Pittsburgh Noir

Intruder by Kathleen George

Schenley Farms

They were partners. One was white, one was black; they got along and liked working together. They’d come up through the ranks at the same time, slightly competitive, mostly friends.

The call came at one in the morning. All the good murders happened at night. The 911 operator told them, “Schenley Farms Terrace. A guy hit an intruder over the head. Called here, we sent the paramedics. They’re saying the guy is dead. Patrol just got there.”

“Breaking news,” said Tolson, looking at his watch as he beckoned his partner down the stairs and outside to a fleet car. “Way too late for the eleven o’clock hash and nobody much watches the morning news, so we caught ourselves a break. I hate sounding dumb on the eleven o’clock news when we don’t know what’s happening.”

“You can manage to sound dumb anytime,” Paulson said. Tolson shot him a look and then Paulson laughed and asked, “Okay, what is it?”

“Manslaughter, probably.” Tolson gave the few details he had while he radioed patrol to call him on his cell.

Damion Paulson drove them, expertly shooting to the parkway and then passing everybody on the road.

Tolson’s phone rang, speaker on. The patrol cop had five minutes on them. “Anything you can tell us?”

“He’s dead. Mashed-up head and lots of blood. Man, he must’ve got hit hard. Family is all upset. Everybody is shaking and crying. They have accents. I don’t know what kind. They’re foreigners.”

“Okay. What else?” Tolson asked.

“The daughter. She’s something else. She looks like some kind of movie star. Like maybe Indian or something, but with light eyes. Maybe she’s somebody famous, I don’t know.”

Paulson was laughing silently.

“Anything else about the homicide?” Tolson pressed.

“Not yet. Just everybody’s upset. They’re talking in their language.”

Tolson hung up. “Check your prejudice at the door,” he quipped. He was serious, though. Now was not the time to fuck up. Respectful to foreigners was drummed into their heads. Also other lessons: Poor doesn’t mean dumb. Every poor dead son of a bitch was a human being.

“You ever hang around Schenley Farms?” Tolson asked Paulson, who had grown up near there, in the Hill District.

“Nah.”

Schenley Farms, they knew, had some fancy properties, but the fanciest mansions were closer to Oakland. Old money as well as some high brass from the universities resided there. Then there were the somewhat fancy houses on the steeper streets of Schenley Farms, and then way up above them was the beginning of “the hill,” a black ghetto. Five minutes later they were at the house. It was far from shabby.

A couple of TV news trucks were parked on the street. Tolson told reporters he passed, walking to the house, “We’ll have a statement for you in thirty minutes.” They went inside.

The inside of the house was super fancy. Glass, white, glass, white. Plush carpets. Tolson knew they were bringing in dirt and he felt uncomfortable. It was late May and the earth was moist. The patrol cop said, “Down here,” and led them down a set of carpeted steps to a finished basement that was basically a well decked-out apartment. The paramedics were standing around like oafs. The guy on the floor of this downstairs apartment was so totally dead — extreme measures definitely not necessary. He was a black guy, and they could see that he was wearing running shoes, jeans, and a T-shirt of a good quality, nice-looking things. A pocketknife lay near the body.

Tolson and Paulson moved outside the basement door. They examined the grounds, the shaved bits of door around the lock, then came back in and looked around. Cushy, cushy sofas and a huge TV. Tolson walked around, Paulson behind him, briefly taking in the little kitchen and the bathroom, all very state of the art.

“You know how much that kind of shower setup costs?” Paulson asked. He was married and trying to renovate a house. “And the faucets. Way out of my range.”

“Pretty,” Tolson admitted. “Pretty stuff, all right.” He was not married. He had just suffered a breakup and was nursing a broken heart. He hadn’t even known she was unhappy. She’d told him that was because he wasn’t too smart.

They checked the victim for ID. There was nothing in his pockets. “This knife was just like this?”

The patrol cop told them it was.

Had the deceased dropped it that way when he fell? Odd.

They headed upstairs to talk to the family.

They tiptoed through the huge living room with its two levels to where the patrol cop pointed them, saying, “They told me they’d be in the kitchen.”

The kitchen was not exactly a kitchen. It was perhaps larger than the two-tiered living room. Its paned glass windows looked clean even by night, the paint on the wood perfect. It had clearly been added onto the house, using up part of the yard. It had a fireplace and a seating area with comfortable chairs, like a second living room. In a gazebo kind of thing at one end was a dining table and chairs. There were windows everywhere. These cats were in favor of windows. One arched window at the dining end looked out onto the hillside where outdoor lights showed there were terraced levels, all planted with colorful flowers — the slope was landscaped to within an inch of its life.

The dining table was glass too. Light. Light everywhere.

The detectives turned away from the view to find the family huddled in the back near the cooking area, comforting a young woman. They broke apart reluctantly to come forward. The father indicated the glass dining table, which seated eight.

Tolson said, “Fine. Yes, let’s sit there. We need to ask you some questions.” Five family members trooped in front of the detectives. They appeared to be father, mother, sister, brother, grandmother, four of them huddling protectively over the fifth, the girl, so that at first the detectives couldn’t see her.

When they all got to the table where the family took separate seats, Tolson and Paulson got their first look at her.

She was the most beautiful woman Tolson had ever laid eyes on. She was like Elizabeth Taylor in her youth in those old, old movies — light eyes, dark hair, and lips, skin, that made his heart stop. She held a cloth to the side of her face.

“You’re hurt?”

She shook her head.

The father said firmly, “He hit her. The guy hit her.”

“Should you have medical help?”

She shook her head. Her brother sat next to her at the table but his shoulders were angled away from her — distancing himself for some reason.

Maybe she was famous, an actress or something — everything she did, even the way she shook her head, seemed watchable and interesting.

“I’m Detective Tolson, this is Detective Paulson. We’ll want your names. And then the whole story, from the beginning.”

The father’s name was Yousef, the son Javeed. The old baba, the mother’s mother, was Fatemeh, the mother was Malakeh, and the girl was Azita. The last name of the family was Samadi. Tolson laboriously copied these into his book and checked the spelling by reading each name back.

“This is your home? You live here?”

Everybody looked to Yousef Samadi, who answered. “Most of the year.”

“What does that mean?”

“We have other homes. We travel. I travel a lot,” Yousef explained, “but the children are in school so mostly they are here.”

“We went to Florida in January,” the son added.

“Oh, you mean a vacation?”

“A trip,” Samadi said. “I had some business there. I made sure they did their schoolwork. We have a home there.”

“You said homes? I suppose I should get it all down. Somewhere else?”

“Yes. In Iran, of course. Our main home. And we have an apartment in Paris.”

“I see,” Tolson said. “Would someone write the addresses for us? To make all this go quicker?”

Javeed volunteered to do that.

Tolson asked Yousef, “Your work is here?”

“I have several businesses. Not here, but I can work here by phone and computer.”

“What kind of business do you do?”

“Import.”

“I see.” Dope, guns, trinkets, antiques? “What products?”

“Carpets, rugs, beautiful things.”

Tolson nodded and turned to Paulson to bring him into the questioning phase. “Anything?”

Paulson said, “We’ll need to hear from the beginning what happened tonight.”

“Right,” Tolson said. “Go ahead.”

“We were in bed,” Yousef began. “The women were sleeping. They didn’t hear anything. Javeed was in his room. I thought he was asleep. But he was listening to something—” He made a gesture to his ears to indicate contempt toward MP3 players. “So he still didn’t hear. I was in my bed. I was watching my television. I thought I heard a sound. Highpitched. A voice. From the recreation room. I thought maybe an intruder, maybe a robber got hurt. But I knew sometimes my daughter went down there late, watching TV and doing her homework at the same time. I had to go down sometimes in the middle of the night to tell her to go to bed.” He looked around at his family. They nodded at him, some almost imperceptibly.

A knock at the front door and a simultaneous call on the police radio interrupted Samadi’s narrative.

“We’re here,” a crackling voice came through on the radio.

“What’s happening? Who is that?” Samadi held a hand over his heart.

“Our team. We have to get prints, photos.”

Azita put her hands over her face. Her brother nudged her. He said something like, “You might have to.”

Tolson saw a nasty bruise on her cheekbone near her ear.

Detective Paulson went to the door to let in the forensics team. Tolson got up too, to see who had been sent. Lucky. They’d got the best lab guys. He indicated the basement where the team should go. Then he and Paulson headed back to their seats.

“Why won’t they take the man away?” the wife was murmuring to her husband. “And the blood? I won’t ever go down there again. I want to move.”

“Let’s be patient,” Samadi said. “Let’s find out how they do it. They’re professionals.” He was an imposing man, not just because he was well-barbered and distinguished looking, but also because it was clear he was used to exercising his will.

Tolson answered formally. “We’ll tape the room off. When we have all the evidence we need, a team will come in and clean up. We can give you some names of experts at cleanup. You might want to change the carpet simply because... because you want to change it. But that’s to be decided by you later.”

Azita had begun crying.

“What is it?” Paulson asked.

“A man died in our house. It makes me feel... unlucky.”

“Unlucky?”

“And sad.”

“You were down there when he broke in?”

“Oh, yes.”

“You didn’t hear him breaking in?”

“I had fallen asleep. The TV was on.”

“I see. And then?”

“Something woke me. And I saw him. And I made a sound. And my father came down. When he saw the man he grabbed a baseball bat.”

“There was a bat there?”

“The whole corner,” Yousef interrupted. “You saw it. Sports equipment. I didn’t think; I couldn’t think. I wanted something that would be... far from my body and strong. I wanted to save my daughter.”

“Save her?”

“He was holding her. He had a knife.”

“We saw the knife,” Paulson volunteered. “Beside the body.”

Tolson said, “So, you wanted distance from him as you hit him. But you, Azita, were in the man’s grip. There’s no blood on you. How is that?”

“There was.” She shuddered. “I showered. I changed clothes.”

“I see. Where are the clothes you were wearing?”

“In the garbage. My mother took them.”

“We’re going to need them,” Paulson said kindly. “You can’t do that. You can’t make those decisions. They’re evidence. Out back?”

The mother glanced at her husband, then nodded.

“I’ll tell the techs to get them,” Paulson said, again very gently.

Tolson asked, “How long before you called us?”

“Right away.”

“But the shower? Your daughter had a shower?”

“Maybe I sat with her for a few minutes to calm her, I don’t remember. There’s a shower in the basement. She used that.”

“The change of clothes?”

“My wife brought her fresh clothes.”

“We need to go to your living room and reenact. You should show us where you were at each point. But first, did you know the young man? Any of you?”

They all said no.

“Are you sure? Did you all look at him?”

“We didn’t let Javeed or my mother-in-law go down to look, but my wife and I saw him. He was not familiar.”

“Azita?”

“Please, no.”

“What?”

“I didn’t know him.”

“Did the man speak? What did he say to you?”

She hesitated.

“Azita?” her father prompted.

“He said, ‘I need jewels, money, cash, lots of cash, now.’ I said, ‘I can get you a little cash.’ But I made a noise. He hit me. He said, ‘Shut up or I’ll kill you.’ He pulled a knife. I kept talking, telling him we had some cash on hand, not much, but that I would find him something else of value. Then my father came down. The surprise made him... the man... turn from me. Then he turned back because... I don’t know, maybe he was going to stab me. My father hit him.”

“How many times?”

“Two.”

“Please promise me,” Yousef Samadi said suddenly, “that you will keep this out of the papers and the news.”

Tolson paused and looked at him, surprised. “There is no way I can do that. We have freedom of the press.”

“Please. Keep my daughter out of it. She’s young. She’s still in high school. Don’t you understand that? Please.”

“I’ll do my best on that end.”

The father sighed heavily.

They went into the living room and played out the scenario the girl had described — sleep, sound of break-in, scream, words of threat, knife pulled, father arrives, hit to the head. They played it a couple of times while the techs worked in the basement room. Azita did it beautifully. She turned like a dancer, got up off the sofa like a princess awaking from sleep in a Disney film.

After they’d seen the act, Tolson went outside to talk to the news folks who had gathered and were sitting in open cars, smoking and chatting amongst themselves. Paulson stood in the doorway. Tolson said simply, “The apparent situation is that an intruder broke into the basement of this home. The owner who was upstairs alleges that he was alerted by a sound. He went downstairs. The man made threats to his family. The owner hit the man and the blow killed him. The intruder is as yet unidentified. We are working on an identification and checking all aspects of the case.”

Tolson and Paulson went back inside. “We’ll probably be here until about dawn,” they told the family.

“Why?”

“Everything takes time. The techs need time. Also, we’ll need to get DNA and fingerprints from you.”

“From us?”

“Yes.”

“Is this normal?” Samadi asked. He drew himself up. “Is this because we are Iranian?”

“Not because you are Iranian. It’s normal practice. We need to corroborate your account so you don’t get in trouble. Please don’t worry,” Paulson said in his honey voice. “This will soon be in the past.”

The atmosphere softened a bit after that. The grandmother yawned and slept in a chair. The family made toast, but then started to forage for larger items of food from the fridge. “What can I prepare for you?” the mother asked the detectives.

The partners managed to refuse her offer of food and drink, but they sent a patrol cop to Ritter’s to pick up middle-of-the-night sandwiches for themselves and the techs.

After they finished taking DNA swabs and fingerprints, they allowed the family to go to bed, all except Yousef, who more than agreed to be the point person. “I don’t sleep much anyway,” he said.

“Why is that?”

“Arthritis, gout, business worries.”

“I’m curious. Why did you choose Schenley Farms?” Paulson asked. “I mean, of all the places in the city. Foreign visitors seem to like living in the suburbs.”

“My wife teaches at CMU.”

“She’s a professor?” Paulson didn’t hide his surprise very well.

“Yes. Fairly famous.”

“What subject?”

“Business.”

There. They’d made a gaff. Assumed the wife was a stay-at-home because she looked a certain polite way and didn’t mouth off.

The next day they got an ID on the intruder. He was Jacob Wilson. He’d been in trouble before, for drugs. He’d lived in the Hill District. They went to see his mother and delivered the bad news.

She took it like a soldier, very strong. She provided pictures of Jacob, and when the cops could see his face and the structure of his very fine skull, they saw he’d been an extremely good-looking guy. He’d been twenty-three years old. His mother said, “I knew he had some trouble awhile back. He went to meetings. He got clean twice. He... must have backslid, I guess. I didn’t think so, but I guess he did. If I tell you he was a good kid, you won’t believe me, but he was. He was an addict but not a criminal. He was an innocent boy, all his life. An innocent.”

“Who were some of his friends?” Paulson asked. “We’d like to talk to them.”

Lila Wilson, not crying, but clearly in a deep sadness that took her voice down to a whisper, gave the names of two young men who might have seen her son in recent weeks.

The detectives went to their car. They sat for a moment.

“Nice lady,” Tolson said.

“Why are we still looking into this?”

“Tie up the ends. Be sure.”

“Right. Right. Here’s what I’m thinking. If I met Azita when I was younger...”

“She might like them older.”

“Younger than I am now... You know what I mean.”

“Right. That’s why we’re looking.”

Wilson’s friends were not that easy to track down. Finally, the detectives caught up with one of them, Pierre Smith, who told them where the second friend, Joe Sandusky, could probably be found. Pierre, looking at the pictures of first Yousef, then of Javeed, then of Azita, said no, he’d never seen them or heard of them. “Wouldn’t mind knowing the girl,” he said wide-eyed.

The other friend, Joe Sandusky, didn’t recognize the photos either. When asked about his friend, he said it was a terrible tragedy and that he didn’t believe the crap about Jacob breaking into a house. “Maybe he had a hookup with the chick. He liked women.”

“How would we find out if he knew her?”

“Beats me.”

“Tell us where the hangout was. Where he bought stuff. Where he might have met her.”

“What you talking about?”

“I think you know,” said Paulson. “Drugs. Recreational drugs.”

“I don’t know about any of that.”

“You want to be obstructing an investigation?”

“Nope.”

“You want to think again? Place where the high school kids buy their stuff.”

“Upper Craig Street.” He gave a number. “Maybe there. You’re going to pin the blame on Jacob no matter what. This sucks.”

“His mother told us he was backsliding. What was he on?”

“Just weed. Just fucking weed. He stopped messing with the other stuff.”

“Ecstasy?”

“Maybe sometimes.”

The owner of the apartment on Craig was Amsel Dickens, a big, muscular African American. “I ain’t answering anything,” he said.

“We don’t want to bust you for the weed. We don’t care about the weed. The E. Any of that. Just want to show you a picture. Ever seen this boy?”

“Nah.”

“This girl?”

“No.”

“Willing to take a lie detector?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Look again. What about this guy?”

“Yeah. Now I see him, yeah.”

“He buy much?”

“Not too much.”

“You see a lot of him?”

“No.”

“Okay. Look at the girl again.”

Amsel looked hard, extra hard, as if it took awhile to study her face, as if she was plain and unmemorable. Tolson switched the picture they’d taken of Azita with her wounded cheek with another photo, her high school glamour shot — not that she looked shabby in the police photo. Amsel kept studying, looking this way and that.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Tolson said.

“We’re going to end up not having any proof,” Paulson said when they were back in the fleet car.

“When did you get the feeling we were had?”

“Today. Breakfast, I was thinking, let them go, you know, the man was defending his house — but then I saw Wilson’s picture and I got a whole ’nother story going in my head.”

“You think race comes into it?”

“When does race not come into it?”

“I don’t know.”

“By now this Samadi’s lawyered up, I bet.”

“I’d say.”

“Cause we took the DNA. He didn’t like that.”

“He was believable. Very believable. Shaking and all. Maybe everything he said was true.”

“Maybe, yeah. We don’t want to be prejudiced.” Paulson smiled.

“Are we jumping on them?”

“Because they want to nuke the world? Because they have four houses and I can’t afford faucets for my one? I’m thinking it through.”

Later that day some results came in. They asked Mr. Samadi to come up to the office. They thought he would have a lawyer with him and were surprised that he didn’t. They sat with him in a nonthreatening meeting room and said, “Seems you hit the victim three times.”

“Did I?”

“All from behind.”

“I can’t remember. It’s a blur.”

“You were upset.”

“What man in his right mind wouldn’t be?”

“The knife had your prints on it, his prints on it. They were overlapping, like his then yours, then his, in that order. Can you tell us about that?”

“I did move the knife. He dropped it when I hit him and I shouldn’t have moved it, but I did — I put it near the body.”

“I see,” said Tolson. “So you were the last one to touch it?”

“I think so. I don’t remember. I was very upset.”

“The scenario we saw was not totally complete?”

“Look. What are you doing? I was protecting my property. I know enough about this country to know I have a right to that.”

“Your daughter’s fingerprints were on the man’s belt buckle.”

There was a long silence.

“I don’t know each move. She was defending herself. I’m sure she pushed.”

“What will you tell us about her DNA being found on the guy?” Everything stopped. Samadi froze momentarily. Tolson was police-tricking. The DNA hadn’t been tested yet. It would take weeks. His phrasing, he thought, was clever. He never said it was there, only asked what Samadi would say.

“If you had a beautiful daughter and she was being raped, what would you do?”

“Why didn’t you tell us that before?”

“Scum run the news here. That’s what you do in this country. American scum know nothing about a girl’s reputation, her honor. This is not something to broadcast.”

“Had he already raped her?”

“No. He had a knife. He had her clothes half off. He was holding the knife to her head and making her... kneel in front of him.”

They ran the questions a couple more times for consistency. “How about we take a polygraph and be done with this?”

“I think... I think I will consult a lawyer. I do not wish to be treated this way.”

After Samadi left, Paulson said, “I do have a beautiful daughter and if she was a teenager, I might lose it in a situation like that. I would try not to. But I might not be able to help myself.”

“Three times? From behind?” Tolson was never sure in the devil’s advocate game they played which one of them would take up which argument. This time they switched back and forth, each playing both “nuke the guy” and “foreign prince defends honor.”

“Maybe two.”

It took time.

Tolson’s personal life made a deeper dive in the interim. He tried to contact Jenna. She told him to get lost.

Meanwhile, they kept an eye on the drug house. They attended the Wilson boy’s funeral and talked to neighbors, school chums — everyone said Jacob was a sweet boy, not a criminal of any sort, just sometimes depressed. No job, hadn’t liked school, worked here and there, and got down on himself. He was handsome so he relied on that to pick himself up. Women. Adoration. Being loved. And that usually led to sadness because they invariably decided he had nothing to offer them.

“Hmph,” said Tolson.

Paulson said, “I feel for that kid. That could have been me if I hadn’t got it together.”

“You’re not so handsome. This kid was handsome.” Tolson grinned.

In the next week, they called neighbors at the Florida address. The telephone work was time consuming and seemed to go nowhere for days, but eventually they learned that the family had actually enrolled the kids in school last January. That was a little odd. It took them forever to find the school. The principal, when she answered, said, “Yes, I remember. I thought the children were charming. The girl was a stunner. But then the family whisked them out of school.”

Tolson put the call on speakerphone so his partner could participate. He asked, “You know why they didn’t stay in school? I mean, why start and stop?”

She hesitated. “I don’t want to say anything untrue.”

“Well, what part do you know?”

“I think... the father thought the girl was going wild.”

“Was she?”

“I don’t know. As far as I’m concerned, if I looked like that, I would have a royal good time. Why shouldn’t women have the same chances to play that men do?”

“I totally agree,” Paulson put in. “This is Detective Paulson here. I know a lot of men who don’t agree, but I’m ready to say they have that right. She was what? Sixteen?”

“I think so. Yes, sixteen.”

When they ended the call, Tolson said, “You speak with a forked tongue.”

“How so?”

“Aren’t you the guy who said you’d kill anybody messing with your daughter?”

“Right. Various codes. What other girls can do, what your own daughter can do. Also what’s not okay to do under the age of thirty-five. After thirty-five, they’re on their own. If you ever have a daughter, you’ll understand.”

Tolson shook his head. “Well, let’s call the Frenchies.”

The conversation with the foreign officer started out pretty well in pidgin French and pidgin English. But the questions they needed to ask were too complex to continue. They eventually had to stop at wishing each other well and sending mutual respect across the ocean.

Another couple of weeks went by. The DNA test results came in. Most of it confirmed who touched the knife, who touched the bat, who touched the belt. But there was additional information. Azita’s DNA was everywhere, on the guy’s mouth, cheeks, neck, chest, and yes, his penis. It didn’t form a picture of a forced encounter.

They called Samadi’s lawyer and set the polygraph for two days hence, rehearsing the questions that might shake the guy’s story.

And then they had some luck. They drove to the drug house the next day when school was letting out, and, though they expected nothing, really expected nothing, they got a bit of something. Azita, followed by two eager boys, was going into the house.

“She doesn’t look too upset or sad these days,” Paulson observed.

“No. If she knew the guy, why would none of her friends come forward? Say something?”

But they both knew she had some sort of magical power. You wanted to protect her, you wanted to be loved by her.

About ten minutes went by while they talked about what they would ask when she emerged. But she didn’t come out. Finally, they idled the car forward, parked, and went to the door.

“Who is it?”

“It’s us. Detectives Paulson and Tolson. Just want to talk to Amsel, briefly, outside. No arrests.”

The door opened slowly and Amsel slipped outside, holding a set of keys.

“The girl. The one you didn’t know. Do you recognize her from this picture now?” Tolson pulled out the glamour photo.

“Yeah. What? Am I under arrest?”

“Not if you tell the truth. What’s she doing in there?”

“She has a boyfriend. She’s just hanging with him.”

“Front room, back room?”

Amsel looked at them with hard eyes. “You guys are creeps. She’s in the back room, okay?”

“Was she ever in the back room with this other guy?” Tolson pulled out the other photo, now getting worn from sitting at the back of his notepad.

“Yes. Yes.”

“He was her boyfriend?”

“Yes. Am I under arrest?”

“No, you’re cool. Just let us in. We’ll talk to her. Her father is going to want her home soon.”

Amsel dangled the keys. He looked terrified. “Okay,” he said, and he let them in.

Tolson felt like a creep.

Paulson tapped lightly on the bedroom door. “Azita Samadi. We need to talk to you.”

Tolson felt oddly frightened in a way he hadn’t before. Of the girl. Of her father.

Azita came out of the room. She was disheveled, her eyes defiant. She was breathtaking. “What do you want with me?”

“Just... a talk.”

“I have a right to a life.”

“Come to the car. We’ll talk in the car.”

“Will you be feeling me up?”

“No. No, we won’t be doing that.”

The two detectives tried to walk casually to the car so as not to excite any trouble, though Tolson edged a little in front so she wouldn’t run. Somebody pretty soon had to start telling the truth. They put her in the passenger seat. Paulson sat in front with her and Tolson climbed in back. He nodded to Paulson to start. He was figuring out how he wanted to do this.

“Here’s the part we know,” Paulson said. “You have boyfriends. That’s your business. You like to smoke weed. We’re not going to bother you about weed. At one point Jacob Wilson was your boyfriend. So you don’t have to deny any of that.

You can just say yes.”

“So?”

“So he’s dead.”

There was a long silence. Tolson added after a while, “We’re told he was a young man who didn’t quite know himself. Maybe he went after women who were too young. That’s not good. But we don’t know that he did anything he should have died for. We’re told he was gentle. Is that true?”

Some of her fight was gone. “Yes.”

“Did he rape you? We’re going to need to do a lie detector, so you might as well tell the truth.”

“No.”

“Did he try to?”

“No.”

“Did he pull a knife on you?”

“No.”

“Had you had sex with him before?”

Defiant again, she said, “Yes. What of it?”

“He died. He’s dead.”

Her hand went to her mouth and she started to cry. She did it very beautifully again. Tolson wanted to touch her. Paulson said, “Why would your father think it was a rape? Did you cry rape to save yourself from your father’s anger?”

“I didn’t say anything. He was there with the bat before I knew what was happening.”

“And then he messed with the lock and the knife.”

She swiped at her eyes and seemed as if she would not answer. “Yes.”

“We have to do right by Jacob Wilson.”

She nodded. “He was sweet. Not too savvy but very sweet. I love my father. What’s going to happen to him?”

“He’s going to go to jail,” Tolson said. He was glad she was finally talking.

“For sure?”

“He has a good lawyer, he’ll probably get a short sentence. A jury will be sympathetic that he was acting by some code he thought was right.”

“What a mess. For all of us.”

Tolson couldn’t let up. He wanted to hear her talk. “You might have some hard times. The money won’t flow in if your pop is in jail.”

She smiled. “Pop. It’s such a funny word. I’m not worried about that. My mother pretty much does everything anyway.”

“Oh?”

“So you’ll be free for a while,” Paulson said. He sounded sad and mad.

“And so we have to do what we have to do,” Tolson said. “Where’s your father now? Back at the house?”

She smiled. “He’s in Iran.”

“Huh?”

“He left yesterday.” She looked at them straight on. “Of course. What did you think?”

“He can’t just do that.”

“He can. Believe me.”

Tolson tried to think what he wanted to ask her. He wanted her to be different, to say something different.

She got out of the car and started walking toward home. She walked smoothly and confidently. They saw her pull out a cell phone. It seemed she punched in a lot of numbers before she started speaking.

They just kept looking until she was out of sight.

Loaded by Rebecca Drake

Fox Chapel

It rained on moving day, quarter-size drops splashing like bloodstains on the stone walkway. The movers cursed under their breaths and one of them slipped as they were carrying in an antique sideboard. The heavy end left his blunt hands, landing with a crash that chipped the mahogany veneer.

Andrew watched from the doorway of the house, relieved that the damage was on the left side. Given its placement in the dining room, Christine would be unlikely to notice.

She had a tendency to overreact and he imagined if she’d been the one to see the accident she would have yelled at the movers and they might have abandoned the job half-done, a trail of possessions left on the front lawn to soak up the rain.

Luckily, she’d been out of earshot, down the hall in what was to be the boys’ bedroom, picking paint colors with her mother.

It was their first house. She made him lift her over the threshold in full view of her parents and the movers. He’d done the same thing in their apartment six years earlier, just a week after their wedding, tired and tanned from their honeymoon in Aruba, both of them laughing as he’d hoisted her into his arms and swung her through the narrow doorway.

Six years later he felt embarrassed and a little annoyed. Things were different between them. Christine was noticeably heavier, for starters, carrying twenty extra pounds of baby weight, which no one was supposed to mention even though their younger son was six months old. “You look so good!” all her friends said, as if there was some unwritten female rule to lie about physical appearance.

She’d giggled as he hoisted her into his arms and he’d forced a smile. Out of the corner of his eye he’d seen one of the movers, a young man with heavily tattooed arms, staring at him with a hardened expression while smoking a cigarette. Andrew had flushed and looked away, but not before seeing the man toss the cigarette onto the lawn. His lawn.

He hadn’t wanted to buy a house. They’d spent six years in a duplex in the East End and he’d been happy there, able to walk to the university or stop for milk on his way home, just a few blocks to meet friends for a drink in the evening. It met all his needs, until the convenience store got robbed in broad daylight, and a neighbor was mugged, and the lawn chairs disappeared. Christine started saying that she didn’t feel safe. She talked about moving out of the city and said it was better for kids. When she got pregnant with their second son, Andrew knew his days in the city were numbered.

Fox Chapel was too expensive for them, but Christine refused to look farther out, arguing that it had good schools and they’d be close to her parents. Not an incentive for Andrew, but after six years of marriage he’d learned when to shut up.

In their price bracket, they were stuck looking at fixeruppers, which meant 1960s-era ranches or early-’70s faux colonials, with avocado kitchens and baths, and basement rec rooms. The house they settled on — a four-bedroom with potential — had a red Naugahyde bar in the basement. Andrew pictured himself standing behind it and offering his friends martinis. It was so retro it was almost hip. Almost. He felt panicky.

Their realtor, an older brittle blonde with orangish skin named Tippy Cooperman, looked right at home sidling up to the bar. “You’ll have lots of fun down here!” she brayed, smacking the black Formica counter.

She turned every criticism of the house into something positive. So when Andrew noticed that it needed new windows, Tippy said, “Look at all that natural light!” As for the overgrown, bushy two-acre lot, she said, “Such an excellent deal for all this land!” She pushed them to make an offer, saying it was a great investment.

The only investment Andrew could focus on was the time it would take to get the house and yard into shape. Christine looked at the larger homes surrounding them and agreed with Tippy. Apparently, her father agreed too, because the next day, after they’d been out to see it with their daughter, his in-laws offered to give them the down payment and cover the closing costs.

“It’s a good starter home,” Donald Wallace declared after he’d walked through it. He was a large, ruddy-cheeked businessman with a full head of silvery white hair, who’d amassed a fortune by tripling the size of his grandfather’s plumbing supply company. Semiretired, he spent his days staring at a flat screen in his enormous home or playing endless rounds of golf at the country club. He was the sort of man who distrusted academia and thought even less of scientists. When Andrew couldn’t easily sum up his research in physics, it was immediately suspect.

Donald’s small, plump wife, Joyce, bustled about on moving day, watching over the grandkids and helping Christine direct the placement of furniture. Smiling, she told Andrew that “of course” she and Donald would ensure they got invited to join the country club.

That night, their first in the new house, they lay in bed in their master bedroom suite, which was painted a bilious shade of blue. Christine whispered, “Can you believe it? We’re homeowners!” She sounded elated. He felt only panic: his life was over; he was thirty-two years old.

Startled awake at three by Sam’s high-pitched crying, Andrew shot up in bed and didn’t recognize the room. Christine didn’t stir, a lump under the sheets, her dark hair falling in lank, sweaty strands across the pillow.

He let her sleep, stumbling from their room and padding along the dark, unfamiliar hallway to the boys’ bedroom. Three-year-old Henry slept in his new bed, looking smaller than he had in the crib that was now Sam’s, oblivious to his younger brother’s wailing. A nightlight in the shape of a cartoon dinosaur cast a soft yellow glow.

Sam stopped crying for a few seconds when he saw his father looming above him and then started up again. It reminded Andrew of an air raid siren. “Hush now, little guy,” he whispered, scooping him up and heading into the kitchen.

Christine pumped so that Andrew wouldn’t “miss out” on feedings. He took one of the bottles from the fridge and warmed it, letting his son gnaw rodent-like on one of his fingers while they waited.

Sam nursed voraciously, cupping the bottle with small hands and sucking down the milk like the final beer at last call.

The night was stifling. Andrew carried Sam and the bottle out onto the back deck, quietly sliding open the screen door. The weathered wood felt cool under his feet. The air throbbed with locusts and crickets. The leafy branches of looming oak and maple trees formed a canopy over their heads, and beyond them, luminous and large, the stars. Movement caught his eye and he turned to see a woman standing on the back deck of the house closest to theirs, which wasn’t close, not by city standards. She was naked, her skin glowing white in the moonlight. Her long, straight hair looked like liquid silver. As he watched she raised her hands above her head, pressing them together and arching her long, lean body back. Yoga at three in the morning.

He stood in the shadows and watched, wondering if she knew he was there. A few minutes of stretching and a man suddenly appeared behind her. It was too far away to hear anything, but Andrew clearly saw the guy wrap his hand in that long silver hair and pull. She moved with her hair, a single cry of pain loud enough to echo through the trees. It could have been a cat or a bird; no one would investigate. Sam paused in his guzzling, the bottle popping free of his milky lips, and stirred in his father’s arms.

Andrew stood still, afraid to move, unable to turn away. The couple tussled silently for a minute, the man letting go of her hair, but only to move his hand to her upper arm. He dragged her into their house. Andrew stood there a moment longer on shaky legs, his breathing rough and fast in his ears. The clatter of the bottle falling onto the deck startled him— Sam had fallen asleep in his arms.

On the following Friday, they invited friends from the city out to visit their new house. Christine’s idea. They would grill, and everyone could sit on the back deck and admire the view.

“Hey, Soccer Dad,” Jason teased, accepting the beer that Andrew pulled from the fridge. “When are you getting the minivan and the golden retriever?”

“Ha fucking ha.” Andrew pulled the marinating steaks from the fridge and carried them past the group huddled in the living room cooing at the baby, and stepped out onto the deck. Hot air fell like a blanket on his face and he heard Jason exclaim behind him. It was dusk and the dark trunks of oak trees shimmered slightly in a golden sunset.

“So you like it out here?” Jason said, pulling on his beer and watching Andrew transfer steaks to the massive gas grill that had been his in-laws’ house-warming gift.

“Sure, it’s okay.”

“I guess there are some benefits to this whole home-buying thing,” Jason muttered a few minutes later.

Andrew glanced up and noticed the woman he’d seen before leaning against the rail of her deck, twirling a wine glass in her hand. Her hair was pale blond, he saw in the daylight, not silver. She was dressed this time, a white fitted blouse and turquoise trousers. She turned and peered at him, lifting the glass slowly to her lips and taking a long swallow.

The grill hissed and Andrew looked down in time to save the steak from being engulfed in flames. When he looked up a minute later the woman was gone.

On Monday, Christine left for work with both boys strapped into car seats in the back of her Volvo. She would drop them off at her mother’s, where they spent their days being spoiled by Nana and an elderly housekeeper named Winnie, before driving to her downtown law practice.

Usually, Andrew left for work at the same time, but this summer was different. The move had delayed the writing of a paper he had to present at a conference in late summer, and he’d set up a home office to work on it without interruption.

Except he couldn’t seem to concentrate. In their apartment, his desk had been in an alcove near the front window where he’d watched city life passing by and had gotten used to the noise — sirens and delivery trucks, children laughing, neighbors bickering. It was so quiet in his new neighborhood that he jumped at the screeching of a bird in the woods behind the house. The only regular noises were the sounds of lawns being mowed by the landscape crews that arrived regularly to tend to all the larger, expensive houses. They came next door every Tuesday — Henry called it the castle house because it was a large stone Tudor with a turret. Andrew thought of it as the naked yoga house, but he’d never told Christine. Every morning he saw the man zoom away in a silver Porsche, but he had not seen the woman again.

That afternoon, fed up with his inability to produce anything coherent, he decided to go for a run. He often used the treadmills at the university gym, but it didn’t seem worth it to drive that far. There were plenty of paths throughout the vast swaths of borough parkland. He drove a quarter-mile to a small horseshoe of unpaved parking where he left his car next to others and headed off on a trail. He ran hard for two miles.

On his way back he ran into his neighbor. She was running along the path toward him, wearing a green singlet and thin black running shorts, her hair pulled back severely in a ponytail which swayed side-to-side as her legs and arms moved like pistons. On one arm she had a silver bracelet that chimed faintly as she ran.

She was a faster runner and focused. She stared straight ahead and Andrew thought she would pass without speaking. He spoke instead. “Hello.”

“Hi.” She barely glanced at him.

Already she’d moved two paces past him. Afterward, when he dreamed of her, it would begin with this moment when he could have let her go, pretended he didn’t know her. He turned and called out, “I think we’re neighbors. I’m Andrew Durbin.”

She looked back and surveyed him, standing in the path with her hands on her hips, panting. Her expression wasn’t promising. After a moment she replied, “I’m Elsa.” Then she said, surprising him, “Do you want to run together?”

He felt a jolt of pleasure in having been invited, like he was back in middle school and the popular girl had asked him to dance. He tried to play it cool, glancing at his watch as if time somehow factored into his decision though Christine wouldn’t be home for hours. “Sure.”

He had to work to keep up with her; he could feel his chest heaving, hear his labored breaths. Her own breathing seemed effortless. She ran like the deer he’d seen from the back window of his house, thin-legged and nimble, darting fluidly around trees and missing stray branches that seemed to reach out and whack him in the face.

When the path narrowed, he followed blindly, feeling damp spreading at the neck and under the arms of his T-shirt. Finally, they were back at their cars. He leaned against the hood of his Honda, sucking air, while she walked calmly over to her car, a sleek black BMW, raising a key tag to open it with a little beep. She slid into the seat and turned over the engine before poking her head out to ask, “You want to meet again on Wednesday? How about one-thirty?”

That was how it started, but he couldn’t say it was ever innocent. When he got home he went straight to the shower and, leaning against the tiled wall, masturbated like a teenager, while imagining peeling the clothes off her sweating body.

She didn’t talk while they ran, it wasn’t her style, but she did linger sometimes afterward, once offering him some water when he’d forgotten his, and another time telling him that his stride was improving. Never once did she ask him about his life and she didn’t volunteer anything. He wanted to ask about the man he’d seen on the deck, the man he assumed was her husband, judging by the thin gold-and-diamond ring set on her left hand, but he always chickened out.

Instead, he searched his garage for the free weights he’d bought at a yard sale years earlier, which had been gathering dust ever since. “What are you doing?” Christine asked when he hauled them up to their bedroom.

“Just getting back into shape.”

She wrinkled her brow. “Are you trying to drop a hint?”

He looked at her standing there in a spit up — stained blouse with a dish towel slung over one shoulder. She’d taken off her jacket, but was still wearing her suit skirt, her stomach bulging over the waistline. She frowned, her round face puffy and sweaty. “Well? Because I don’t appreciate the pressure.”

“No, it’s not for you. It’s for me.” He wanted to add, You could use them too, but he didn’t.

They’d been running together for three weeks when Elsa said, “Do you want to come over for a drink?”

He’d fantasized about this moment many times, but strived to sound casual. “Why not?”

He followed her back up the hill to their quiet street, struggling to maintain the same speed, while looking out for cops, because she went seventy the whole way, the Beemer flashing along narrow roads, hardly slowing for dangerous curves.

He pulled into his own driveway and stopped outside the car for a moment, wondering if he should shower first.

“Aren’t you coming?” she called, and he immediately walked across the wide expanse of emerald lawn that divided their properties.

The house was cool inside, dark after the sunshine. “This is nice,” he said, admiring the midcentury modern furniture, the entire living room done in shades of black, white, and steel. She’d vanished into another room, returned with two tall glasses of ice water.

“Do you think so?” She handed a glass to him and drank her own in one long, soundless swallow, wiping the back of a delicate hand across her mouth when she finished.

“How long have you lived here?”

She smiled. “Long enough.” She was standing close enough that he could see her perfectly manicured nails.

He tried to look into her eyes, but his gaze was drawn down to the erect nipples poking out of her shirt.

“Do you want to kiss me?” she said, surprising him. He felt hotter, suddenly, his vision blurred for a moment.

“I’m married.”

She laughed and put her glass down on a side table, advancing toward him. “So am I.”

Afterward he would think about the improbability of it, but at that moment all he thought about was the taste of her mouth and the smell and feel of her skin. It had been a long time since he’d taken time with sex, since he’d had to tell himself to slow down, enjoy it, since he’d been young enough to come immediately instead of waiting, and knowing to wait for his partner.

She didn’t talk during sex either, but she made a soft little humming sound in her throat, and at the end, when they were finished, she sighed in a pleased way.

It became a pattern. They ran together three days a week, and after running they went back to her house and fucked. Once they did it in her car. Once he caught her in the woods and had her up against a tree.

He had never been this adventurous before. The closest he’d come was a night at the beach when he’d slipped his hand down Christine’s blouse and would have taken her on the dunes except they heard people coming and she’d pulled away. Elsa never pulled away. She tried different sexual positions the way other women tried new shoes. The only constant was the light, rhythmic tinkling of the dozens of tiny silver bells on her bracelet.

During the rest of the week he saw her only from afar, wearing revealing dresses and three-inch sandals as she accompanied her husband in the evenings, or hiding behind enormous sunglasses while zipping off to lunch with friends. A bevy of service people came and went from the house — cleaning women, landscapers, carpenters, and pool boys. He knew she spent half her day at a spa.

One afternoon as they were loading the kids in the car to go celebrate their grandfather’s birthday, Christine said, “She’s well maintained,” and he looked up to see Elsa, wearing a filmy white dress and gold sandals, slipping into the Porsche. She glanced over at him and away as if he were of no consequence.

The next day when he fucked her, he took her harder because of it, and when it was over he said, “Don’t ignore me.” She laughed.

He didn’t think of sex with Elsa as making love. He didn’t know her well enough to love her, but he did lust after her. He thought about her constantly, and on the days they didn’t meet he found himself trying to catch glimpses of her. Once he went so far as to walk over to her house and ring the bell. He knew she was home, the BMW was there in the drive, but she didn’t answer the door.

Sometimes she’d talk to him while they recovered in the cavernous bed in the dark master bedroom. He learned about her husband, that he worked in finance, that she’d met him when she was modeling, and found out that she had a German mother and American father.

In her bathroom cabinet were rows of pills, including antidepressants with her name on the bottle. She didn’t appear to have a job or do any meaningful work. He asked her once and she laughed and told him her purpose in life was to look good.

Christine commented on his running so much and he talked about how good it was for him, but when she suggested that they go together in the evenings, he said he preferred to run during the day.

One afternoon, as Andrew pushed his lawn mower around the yard, Elsa’s husband hailed him, coming out of the castle house wearing suit pants and a dress shirt even though it was a Saturday. “Hey there, neighbor,” he said with an affable wave. He stepped gingerly across the freshly mown grass in Italian loafers. “Should have come over earlier and introduced myself. Michael Cantata.” He shook hands, hard, but as Andrew released his grip, the other man’s hold tightened. “I think you’ve met my wife,” he added, looking straight into Andrew’s eyes with a cold little smile.

“Yes.” Andrew met his gaze for a moment, trying to keep his own eyes locked with the gray, predatory ones.

“You trim your own lawn?”

“Yeah.”

“Important to take care of your own lawn. Never want to leave that unattended.” He gave Andrew’s hand one more squeeze and released.

“Does your husband know about us?” he asked the next day when he met Elsa in the woods. She was leaning against an oak tree doing her stretches and seemed annoyed that he’d interrupted her concentration.

“How could he know? He’s at work more than ten hours a day.”

He didn’t believe her. Nobody could be that clueless, but maybe they had an open marriage. Christine now suspected. He caught her checking the pockets of his clothes in the laundry room. “What are you doing?”

“Are you having an affair?”

“What? No! Of course not.” He’d never thought he was particularly good at lying and she stared at him for a long moment, the tension broken when Henry began crying in the other room.

“I’ve been going to the gym,” she said the next morning, barely looking at him, already engrossed in her BlackBerry, so he thought for a moment that she was speaking to someone on the phone. When she glanced up, he realized it was meant for him.

“Great. That’s great.”

“I’ve lost five pounds.”

“Wow! Good for you.” He patted her shoulder as he got up from the kitchen table.

The next time they fucked he told Elsa that they had to end it. She laughed and he realized his timing had been bad, that it would have been believable if he’d said it before having sex instead of after.

He told himself every afternoon that this would be the last time, but promptly forgot his resolve the minute he saw her. He’d known a few addicts — the colleague who really had three-martini lunches and secreted a bottle of scotch in her desk drawer, a former neighbor’s glassy-eyed teenage son who’d been sent to rehab for cocaine addiction, Christine’s roommate from college who threw up in the bathroom after every meal — and he’d pitied them all, never understanding what it meant to have desire consume you like a rash.

One day he found a bruise on Elsa’s arm. He knew her body intimately by then and the spreading purple flower jumped out at him. “How did you get this?”

She moved out of his grasp and he saw, then, that the petals of the flower corresponded to fingers larger than his. “He grabbed you here? Is he hurting you?”

He flashed to a man’s fist wrapped in silver hair at three o’clock in the morning, though he’d never told Elsa about the first time he’d seen her.

“He’s not a happy man,” she said. “He’s not happy if anyone else is happy.”

He fantasized about leaving Christine and marrying Elsa, but these thoughts lasted about as long as his orgasm. She was a kept woman, a trophy wife, and she wouldn’t leave the man who provided for her. And his role in this charade was to be the plaything. He told himself it was a summer fling and it would end before the new semester started.

They were past the two-month mark when Henry came down with a bad chest cold. “We can’t possibly drop him off with my mother,” Christine said. “She’s old and Winnie’s downright elderly.” She glanced at her BlackBerry, then at him. “I’ve got depositions all morning and then I’ve got to be at a hearing in the afternoon, but I can probably take off a little early. Five-thirty maybe? So you can take care of him until then, right?”

He watched over his son, took Henry’s temperature, snuggled with him in the family room while they stared at Sesame Street on the flat screen, and plied him with apple juice, all the while thinking about Elsa waiting for him in the woods. It started to drizzle in the afternoon and he thought of Elsa out in the rain, of her standing on the pathway in a sopping wet T-shirt, of taking her there, under the boughs of a hemlock tree. He left Henry sleeping fitfully and masturbated in the shower.

Three days later Henry’s fever broke, and the next morning he went back to his grandmother’s house. Andrew counted the minutes until he could meet Elsa, driving fast but carefully down hillside roads slick from rain.

Her car was there, but she wasn’t. He walked around it, looking for a note, and pressed his face against the tinted glass to try and see inside, but there was no evidence that she’d thought about him.

Disappointment left him sour and restless. He ran anyway, following their same trail, though it was masochistic in the pouring rain, his legs sprayed with mud, his feet slipping over wet tree roots. He thought he could catch her if he ran faster and pushed his body. When he came to the fork in the trail and had to choose, he thought he saw her imprint in the mud and took the path to the right, which got progressively steeper.

Along a narrow ridge high above the creek he tripped over a rock and fell, scraping his right shin and landing heavily on a knee. He was lucky he didn’t slip over the side, skittering down the hillside with the pebbles he’d kicked loose. He pushed himself up, glancing down at the swollen creek rushing fast some twenty feet below. Among the green and brown, he noticed something pink in the water. He leaned forward, bracing his body against a maple sapling, blinking the water out of his eyes, but he couldn’t tell what it was.

He ran more slowly down the hill, trying to keep the thing in view as he drew closer, ignoring the stinging scrape on his leg and the pain in his knee. When he came to the bank of the creek he could see something resting under the water.

He undid his shoes and slid off the bank, the water frigid despite the heat of the day, his toes sinking in muck, a swirl of silt disturbing his view. He reached forward blindly, stirred his arm in the soup, and felt rocks and leaves and something harder, heavy, which had settled at the bottom. He tugged and it burst out of the water, spraying him in the face, a woman’s running shoe, white stained brown by the water with pink stripes and pink laces. It was Elsa’s.

For a moment he did nothing but stand there, staring at the dripping shoe dangling from his hand. Then he looked wildly around... expecting what? To see someone in the trees watching him? The rain fell in a steady curtain, but he plunged down the creek anyway, blindly searching, his hair sopping and stringy in his eyes, his feet long since numb.

He could feel his heart thudding in time with the rushing water. He didn’t think about the shoe in his hand, didn’t think about the slender foot it belonged to, didn’t think about what he was really looking for in the creek. Until suddenly he spotted her, lodged in the crux of an oak tree’s roots, which had spread from the eroding bank like fingers raking the water and acted like a sieve, capturing anything solid that came within reach. She was facedown, her head pinned by the tree, arms forward as if she were going for a swim, except one arm was at an odd angle, as if it had been twisted, and her long, bare, muscled legs bobbed uselessly behind her, the other shoe still on its foot.

He fought the current to get to her, sobbing at the sight of her pale, perfect skin and hair laced with flotsam — broken bits of fern, splinters of bark, the single teal claw of a crayfish. He grasped her shoulder, turning her over, and saw a large, gaping wound on one side of her head, a hole really, the hair near it matted and bloody. He thought he caught a glimpse of gray matter underneath that, before he let her flop facedown again in the water.

She was dead. The closest he’d come to a dead person had been a nine-year-old’s view of his grandmother lying heavily powdered and stiff in a shiny box, but he knew Elsa was gone even before he’d seen her eyes clouded over like a dead trout. He pictured her husband waiting along the trail and striking her with a tire iron as she turned the corner.

With shaking hands he pulled his cell phone free of his wet pocket to call 911 but stopped short, suddenly realizing that he had bigger things to fear than Elsa’s body floating in the water.

If he told the police about Michael Cantata’s violence they would ask how he knew and he would have to confess to the affair. And Christine would kill him if she found out about it. Divorce him at the very least. If he survived her wrath he faced a future in which he only got to visit Henry and Sam every other weekend and had to share the title of “Dad” with another man. He knew Christine wouldn’t live alone. She’d find someone just to spite him and someone who made more money or who wasn’t going to lose his hair or who already belonged to the stupid country club.

And this was his future only if the police believed that Michael Cantata and not Andrew had done the killing. Why should they believe him? He was the one standing in the water with the body.

Panicked, Andrew peeled off his soggy T-shirt, swiped roughly at the spot on Elsa’s shoulder that he’d touched, and then backed away from the body before turning and splashing back up the creek, fighting the current to get away. It wasn’t until he’d climbed out on the bank that he realized he was still holding Elsa’s shoe. He wiped it down frantically before hurling it back in the center of the creek where it sank with a horrific splash before bobbing slowly to the surface. He scrambled into his own shoes, fingers fumbling with the laces, feet squelching in the soles. He walked back along the trail, watching the rain eroding his footprints in the mud, until he got to the fork; he took the left path and ran down it fast, so that if someone had seen him, he could say that he’d taken this trail and had never been near the creek.

When Andrew got back to the parking lot there were no cars except his and Elsa’s. They were visible from the road. How many people had passed by and seen his car? His stomach cramped when he remembered that he’d touched the BMW, and he forced himself to walk casually over. When there were no cars whizzing by he rubbed his T-shirt across the windows to smudge any potential prints.

He didn’t remember driving home. He was in the mud room ineffectively drying himself with paper towels while water puddled around him when Christine appeared in the doorway.

He jumped. “Hi!” His voice sounded manic. “I didn’t expect you home so soon. Are the boys with you?”

“My mother’s bringing them home in a little while. They’re enjoying playing in the rain.” She stared at him and he forced his gaze up to her standing there in a terry cloth robe with comb marks visible through her damp hair. “You were out running in this weather?”

He nodded, ducked his head again. “Crazy. This rain is unbelievable.” He was shaking, but she didn’t comment. “Could you get me a towel?”

He stayed in the shower for twenty-five minutes, hoping the noise covered his sobbing. Then he ran his clothes through the washer. Christine joined him in the laundry room and said she would do it with the regular wash, but he insisted. He moved his shoes into the laundry room too, cleaning off every bit of mud before turning them upside down on an old newspaper to dry.

All that long afternoon and evening he expected to hear sirens, but they never came. He wondered if they’d found Elsa’s body yet and watched the evening news braced for an announcement, but there was nothing.

At night the magnitude of what he’d done weighed on him and he couldn’t sleep. He was letting a man get away with murder. He was sure Elsa’s husband had killed her. He thought of writing an anonymous letter to the police to alert them that this was no accidental death, but if he fingered Michael Cantata then that long finger would eventually touch him. They would find out about his affair, and when they found out, so would Christine.

It suddenly occurred to him that this was Michael Cantata’s intent: He’d killed his wife to frame Andrew, who’d been foolish enough to think that washing away his footprints and rubbing off her car windows could erase his presence from Elsa’s life. His fingerprints were all over her house.

What day did her cleaning service come? Did they clean well enough to remove all traces of him from the house? His stomach roiled. He couldn’t sleep until finally he did, only to dream over and over of Elsa’s body floating in the water.

They were eating breakfast at the kitchen table when he heard the faint sound of a siren. He finished chewing his bite of toast, swallowed down a dry throat. The wailing grew louder and louder. He forced himself to take a bite of eggs, but Henry pushed back from the table and ran to the living room window to see. “Henry, come back to the table,” Christine called.

“There’s police at the castle house!”

For one long moment nothing happened. Andrew leaned over to wipe oatmeal off Sam’s face, but he could feel Christine staring at him. He wouldn’t meet her gaze. She abruptly stood up and stalked out of the room.

“The police are at the Cantata’s,” she called, confirming what Henry had said. He got up and unhooked Sam from his highchair, swinging him onto his hip and carrying him into the living room. He watched officers at the door speaking to Michael Cantata and all the while could feel the sound of his own heartbeat. He wondered if anyone else could hear it.

“What do you suppose happened?” Christine said, and her voice sounded odd. She was holding Henry’s hand tightly in her own. Then he heard a faint, familiar tinkling and saw, dangling from her wrist, a silver bracelet with tiny silver bells.

Far Beneath by Carlos Antonio Delgado