The boy swallowed hard before he answered. “They were fighting. Bonnie and the man were fighting. He was bigger than she was, and she couldn’t get away.”
“Did either one of them say anything to you?”
“Bonnie saw me, and she shook her head like for me not to come any closer. The man saw me too, I think, but I ran away before he could catch me.”
“What did he look like?”
Junior shrugged. “I dunno. Just a man, I guess.”
“Was he tall or short? Taller than your mommy? As tall as your daddy?
“Tall, but not as tall as my daddy.”
Big Al looked at me. “Ben was six five,” he said before turning back to Junior. “Was he fat?”
“No, he was kinda skinny.”
“Was the man black or white, brown or yellow?”
“White,” Junior answered at once.
“What kind of white?” Big Al asked.
Junior Weston regarded Big Al with his head cocked to one side. “Not like you,” he said seriously. “You’re kinda red. More like him,” he said, pointing at me, “and his hair was brown.”
“Long or short, straight or curly?”
Junior leaned back. “It wasn’t curly,” he said. “Definitely straight.”
“Had you ever seen him before? Is he maybe someone from right around here, someone from this neighborhood?”
“No. I never saw him before.” Junior hunkered against the detective’s chest. “I’m tired. Can’t we stop now?”
Big Al shook his head. “It’s important to go on. You might forget something.”
“Okay,” Junior said.
“Do you know what time it was?”
The boy shook his head. “No. We were in bed. We were supposed to be asleep, but Dougie and Adam started telling ghost stories. They do that sometimes, just to scare me ‘cause I’m littler than they are. That’s when I went out to sleep in the closet in the hall. It’s my secret hiding place. I go there when Dougie and Adam start acting mean or picking on me. I closed the door almost all the way so they couldn’t find me. When they got quiet, I was going to go back to bed, but I heard a noise. I went into the kitchen. That’s when I saw the bad man.”
“Did Bonnie say anything to you?”
“No, she couldn’t. She tried, but there was something over her mouth. He was behind her. When she shook her head, he looked up and saw me.”
“What did you do then?”
The boy ducked his head and bit his lip. His answer was little more than a whisper. “I ran away.”
“You went back to the closet?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Where did the bad man go?”
“I don’t know. I heard some doors opening and closing. I think he was looking for me. I think he went into our room.”
“Why didn’t you call your daddy?”
“I was too scared to make a noise. I heard him getting closer, going past. Then, after that, I wanted to get out, but I couldn’t. The door was stuck. It got really quiet.”
“But you did hear noises?”
This time, instead of answering aloud, Benjamin Harrison Weston, Jr., buried his head against Big Al’s chest and sobbed into it. The detective didn’t bother to ask him what he had heard-there was no need. We both had a pretty good idea what the horror outside must have sounded like to a terrified child hiding in a darkened closet, wondering if the monster would come after him next.
“I knew he hurt them. He was bad,” Junior Weston said finally. “Before you even told me, I thought maybe he killed them. Like on TV.”
“Ja,” Big Al said softly. “I thought maybe you did. You’re a smart boy, Junior, and you were real smart to stay hidden. Your daddy would be proud of you.”
At the mention of his father, Junior’s eyes once more clouded with tears. “But I wanted to help…what if…” he began, then he broke off. For the next several minutes he sobbed brokenly into Big Al’s massive chest. I couldn’t know how a five-year-old would process the end of that sentence. Maybe he wondered what would have happened if, instead of hiding, he had warned his father, just as Officer Dunn had wondered what would have happened if the patrol car had somehow arrived on the scene sooner.
In the aftermath of death, “what if” becomes a haunting question, a philosophical imperative dictating the lives of survivors. Some ask themselves variations of that question for the rest of their lives. I’ve done it myself on occasion, especially in regard to Anne Corley, a woman I loved and who I thought loved me-right up until she tricked me into killing her.
Actually, over the years I’ve almost managed to convince myself that she did love me with the same kind of life-changing ferocity I felt for her. I’ve wondered if the force of that love didn’t somehow bring her face-to-face with the reality of the fiendish monster she’d become. I don’t blame her for not being able to live with that reality, but I’ve often wished she had committed suicide with her own hand instead of mine.
Still, though, I’ve asked myself countless times what if I had done something else? What if I had taken some other action? Would it have caused a different result? Would we somehow, somewhere have managed to live happily ever after? I don’t know. I doubt it.
It was painful hearing Junior Weston, sitting there on Detective Lindstrom’s lap in our little cubicle, ask himself those same questions for the very first time. Finally, having cried himself out, the boy grew still.
“He was way bigger than you. You did the best you could at the time,” Big Al said reassuringly. “Now you’re helping us. We’ll have an artist work with you on a composite, a picture drawn from your description. Do you know about those?”
Junior nodded. “I saw one once when Daddy brought me down here on a Saturday morning.”
“We’ll do that later on, tomorrow or the next day,” Big Al added. “In the meantime, we have to talk to the other boy’s family, to Adam’s family. What’s his last name?”
“Jackson. Adam Jackson. He slept over because his mama had to work all night.”
“Where does she work?”
“In a hospital.”
“Where? Which one?”
“Somewhere,” Junior said vaguely. “I don’t know the name of it.”
“What’s Adam’s daddy’s name?”
“He doesn’t have a daddy.”
“Does his mother have another name, a first name?”
“Her name is Mrs. Jackson,” Junior responded firmly. “That’s what my mommy said to call her.”
Ben and Shiree Weston had taught their son to respect his elders, but that respect wouldn’t make our job any easier.
Big Al took another tack. “Where does she live? Somewhere close to you?”
“No. They live all the way over on Queen Anne. You know, that really steep hill, but Adam and Dougie go to the same school. McClure. They’re in junior high. I’m only in kindergarten now, but I’ll be big enough to be in first grade next year. Did you know that?”
Hearing the ingenuous certainty in Junior Weston’s voice made me wish I could be a little kid again myself. No matter what terrible disasters might befall, kids exist in a plane where much of the future is known and predictable. At least children were free to believe it predictable. Junior Weston’s parents, siblings, and friend had been wiped out in the course of a single catastrophic night, but the boy moved forward with every confidence that next year he would shift automatically from kindergarten to first grade. And he was probably right.
“Will I get to see my mommy and daddy?” Junior asked. “I saw Grammy after she was dead. She was in a long box with her good black dress on, her best church dress. There were lots of flowers. I thought she was sleeping. That’s what it looked like.”
I doubted any amount of mortician’s art would ever restore the appearances of Shiree and Bonnie Weston. They would certainly need closed coffins. As a consequence, the others probably would be too. As if reading my mind, Big Al spoke. “No,” he answered firmly. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh,” Junior Weston said. He rubbed his eyes. “I’m tired. Can I go home now? I want to go to bed.”
The shift was abrupt but not surprising. A five-year-old’s attention span is only so long, and his understanding of the tragedy was as yet only skin-deep. It was fine to talk about people being dead and in heaven, but Junior Weston still had no real grasp of the fundamental changes that had transformed his young life. He was tired, with good reason, but he couldn’t go home and go to bed, not to the home and bed he had known, not ever again.