enough to say something against him to the Iowa sheriff.
Or did he just say nothing at all, as he’d done with her? None of your concern.