“What servicemen do you know who have recently left the station?”
“I don’t know.”
“But he knew you — he waved, according to you — how do you explain that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know much,” says Rick’s friend from the passenger side — the one who punched him in the gut when he stopped running. He is sitting on a chair tilted against the wall, taking notes.
“I want to call my dad.”
“Trouble is, buddy,” says the big cop, “there were no departures from the station that week. No courses finishing, no postings, no one away on leave. We checked, eh?”
Rick stares at the scarred tabletop.
“How do you explain that, young man?” asks Bradley.
“I can’t.”
“I can.” Rick waits. Bradley says, “It never happened.”
A bad dream. “I want my mother,” says Rick and bites his lip, feeling himself redden with the approach of tears, ambushed by the potency of the universal phrase. He looks up. The big cop is grinning at him.
Jack runs up the steps and into his house. “What’s for supper, I’m starved”—but the kitchen is empty. No dinner smells, the table not set. “Mimi? … Kids?” What’s happened? I went away and something happened. The cuckoo clock startles him; he reaches for the phone, for Mimi’s pop-up tin address book — although he hasn’t a clue how to decode her filing system — and catches sight of the note on the fridge, “We’re across the street at the Froelichs’.” He breathes again. He wants a beer. Maybe Henry’s got a good Löwenbräu on ice.
He is about to knock on the Froelichs’ door when the bejesus police dog lunges at him through the screen—“Rex!” Colleen seizes his collar. “He thought you were another cop.” She turns and disappears down the hall, and Jack enters. A record is blaring on the hi-fi. Bambi.
“Dad!” Madeleine scrambles from the living-room floor and runs to him.
“Hi old buddy.”
“Hi Dad,” says his son, absorbed in a Meccano creation.
The Froelichs’ living room is chaotic — laundry hamper, newspapers, playpen, toys. The young gal in the wheelchair doesn’t seem to register his arrival so Jack doesn’t greet her. He finds his wife in the kitchen, feeding the two baby boys, one screaming. He grins at the sight; he’ll tease her about it later, but it looks good on her, a baby at the end of each spoon, strained peaches in their hair. But she doesn’t smile back, just says, “There’s soup on the stove. Ricky Froelich’s been arrested.”
“What?” Jack hesitates, but the soup smells good. “What for?” He reaches toward the stove and lifts the lid on the pot.
“Claire,” says Mimi.
The metal is hot but it takes a second for that message to get through, so that, by the time Jack replaces the lid on the pot, the pads of his thumb and forefinger are shiny and seared.
“Claire?” he says, his lips drying. The word dissolves like a capsule in his gut, spreading outward. Claire. He takes a breath. Sits at the kitchen table, the little boys racketing their fists against their high-chair trays. Mimi is sliding peach goo from their faces, folding it expertly into their mouths. He watches her lips move and struggles to follow what she is saying — the Froelichs have gone to look for their son, the police came and took away his clothes, claimed not to know where the boy was being held. She goes to the sink to rinse the bowls.
“Why?” says Jack. She hasn’t heard him over the din. “Why?” he repeats.
Mimi says, “They don’t believe his alibi.”
Jack examines the word “alibi”—like a strange fish on the end of his line. He sees Colleen in the doorway. She says, “I’ll put ’em to bed, I’ll change ’em,” barely moving her mouth, eyes more guarded than ever.
Mimi says, “You’re a good helper, Colleen, let’s you and me do it together.”
Jack is alone at the kitchen table. In the living room, Shirley Temple’s intimate tones boom from the hi-fi, a certain plaintive sexy catch in her voice. His alibi. How did he miss it? What he should have known. The boy on the road with his sister and his dog … a trick of perspective. Jack makes the realization that his memory of the event has been from Rick’s point of view: the blue car, oncoming into the sun, bounce of light off the windshield obliterating all but the shape of a hat behind the wheel; a hand raised in greeting, a man waving. And as the car passes, the dent in the rear bumper, the yellow sticker.
Now Jack plays the same memory from his own vantage point behind the wheel. He sees Rick jogging on the road with his sister and dog, pushing the wheelchair. The boy lifts a hand to shield his eyes against the sudden glare of sun. Then he raises an arm, tentative, in response to Jack’s wave. Wednesday afternoon. When the little girl went missing.
The police were never interested in what the boy saw. They were interested in whether or not anyone saw the boy. “On the afternoon of Wednesday, April tenth,” is what Bradley asked. That must have been the time of the murder. Even thinking or saying “the time of the murder” seems to bring order to an obscenely disordered event. No one should call it anything; to name it is to include it in the world, and it should not be included.
Jack stares at the kitchen table; grey Formica sparkles blend with crumbs, a ring of milk. He folds his hands next to a wad of bills blotched transparent with butter.
He was just doing his job, it never entered his mind…. But who in his right mind could have imagined the police were after Ricky Froelich? He shakes his head — now that the “war criminal” is out of the picture, the picture is suddenly clear: Rick was the last one seen with her. Rick found the body—knew where to look for it, according to the police. And now, thanks to Jack, they can say, Rick lied about his alibi. The police were not impeded in their deductions by the knowledge of what a nice boy Ricky Froelich is. To them, he is just a male juvenile.
A sizzling — Jack looks up, the soup is boiling over. He gets up, turns off the heat. Warms his hands over the mess.
From the hi-fi a pert command, “Wake up, wake up! Wake up, friend Owl!”
Inspector Bradley’s face is inscrutable, his voice as expressionless as if he were reading from an instruction manual. “You left your sister in her wheelchair and, accompanied by your dog, you lured Claire McCarroll into the field, where you attempted to rape her, and when she threatened to tell, you killed her.”
“What’s so funny, Rick?” asks the cop from the chair.
“Nothing.”
“Something must be funny, you’re laughing.”
“It’s crazy, that’s all.” He tried not to laugh, but it turned out that tears were easier to fend off. It is funny. It’s eight-thirty and he has been in this room for five hours, he hasn’t peed, he hasn’t eaten, he has told the same story countless times, they are saying he would leave his sister alone in her wheelchair—“I would never leave my sister alone in her—” He is laughing so hard that tears trickle down his face. He lays his head down on his arms on the table. Heaving.
“What did you say?”
“You should ask her,” says Rick, wiping tears.
“Ask who, Rick?” says Inspector Bradley.
“My sister. She was with me the whole time. She knows.”
Inspector Bradley says nothing. The big cop sips his Coke and asks, “What good’s that going to do, Rick?”
“She can tell you, I didn’t do it.”
“She can’t tell us diddly-squat, Ricky.”
“Yes she can, she was—”
“She’s retarded.”
Rick is so tired. He looks from the man in the suit to the man in the uniform and says, “Fuck you.”