“I don’t know what it was,” she said finally. “But it wasn’t about Holly. It couldn’t have been.”
Gordon looked at her. Then he looked into his coffee again. Silent. Far away in his thoughts, in his pain, so that when he spoke again she knew it didn’t matter that she was there to hear it.
“I watched that boy grow up. Him and his brother. Their daddy was my business partner. Our kids used to play together when they were little.” He tilted his mug, watching. “I saw the other one just a few days ago, over at Wabash’s. Or I guess it was longer ago than that.”
“The other one?”
“Other brother. Twin brother. Marky. He works there. And after that I go on out to their mother’s place, I don’t even know why, I haven’t said one word to that woman in ten years, and here she is trying to bury a dead dog in the frozen ground.” He shook his head. “The world is just too strange for words, that’s all.”
She watched him. Then she stepped back to the table and sat down again.
“So what are you going to do?” she said.
He didn’t look up. “About what?”
“About what he told you—what Danny Young told you.”
He looked up then, and she felt the blood rising to her face.
“What am I supposed to do?” he said.
“You could go to the sheriff, Mr. Burke. Sheriff Halsey. Or a lawyer. I know a good one, I could—”
“Lawyer? I don’t need no lawyer. And I can just see the sheriff’s face. This boy comes to tell me a story about a deputy—a full sheriff now—trying to frame him ten years ago? Hell, he’d lock me up.”
“But there’s evidence now.”
“There’s a piece of cloth ten years old, and I don’t even have it. He took it with him.”
“But the sheriff—”
Gordon pushed back from the table and stood, as if remembering something he’d forgotten to do, but then did nothing, just stood there. Then he went to the sink, and after a moment there was the sound of his mug going into the water, the dull, underwater note of it hitting bottom.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s none of my business.”
He stood staring into the water. “Nothing to be sorry about,” he said. “But to tell you the truth, I wish like hell you never opened up that window. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”
She watched him. The back of his neck.
“I don’t know, Mr. Burke,” she said. “Maybe I was supposed to open that window.”
He glanced back at her then without quite looking at her. “Supposed to?”
“Yes. If you think about how it all happened… me getting sick, you bringing the firewood, then bringing me here. Danny Young showing up like that. The fact that it was my dad’s case…”
He turned back to the kitchen window. “You’re a strange girl, you know that?” He was silent a long while, and she was too. Then he said to the window, “I went on up there to Rochester, to that hospital, when you were there. He tell you that—your dad?”
“No.”
“Well. Can’t say I’m surprised, after what I said to him.”
“What did you say to him?”
“Said I wished it on him. What happened to you. It was a long time ago, but after he let that boy go, after he let Danny Young walk away, I wished it on him. Just so he’d know what it was like.”
She watched him but he would not turn to look at her.
“You don’t think…” she began. “Mr. Burke—you don’t think that had anything to do with what happened to me and Caroline, do you?”
He didn’t move. Staring out the window.
“Mr. Burke?”
“I don’t know what I think. I just got a funny feeling that if you never went into that river, you and Caroline, Danny Young never would of come to show me that piece of cloth. And don’t even say it,” he said, turning toward her again. “I know how it sounds.”
He held her eyes, then turned away again. “I just wanted you to know I wished for it, that’s all. I wanted you to know that about me.”
She was silent, imagining that moment: Gordon Burke standing with her father in the hospital and telling him that—that he’d wished harm on her.
“What did he say?” she said finally.
“Who?”
“My dad. When you told him that.”
“Said what a decent man would say. Said he was sorry.”
“He was, Mr. Burke,” she said. “He never got over it. He never stopped thinking about it. I know he didn’t. I know that’s why he went down there and shot that boy in the hand like that. It wasn’t just about me and Caroline. It was about Holly too, and Danny Young, and—”
Gordon had raised his hand, and he kept it raised. As if demonstrating the act itself—how a hand was raised for its own shooting. “That was about you,” he said. “Trust me. I know what was in his heart. And I know he let that boy off easy.”
“He shot a boy with no evidence, Mr. Burke.”
“No evidence doesn’t mean no reason.”
She shook her head. Her heart was pounding. How did they get here—with her condemning her father’s actions and Gordon Burke defending them?
“And what about those pictures?” she said. “The photo line-up? I couldn’t ID him myself.”
“Doesn’t mean it wasn’t him.”
“And Danny Young?” she said—she blurted.
“What about him.”
“I mean—should he have shot him too?”
He stared at her and she did not look away, her heart pounding, and there was no sound but the tumbling of her clothes in the other room, that constant thumping and ticking, until suddenly an alarm sounded, so loud and urgent she jumped. It was the dryer. It blared and stopped and the drum stopped turning and they studied each other in a new silence.
“I think your dad was right about one thing,” Gordon said. “It’s none of your concern.”
She saw him again, her father, sitting on the bed, his cool hand on her forehead, You have to help him now, sweetheart. She felt Holly Burke’s heart beating in her chest again—or the memory of it, the emptiness that so much feeling left behind.
“And if he was here,” Gordon went on, “I think he’d say it was time for you to get back to school where you belong.”
“How do you know what he’d say?” she said, and she saw how these words struck him, and she said, “I’m sorry… Mr. Burke, I didn’t mean that how it sounded, I—”
He raised his hand again and shook his head. Suddenly he looked very tired and very old.
“We keep saying things we’re sorry we said,” he said. “Which tells me we should just stop talking about it.” He looked at her with kindness, or his idea of it in that moment, and Audrey nodded, and smiled, and wiped her eyes. Then she stood from the table and went into the utility room to get her clothes.
44
IT’S NONE OF your concern.
Her father had told her that years ago, and Gordon Burke had said he was right.
But her father had also said, You have to help him now, sweetheart.
Help who? Mr. Burke? Danny Young?
All that day—the day after Gordon Burke brought her home—she did not leave the sofa except to make herself soup, except to use the bathroom, and by nine o’clock the next morning she was done lying around on that sofa.
She’d not been back to the building since his retirement but it had not changed, and its smell was still the smell of her father: leather belts and coffee and cigarettes and dusty wooden floors and the smoky wintry smell of his sheriff’s jacket when he would let her wear it as she sat reading in the old wooden armchair, waiting for him to finish typing at his computer, finish his phone calls, finish talking to his deputies, to Gloria, his secretary, before at last jingling his keys and putting his hand on top of her head, Ready to roll, Deputy?