The Best American Mystery Stories 2004

Christopher Coake All Through the House

From Gettysburg Review

Now

Here is an empty meadow, circled by bare autumn woods.

The trees of the wood — oak, maple, locust — grow through a mat of tangled scrub, rusty leaves, piles of brittle deadfall. Overhead is a rich blue sky, a few high, translucent clouds, moving quickly, but the trees are dense enough to shelter everything below, and the meadow too. And here, leading into the trees from the meadow’s edge, is a gravel track, twin ruts now grown over, switching back and forth through the woods and away.

The meadow floor is overrun by tall yellow grass, thorny vines, the occasional sapling — save for at the meadow’s center. Here is a wide rectangular depression. The broken remains of a concrete foundation shore up its sides. The bottom is crumbled concrete and cinder, barely visible beneath the thin netting of weeds. A blackened wooden beam angles down from the rim, its underside soft and fibrous. Two oaks lean over the foundation, charred on the sides that face it.

Sometimes deer browse in the meadow. Raccoons and rabbits are always present; they have made their own curving trails across the meadow floor. A fox, rusty and quick, lives in the nearby trees. His den, twisting among tree roots, is pressed flat and smooth by his belly.

Sometimes automobiles crawl slowly along the gravel track and park at the edge of the meadow. The people inside sometimes get out and walk into the grass. They take photographs or draw pictures or read from books. Sometimes they climb down into the old foundation. A few camp overnight, huddling close to fires.

Whenever these people come, a policeman arrives soon after, fat and gray-haired. Sometimes the people speak with him — and sometimes they shout — but always they depart, loading their cars while the policeman watches. When they depart he follows them down the track in his slow, rumbling cruiser. When he comes at night, the spinning of his red and blue lights causes the trees to jump and dance.

Sometimes the policeman arrives alone:

He stops the cruiser and climbs out. He walks slowly into the meadow. He sits on the broken concrete at the rim of the crater, looking into it, looking at the sky, closing his eyes.

When he makes noise the woods grow quiet. All the animals crouch low, flicking their ears at the man’s barks and howls.

He does not stay long.

After his cruiser has rolled away down the track, the woods and the meadow remain, for a time, silent. But before long what lives there sniffs the air and, in fits and starts, emerges. Noses press to the ground and into the burrows of mice. Things eat and are eaten.

Here memories are held in muscles and bellies, not in minds. The policeman and the house and all the people who have come and gone here are not forgotten.

They are, simply, never remembered.

1987

Sheriff Larry Thompkins tucked his chin against the cold and, his back to his idling cruiser, unlocked the cattle gate that blocked access to the Sullivan woods. The gate swung inward, squealing, and the cruiser’s headlights shone a little ways down the gravel track before it curled off into the trees. Larry straightened, then glanced right and left, down the paved county road behind him. He saw no other cars — not even on the distant interstate. The sky was clouded over — snow was a possibility — and the fields behind him were almost invisible in the dark.

Larry sank back behind the wheel, grateful for the warmth and the spits of static from his radio. He nosed the cruiser through the gate and onto the track, then switched to his parking lights. The trunks of trees ahead faintly glowed, turning orange as he passed. Even though the nearest living soul, old Ned Baker, lived a half mile off, he was an insomniac and often sat in front of his bedroom window watching the Sullivan woods. If Larry used his headlights, Ned would see. Ever since Patricia Pike’s book had come out — three months ago now — Ned had watched the gated entrance to the woods like it was a military duty.

Larry had been chasing off trespassers from the Sullivan place ever since the murders, twelve years ago in December. He hated coming out here, but he couldn’t very well refuse to do his job — no one else would do it. Almost always the trespassers were kids from the high school, out at the murder house getting drunk or high, and though Larry was always firm with them and made trouble for the bad ones, he knew most kids did stupid things and couldn’t blame them that much. Larry had fallen off the roof of a barn, drunk, when he was sixteen. He’d broken his arm in two places, all because he was trying to impress a girl who, in the end, never went out with him.

But activity in the woods had picked up since the Pike woman’s book came out. Larry had been out here three times in the last week alone. There were kids, still, more of them than ever — but also people from out of town, some of whom he suspected were mentally ill. Just last weekend Larry had chased off a couple in their twenties, lying on a blanket with horrible screaming music playing on their boom box. They’d told him — calmly, as though he might understand — that they practiced magic and wanted to conceive a child out there. The house, they said, was a place of energy. When they were gone Larry looked up at its empty windows, its stupid, dead house-face, and couldn’t imagine anything further from the truth.

The cruiser bounced and shimmied as Larry negotiated the turns through the woods. All his extra visits had deepened the ruts in the track — he’d been cutting through mud and ice all autumn. Now and then the tires spun, and he tried not to think about having to call for a tow, the stories he’d have to make up to explain it. But each time, the cruiser roared and lurched free.

He remembered coming out here with Patricia Pike. He hadn’t wanted to, but the mayor told him Pike did a good job with this kind of book, and that — while the mayor was concerned, just like Larry was, about exploiting what had happened — he didn’t want the town to get any more of a bad name on account of being uncooperative. So Larry had gone to the library to read one of Pike’s other books. The Beauties and the Beast was what the book was called, with the close-up of a cat’s eye on the front cover. It was about a serial killer in Idaho in the sixties who murdered five women and fed them to his pet cougar. In one chapter Pike wrote that the police had hidden details of the crime from her. Larry could understand why: The killings were brutal, and he was sure the police had a hard time explaining the details to the families of the victims, let alone to ghouls all across the country looking for a thrill.

We’re going to get exploited, Larry had told the mayor, waving that book at him.

Look, the mayor said. I know this is difficult for you. But would you rather she wrote it without your help? You knew Wayne better than anybody. Who knows? Maybe we’ll finally get to the bottom of things.

What if there’s no bottom to get to? Larry asked, but the mayor had looked at him strangely and never answered, just told him to put up with it, that it would be over before he knew it.

Larry wrestled the cruiser around the last bend and then stopped. His parking lights shone dully across what was left of the old driveway turnaround and onto the Sullivan house.

The house squatted, dim and orange. It had never been much to look at, even when new; it was small, unremarkable, square — barely more than a prefab. The garage, jutting off the back, was far too big and made the whole structure look deformed, unbalanced. Wayne had designed the house himself, not long after he and Jenny got married. Most of the paint had chipped off the siding, and the undersized windows were boarded over — the high school kids had broken out all the glass years ago.

Jenny had hated the house even when it was new. She’d told Larry so at her and Wayne’s housewarming dinner.

It’s bad enough I have to live out here in the middle of nowhere, she’d said under her breath while Wayne chattered to Larry’s wife, Emily, in the living room. But at least he could have built us a house you can look at.

He did it because he loves you, Larry whispered. He tried.

Don’t remind me, Jenny said, swallowing wine. Why did I ever agree to this?

The house?

The house, the marriage. God, Larry, you name it.

When she’d said it she hadn’t sounded bitter. She looked at Larry as though he might have an answer, but he didn’t — he’d never been able to see Jenny and Wayne together, from the moment they started dating in college. He remembered telling her, It’ll get better, and feeling right away as though he’d lied, and Jenny making a face that showed she knew he had, before both of them turned to watch Wayne demonstrate the dimmer switch in the living room for Emily.

The front door, Larry saw now, was swinging open. Some folks he’d chased out two weeks ago had jimmied it, and the lock hadn’t worked right afterward. The open door and the black gap behind it made the house look even meaner than it was — like a baby crying. Patricia Pike had said that, at one point. Larry wondered if she’d put it into her book.

She had sent him a copy back in July just before its release. The book was called All Through the House; the cover showed a Christmas tree with little skulls as ornaments. Pike had signed it for him: To Larry, even though I know you prefer fiction. Cheers, Patricia. He flipped to the index and saw his name with a lot of numbers by it, and then he looked at the glossy plates at the book’s center. One was a map of Prescott County, showing the county road and an X in the Sullivan woods where the house stood. The next page showed a floor plan of the house, with bodies drawn in outline and dotted lines following Wayne’s path from room to room. One plate showed a Sears portrait of the entire family smiling together, plus graduation photos of Wayne and Jenny. Pike had included a picture of Larry, too — taken on the day of the murders — that showed him pointing off to the edge of the picture while EMTs brought one of the boys out the front door, wrapped in a blanket. Larry looked like he was running — his arms were blurry — which was odd. They’d brought no one out of the house alive. He’d have had no need to rush.

The last chapter was titled “Why?” Larry had read that part all the way through. Every rumor and half-baked theory Patricia Pike had heard while in town, she’d included, worded to make it sound like she’d done thinking no one else ever had.

Wayne was in debt. Wayne was jealous because maybe Jenny was sleeping around. Wayne had been seeing a doctor about migraines. Wayne was a man who had never matured past childhood. Wayne lived in a fantasy world inhabited by the perfect family he could never have. Once again the reluctance of the sheriff’s department and the townspeople to discuss their nightmares freely hinders us from understanding a man like Wayne Sullivan, from preventing others from killing as he has killed, from beginning the healing and closure this community so badly needs.

Larry had tossed his copy in a drawer and hoped everyone else would do the same.

But then the book was a success — all Patricia Pike’s books were. And not long after that, the lunatics had started to come out to the house. And then, today, Larry had gotten a call from the mayor.

You’re not going to like this, the mayor said.

Larry hadn’t. The mayor told him a cable channel wanted to film a documentary based on the book. They were sending out a camera crew at the end of the month, near Christmastime — for authenticity’s sake. They wanted to film in the house, and of course they wanted to talk to everybody all over again, Larry first and foremost.

Larry took a bottle of whiskey from underneath the front seat of the cruiser, and watching the Sullivan house through the windshield, he unscrewed the cap and drank a swallow. His eyes watered, but he got it down and drank another. The booze spread in his throat and belly, made him want to sit very still behind the wheel, to keep drinking. Most nights he would. But instead he opened the door and climbed out of the cruiser.

The meadow and the house were mostly blocked from the wind, but the air had a bite to it all the same. He hunched his shoulders, then opened up the trunk and took out one of the gas cans he’d filled up at the station and a few rolls of newspaper. He walked up to the open doorway of the house, his head ducked, careful with his feet in the shadows and the grass.

He smelled the house’s insides even before he stepped onto the porch — a smell like the underside of a wet log. He clicked on his flashlight and shone it into the doorway, across the splotched and crumbling walls. He stepped inside. Something living scuttled immediately out of the way: a raccoon or a possum. Maybe even a fox. Wayne had once told him the woods were full of them, but in all the times Larry had been out here, he’d never seen any.

He glanced over the walls. Some new graffiti had appeared: KILL ’EM ALL was spray-painted on the wall where, once, the Christmas tree had leaned. The older messages were still in place. One read, HEY WAYNE, DO MY HOUSE NEXT. Beside a ragged, spackled-over depression in the same wall, someone had painted an arrow and the word BRAINS. Smaller messages were written in marker — the sorts of things high school kids write: initials, graduation years, witless sex puns, pictures of genitalia. And — sitting right there in the corner — was a copy of All Through the House, its pages swollen with moisture.

Larry rubbed his temple. The book was as good a place to start as any.

He kicked the book to the center of the living room floor and then splashed it with gas. Nearby was a crevice where the carpet had torn and separated. He rolled the newspapers up and wedged them underneath the carpet, then doused them too. Then he drizzled gasoline in a line from both the book and the papers to the front door. From the edge of the stoop, he tossed arcs of gas onto the door and the jamb until the can was empty.

He stood on the porch, smelling the gas and gasping — he was horribly out of shape. His head was throbbing. He squeezed the lighter in his hand until the pain subsided.

Larry was not much for religion, but he tried a prayer anyway: Lord, keep them. I know you have been. And please let this work. But the prayer sounded pitiful in his head, so he stopped it.

He flicked the lighter under a clump of newspaper and, once that had bloomed, touched it to the base of the door.

The fire took the door right away and flickered in a curling line across the carpet to the book and the papers. He could see them burning through the doorway, before thick gray smoke obscured his view. After a few minutes the flames began to gutter. He wasn’t much of an arsonist — it was wet in there. He retrieved the other gas can from the trunk and shoved a rolled-up cone of newspaper into the nozzle. He made sure he had a clear throw and then lit the paper and heaved the can inside the house. It exploded right away, with a thump, and orange light bloomed up one of the inside walls. Outside, the flames from the door flared, steadied, then began to climb upward to the siding.

Larry went back to the cruiser and pulled the bottle of whiskey from beneath his seat. He drank from it and thought about Jenny, and then about camping in the meadow as a boy, with Wayne.

Larry had seen this house being built; he’d seen it lived in and died in. He had guessed he might feel a certain joy watching it destroyed, but instead his throat caught. Somewhere down the line, this had gotten to be his house. He’d thought that for a while now: The township owned the Sullivan house, but really, Wayne had passed it on to him.

An image of himself drifted into his head — it had come a few times tonight. He saw himself walking into the burning house, climbing up the stairs. In his head he did this without pain, even while fire found his clothing, the bullets in his gun. He would sit upstairs in Jenny’s sewing room and close his eyes, and it wouldn’t take long.

He sniffled and pinched his nose. That was horseshit. He’d seen people who’d been burned to death. He’d die, all right, but he’d go screaming and flailing. At the thought of it, his arms and legs grew heavy; his skin prickled.

Larry put the cruiser in reverse and backed it slowly away from the house, out of the drive, and onto the track. He watched for ten minutes as the fire grew and tried not to think about anything, to see only the flames. Then he got the call from dispatch.

Sheriff?

Copy, he said.

Ned called in. He says it looks like there’s a fire out at the Sullivan place.

A fire?

That’s what he said. He sees a fire in the woods.

My my my, Larry said. I’m on old 52 just past Mackey. I’ll get out there quick as I can and take a look.

He waited another ten minutes. Flames shot out around the boards on the windows. The downstairs ceiling caught. Long shadows shifted through the trees; the woods came alive, swaying and dancing. Something alive and aflame shot out the front door — a rabbit? It zigged and zagged across the turnaround and then headed toward him. For a moment Larry thought it had shot under his car, and he put his hand on the door handle — but whatever it was cut away for the woods to his right. He saw it come to rest in a patch of scrub; smoke rose from the bush in wisps.

Dispatch? Larry said.

Copy.

I’m at the Sullivan house. It’s on fire, all right. Better get the trucks out here.

Twenty minutes later two fire trucks arrived, advancing carefully down the track. The men got out and stood beside Larry, looking over the house, now brightly ablaze from top to bottom. They rolled the trucks past Larry’s cruiser and sprayed the grass around the house and the trees nearby. Then all of them watched the house burn and crumble into its foundation, and no one said much of anything.

Larry left them to the rubble just before dawn. He went home and tried to wash the smell of smoke out of his hair and then lay down next to Emily, who didn’t stir. He lay awake for a while, trying to convince himself he’d actually done it, and then trying to convince himself he hadn’t.

When he finally slept he saw the house on fire, except that in his dream there were people still in it: Jenny Sullivan in the upstairs window, holding her youngest boy to her and shouting Larry’s name, screaming it, while Larry sat in his car, tugging at the handle, unable even to shout back to her, to tell her it was locked.

1985

Patricia Pike had known from the start that Sheriff Thompkins was reluctant to work with her. Now, riding in his cruiser with him down empty back roads to the Sullivan house, she wondered if what she’d thought was reticence was actual anger. Thompkins had been civil enough when she spoke with him on the phone a month before, but since meeting him this morning in his small, cluttered office — she’d seen janitors with better quarters — he’d been scowling, sullen, rarely bothering to look her in the eye.

She was used to this treatment from policemen. A lot of them had read her books, two of which had uncovered information the police hadn’t found themselves. Her second book — On a Darkling Plain — had overturned a conviction. Policemen hated being shown up, even the best of them, and she suspected from the look of Thompkins’s office that he didn’t operate on the cutting edge of law enforcement.

Thompkins was tall and hunched, perhaps muscular once but going now to fat, with a gray cop’s mustache and a single thick fold under his chin. He was only forty — two years younger than she was — but he looked much older. He kept a wedding photo on his desk; in it he had the broad-shouldered, thick-necked look of an offensive lineman. Unsurprising, this; a lot of country cops she spoke to had played football. His wife was a little ghost of a woman, dark-eyed, smiling what Patricia suspected was one of her last big smiles.

Patricia had asked Thompkins a few questions in his office, chatty ones designed to put him at ease. She’d also flirted a little; she was good-looking, and sometimes that worked. But even then Thompkins answered in clipped sentences, in the sort of language police fell back on in their reports. He looked often at his watch, but she wasn’t fooled. Kinslow, Indiana, had only six hundred residents, and Thompkins wasn’t about to convince her he was a busy man.

Thompkins drove along the interminable gravel roads to the Sullivan woods with one hand on the wheel and the other brushing the corners of his mustache. Finally she couldn’t stand it.

Do I make you uncomfortable, Sheriff?

He widened his eyes, and he shifted his shoulders then coughed. He said, Well, I’ll be honest. I guess I’d rather not do this.

I can’t imagine you would, she said. Best to give him the sympathy he so desperately wanted.

If the mayor wasn’t such a fan of yours, I wouldn’t be out here.

She smiled at him, just a little. She said, I’ve talked to Wayne’s parents; I know you were close to Wayne and Jenny. It can’t be easy to do this.

No, ma’am. That it is not.

Thompkins turned the cruiser onto a smaller paved road. On either side of them was nothing but fields, empty and stubbled with old broken cornstalks and blocky stands of woods so monochrome they could be pencil drawings.

Patricia asked, You all went to high school together, didn’t you?

Abington, Class of ’64. Jenny was a year behind me and Wayne.

Did you become friends in high school?

That’s when I got to know Jenny. Wayne and I knew each other since we were little. Our mothers taught together at the middle school.

Thompkins glanced at Patricia. You know all this already. You drawing out the witness?

She smiled, genuinely grateful. So he had a brain in there after all. It seems I have to, she said.

He sighed — a big man’s sigh, long and weary — and said, I have nothing against you personally, Ms. Pike. But I don’t like the kind of books you write, and I don’t like coming out here.

I do appreciate your help. I know it’s hard.

Why this case? he asked her. Why us?

She tried to think of the right words, nothing that would offend him.

Well, I suppose I was just drawn to it. My agent sends me clippings about cases, things she thinks I might want to write about. The murders were so... brutal, and they happened on Christmas Eve. And since it happened in the country, it never made the news much; people don’t know about it — not in the big cities, anyway. There’s also kind of a — a fairy-tale quality to it, the house out in the middle of the forest — you know?

Uh-huh, Thompkins said.

And then there’s the mystery of why. There’s a certain type of case I specialize in — crimes with a component of unsolved mystery. I’m intrigued that Wayne didn’t leave any notes. You’re the only person he gave any information to, and even then—

— He didn’t say much.

No. I know, I’ve read the transcript already. But that’s my answer, I suppose: There’s a lot to write about.

Thompkins stroked his mustache and turned at a stop sign.

They were to the right of an enormous tract of woods, much larger than the other stands nearby. Patricia had seen it growing on the horizon, almost like a rain cloud, and now, close up, she saw it was at least a mile square. The sheriff slowed and turned off the road, stopping in front of a low metal gate blocking a gravel track that dipped away from the road and into the bare trees. A NO TRESPASSING sign hung from the gate’s center. It had been fired upon a number of times; some of the bullet holes had yet to rust. Thompkins said, Excuse me, and got out. He bent over a giant padlock and then swung the gate inward. He got back behind the wheel, drove the cruiser through without shutting his door, then clambered out again and locked the gate behind them.

Keeps the kids out, he told her, shifting the cruiser into gear. Means the only way in is on foot. A lot of them won’t walk it, least when it’s cold like this.

This is a big woods.

Probably the biggest between Indy and Lafayette. Course no one’s ever measured, but that’s — that’s what Wayne always told me.

Patricia watched his mouth droop when he said this, caught his drop in volume.

The car curved right, then left. The world they were in was almost a sepia-toned old film: bare winter branches, patches of old snow on the ground, pools of black muck. Patricia had grown up in Chicago, had relatives on a farm downstate. She knew what a tangle those woods would be. What a curious place for a house. She opened her notebook and wrote in shorthand.

This land belongs to Wayne’s family? she asked.

It used to. Township owns it now. Wayne had put the land up as collateral for the house, and then when he died, his folks didn’t pay on the loan. I don’t blame them for that. The town might sell it someday, but no one really wants farmland anymore. None of the farmers around here can afford to develop it. An ag company would have to buy it. In the meantime I keep an eye on the place.

Thompkins slowed and the car jounced into and out of a deep rut. He said, Me, I’d like to see the whole thing plowed under. But I don’t make those choices.

She wrote his words down.

They rounded a last bend in the track, and there in front of them was a meadow, and in the center of it the Sullivan house. Patricia had seen pictures of it, but here in person it was much smaller than she’d imagined. She pulled her camera out of her bag.

It’s ugly, she said.

That’s the truth, Thompkins said, and put the car into park.

The house was a two-story of some indeterminate style — closer to a Cape Cod than anything else. The roof was pitched but seemed... too small, too flat for the rest of the house. The face suggested by its windows and front door — flanked by faux half-columns — was that of a mongoloid: all chin and mouth, and no forehead. Or like a baby crying. It had been painted an olive color, and now the paint was flaking. The windows had been boarded over with sheets of plywood. The track continued around behind the house, where a two-car garage jutted off at right angles, too big in proportion to the house proper.

Wayne drew up the plans, Thompkins said. He wanted to do it himself.

What did Jenny think of it? Do you know?

She joked about it. Not so Wayne could hear.

Would he have been angry?

No. Sad. He’d wanted a house out here since we were kids. He loved these woods.

Thompkins undid his seatbelt. Then he said, I guess he knew the house was a mess, but he... it’s hard to say. We all pretended it was fine.

Why?

Some folks, you just want to protect their feelings. He wanted us all to be as excited as he was. It just wouldn’t have occurred to us to be... blunt with him. You know that type of person? Kind of like a puppy?

Yes.

Well, Thompkins said, that was Wayne. You want to go in?

The interior of the house was dark. Thompkins had brought two electric lanterns; he set one just inside the door and held the other in his hand. He walked inside and then motioned for Patricia to follow.

The inside of the house stank — an old, abandoned smell of mildew and rot. The carpeting — what was left of it, anyway — seemed to be on the verge of becoming mud, or a kind of algae, and held the stink. Patricia had been in morgues and, for one of her books, had accompanied a homicide detective in Detroit to murder sites. She knew what death — dead human beings — smelled like. That smell might have been in the Sullivan house, underneath everything else, but she couldn’t be sure. It ought to have been.

Patricia could see no furniture. Ragged holes gaped in the ceilings where light fixtures might have been. Behind the sheriff was a staircase, rising up into darkness, and to the right of it an entrance into what seemed to be the kitchen.

Shit, Thompkins said.

What?

He held the lantern close to a wall in the room to the right of the foyer. There was a spot on the wall, a ragged, spackled patch. Someone had spray-painted an arrow pointing at it, and the word BRAINS.

Thompkins turned a circle with the lantern held out. He was looking down, and she followed his gaze. She saw cigarette butts, beer cans.

Kids come in here from Abington, Thompkins said. I run them off every now and then. Sometimes it’s adults, even. Have to come out and see for themselves, I guess. Already the kids say it’s haunted.

That happens in a lot of places, Patricia said.

Huh, Thompkins said.

She took photos of the rooms, the flashbulb’s light dazzling in the dark.

I guess you want the tour, Thompkins said.

I do. She put a hand on his arm, and his eyes widened. She said, as cheerfully as she could, Do you mind if I tape our conversation?

Do you have to? Thompkins asked, looking up from her hand.

It will help me quote you better.

Well. I suppose.

Patricia put a tape into her hand-held recorder, then nodded at him.

Thompkins held the lantern up. The light gleamed off his dark eyes. His mouth hung open, just a little, and when he breathed out it made a thin line of steam in front of the lantern. He looked different — not sad, not anymore. Maybe, Patricia thought, she saw in him what she was feeling, which was a thrill, what a teenaged girl feels in front of a camp-fire, knowing a scary story is coming. She reminded herself that actual people had died here, that she was in a place of tremendous sadness, but all the same she couldn’t help herself. Her books sold well because she wrote them well, with fervency, and she wrote that way because she loved to be in forbidden places like this, she loved learning the secrets no one wanted to say. Just as, she suspected, Sheriff Thompkins wanted deep in his heart to tell them to her. Secrets were too big for people to hold — that was what she found in her research, time after time. Secrets had their own agendas.

Patricia looked at Thompkins, turning a smile into a quick nod.

All right then, the sheriff said. This way.

Here’s the kitchen.

Wayne shot Jenny first, in here. But that first shot didn’t kill her. You can’t tell because of the boards, but the kitchen window looks out over the driveway, just outside the garage. Wayne shot her through the window. Jenny was looking out at Wayne, we know that, because the bullet went in through the front of her right shoulder and out the back, and we know he was outside because the glass was broken and because his footprints were still in the snow when we got there — there was no wind that night. The car was outside the garage. What he did was, he got out of the driver’s side door and went around to the trunk and opened it — best guess is the gun was in there; he’d purchased it that night, up at a shop in Muncie. Then he went around to the passenger door and stood there for a while; the snow was all tramped down. We think he was loading the gun. Or maybe he was talking himself into doing it. I don’t know.

We figure he braced on the top of the car and shot her from where he stood. The security light over the garage was burnt out when we got here, so from inside, looking out, with the kitchen lights on, Jenny wouldn’t have been able to see what he was doing — not very clearly, if at all. I don’t know why she was turned around looking out the window at him. Maybe he honked the horn. I also don’t know if he aimed to kill her or wound her, but my feeling is he went for a wounding shot. It’s about twenty feet from where he stood to where she stood, so it wasn’t that hard a shot for him to make, and he made most of his others that night. Now down here—

[The sheriff’s pointing to a spot on the linoleum, slightly stained, see photos.]

Excuse me?

[Don’t mind me, Sheriff. Just keep talking.]

Oh. All right then.

Well, Jenny — once she was shot, she fell and struggled. There was a lot of blood; we think she probably bled out for seven or eight minutes while Wayne... while Wayne killed the others. She tried to pull herself to the living room; there were... ah, smears on the floor consistent with her doing that.

[We’re back in the living room; we’re facing the front door.]

After he’d shot Jenny, he walked around the east side of the house to the front door here. He could have come in the garage into the kitchen, but he didn’t. I’m not sure what happened from there exactly. But here’s what I think: The grandmother — Mrs. Murray — and Danny, the four-year-old, were in the living room — in here — next to the tree. She was reading to him; he liked to be read to, and a book of nursery rhymes was open face-down on the couch. The grandmother was infirm — she had diabetes and couldn’t walk so well. She was sitting on the couch still when we found her. He shot her once through the head, probably from the doorway.

[We’re looking at the graffiti wall, see photos.]

But by this time Jenny would have been... she would have been screaming, so we know Wayne didn’t catch the rest of them unawares. Jenny might have called out that Daddy was home before Wayne shot her; hell, this place is in the middle of nowhere, and it was nighttime, so they all knew a car had pulled up. What I’m saying is, I’m guessing there was a lot of confusion at this juncture, a lot of shouting. There’s a bullet hole at waist height on the wall opposite the front door. My best guess is that Danny ran to the door and was in front of it when Wayne opened it. He could have been looking into the kitchen at his, at his mother, or at the door. I think Wayne took a shot at him from the doorway and missed. Danny ran into the living room, and since Mrs. Murray hadn’t tried to struggle to her feet, Wayne shot her next. He took one shot and hit her. Then he shot Danny. Danny was behind the Christmas tree; he probably ran there to hide. Wayne took three shots into the tree, and one of them, or I guess Danny’s struggles, knocked it sideways off its base. But he got Danny, shot his own boy in the head just over his left ear.

[We’re looking through a door off the dining room; inside is a small room maybe ten by nine, see photos.]

This was a playroom. Mr. Murray and Alex, the two-year-old, were in it. Mr. Murray reacted pretty quick to the shots, for a guy his age, but he was a vet, and he hunted, so he probably would have been moving at the sound of the first gunshot. He opened that window—

[A boarded window on the rear of the house, see photos.]

— which, ah, used to look out behind the garage, and he dropped Alex through it into the snowdrift beneath. Then he got himself through. Though not without some trouble. The autopsy showed he had a broken wrist, which we figure he broke getting out. But it’s still a remarkable thing. I hope you write that. Sam Murray tried his best to save Alex.

[I’ll certainly note it. Wayne’s parents also mentioned him.]

Well, good. Good.

Sam and Alex got about fifty yards away, toward the woods. Wayne probably went to the doorway of the playroom and saw the window open. He ran back outside, around the west corner of the house, and shot Sam in the back right about where the garden was. There wasn’t a lot of light, but the house lights were all on, and if I remember right, the bodies were just about at the limit of what you could see from that corner. So Sam almost made it out of range. But I don’t know if he could have got very far once he was in the trees. He was strong for a guy his age, but it was snowy and neither he nor the boy had coats, and it was about ten degrees out that night. Plus Wayne meant to kill everybody, and I think he would have tracked them.

Sam died instantly. Wayne got him in the heart. He fell, and the boy didn’t go any farther. Wayne walked about fifty feet out and fired a few shots, and one of them got Alex through the neck. Wayne never went any closer. Either he knew he’d killed them both, or he figured the cold would finish the job for him if he hadn’t. Maybe he couldn’t look. I don’t know.

[We’re in the living room again, at the foot of the stairs.]

He went back inside and shut the door behind him. I think he was confronted by the dog, Kodiak, on the stairs, there on the landing. He shot the dog, probably from where you’re standing. Then—

[We’re looking into the kitchen again.]

Wayne went to the kitchen and shot — he shot Jenny a second time. The killing shot. We found her face-down. Wayne stood over her and fired from a distance of less than an inch. The bullet went in the back of her head just above the neck. He held her down with his boot on her shoulder. We know because she was wearing a white sweater, and he left a bloodstain on it that held the imprint of his boot sole.

He called my house at nine-sixteen. You’ve seen the transcript.

[How did he sound? On the phone?]

Oh, Jesus. I’d say upset but not hysterical. Like he was out of breath, I guess.

[Will you tell me again what he said?]

Hell. Do you really need me to repeat it?

[If you can.]

...Well, he said, Larry, it’s Wayne. I said, Hey, Wayne, merry Christmas, or something like that. And then he said, No time, Larry, this is a business call. And I said, What’s wrong? And he said, Larry, I killed Jenny and the kids and my in-laws, and as soon as I hang up, I’m going to kill myself. And I said something like, Are you joking? And then he hung up. That’s it. I got in the cruiser and drove up here as fast as I could.

[You were first on the scene?]

Yeah. Yeah, I was. I called it in on the way; it took me a while to — to remember. I saw blood through the front windows, and I called for backup as soon as I did. I went inside. I looked around... and saw... everyone but Sam and Alex. It took me...

[Sheriff?]

No, it’s all right. I wasn’t... I wasn’t in great shape, which I guess you can imagine, but after a couple of minutes, I found the window open in the playroom. I was out with — with Sam and Alex when the deputies arrived.

[But you found Wayne first?]

Yes. I looked for him right off. For all I knew he was still alive.

[Where was he?]

Down in here.

[We’re looking into a door opening off the kitchen; it looks like — the basement?]

Yeah. Wayne killed himself in his workroom. That was his favorite place, where he went for privacy. We used to drink down there, play darts. He sat in a corner and shot himself with a small handgun, which he also purchased that night. It was the only shot he fired from it. He’d shut the basement door behind him.

...You want to see down there?

They sat for a while in the cruiser afterward. Thompkins had brought a thermos of coffee, which touched her; the coffee was terrible, but at least it was warm. She held the cup in her hands in front of the dashboard heaters. Thompkins chewed his thumbnail and looked at the house.

Why did he do it? she asked him.

Hm?

Why did Wayne do it?

I don’t know.

You don’t have any theories?

No.

He said it quickly, an obvious lie. Patricia watched his face and said, I called around after talking with his parents. Wayne was twenty grand behind on his loan payments. If he hadn’t worked at the bank already, this place would have been repossessed.

Maybe, Thompkins said and sipped his coffee. But half the farms you see out here are twenty grand in the hole, and no one’s slaughtered their entire family over it.

Patricia watched him while he said this. Thompkins kept his big face neutral, but he didn’t look at her. His ears were pink with cold.

Wayne’s mother, she said, told me she thought that Jenny might have had affairs.

Yeah. I heard that too.

Any truth to it?

Adultery’s not against the law. So I don’t concern myself with it.

But surely you’ve heard something.

Well, Ms. Pike, I have the same answer as before. People have been sleeping around on each other out here for a lot longer than I’ve had this job, and no one ever killed their family over it.

Thompkins put on his seatbelt.

Besides, he said, if you were a man who’d slept with Jenny Sullivan, would you say anything about it? You wouldn’t, not now. So no, I don’t know for sure. And frankly, I wouldn’t tell you if I did.

Why?

Because I knew Jenny, and she was a good woman. She was my prom date, for Christ’s sake. I stood up at her and Wayne’s wedding. Jenny was always straight, and she was smart. If she had an affair, that was her business. But it’s not mine, now, and it’s not yours.

It would be motive, Patricia said softly.

I took the bodies out of that house, Thompkins said, putting the cruiser into reverse. I took my friends out. I felt their necks to see if they were alive. I saw what Wayne did. There’s no reason good enough. No one could have wronged him enough to make him do what he did. I don’t care what it was.

He turned the cruiser around; the trees rushed by, and Patricia put both hands around her coffee to keep it from spilling. She’d heard speeches like this before. Someone’s brains get opened up, and there’s always some backcountry cop who puts his hand to his heart and pretends the poor soul still has any privacy.

There’s always a reason, she said.

Thompkins smirked without humor; the cruiser bounced up and down.

Then I’m sure you’ll come up with something, he said.

December 25, 1975

In the evening, just past sundown, Larry went out again to the Sullivan house. He and the staties had finished with the scene earlier in the day. There hadn’t been much to investigate, really; Wayne had confessed in his phone call, yet Larry had told his deputies to take pictures anyway, to collect what evidence they could. And then all day reporters had come out for pictures, and some of the townspeople had stopped by to gawk or to ask if anything needed to be done, so Larry decided to keep the house under guard. Truth be told, he and the men needed something to do; watching the house was better than fielding questions in town.

When Larry pulled up in front of the house, his deputy, Troy Bowen, was sitting in his cruiser by the garage, reading a paperback behind the wheel. Larry flashed his lights, and Bowen got out and ambled over to Larry’s car, hands in his armpits.

Hey, Larry, he said. What’re you doing out here?

Slow night, Larry said, which was true enough. He said, I’ll take over. Go get dinner. I’ll cover until Albie gets here.

That’s not till midnight, Bowen said, but his face was open and grateful.

I might as well be out here. It’s all I’m thinking about anyway.

Yeah, that’s what I thought. But I don’t mind saying it gives me the willies. You’re welcome to it.

When Bowen’s cruiser was gone, Larry stood for a moment on the front stoop, hands in his pockets. Crime scene tape was strung over the doorway in a big haphazard X; Bowen had done it after the bodies were removed, still sniffling and red-eyed. It had been his first murder scene. The electricity was still on; the little fake lantern hanging over the door was shining. Larry took a couple of breaths and then fumbled out a copy of the house key. He unlocked the door, ducked under the caution tape, and went inside.

He turned on the living room light, and there everything was, as he’d left it this afternoon. His heart thumped. What else had he expected? That it would all be gone? That it hadn’t really happened? It had. Here were the outlines. The bloodstains on the living room carpet and on the landing. The light from the living room just shone into the kitchen; he could see the dark swirls on the linoleum, too. Already a smell was in the air. The furnace was still on, and the blood and the smaller pieces of remains were starting to turn. The place would go bad if Wayne’s folks didn’t have the house cleaned up soon. Larry didn’t want to have that talk with them, but he’d call them tomorrow. He knew a service in Indianapolis that took care of things like this. All the same he turned off the thermostat.

He asked himself why he cared. Surely no one would ever live in this place again. What did it matter?

But it did, somehow.

He walked into the family room. The tree was still canted sideways, knocked partway out of its base. He went to the wall behind it, stepping over stains, careful not to disturb anything. The lights on the tree were still plugged into the wall outlet. He squatted, straddling a collapsing pile of presents, then leaned forward and pulled the cord. The tree might go up, especially with the trunk out of its water.

Larry looked up at the wall and put his hand over his mouth; he’d been trying to avoid looking right at anything, but he’d done it now. Just a few inches in front of him, on the wall, was the spot where Danny had been shot. The bullet had gone right through his head. He’d given Danny a couple of rides in the cruiser, and now here the boy was: matted blood, strands of hair—

He breathed through his fingers and looked down at the presents. He’d seen blood before; he’d seen all kinds of deaths, mostly on the sides of highways, but twice because of bullets to the head. He told himself, Pretend it’s no different. He tried to focus and made himself pick out words on the presents’ tags.

No help there. Wayne had bought them all presents. To Danny, From Daddy. To Mommy, From Daddy. All written in Wayne’s blocky letters. Jesus H.

Larry knew he should go, just go out and sit in his cruiser until mid-night, but he couldn’t help it. He took one of Jenny’s presents, a small one that had slid almost completely under the couch, and sat down in the dining room with the box on his lap. He shouldn’t do this, it was wrong, but really — who was left to know that a present was gone? Larry wasn’t family, but he was close enough — he had some rights here. Who, besides him, would ever unwrap them? The presents belonged to Wayne’s parents now. Would they? Would they want to see what their son had bought for the family he’d butchered? Not if they had any sense at all.

Larry went into the kitchen, looking down only to step where the rusty smears weren’t. Under the sink he found garbage bags; he took one.

He sat back down in the dining room. The gift was only a few inches square, wrapped in gold foil paper. Larry slid a finger under a taped seam. He carefully tore the paper away. Inside was a small, light card-board box, also taped. He could see Wayne’s fingerprint caught in the tape glue before he cut it with a thumbnail. He held the lid lightly between his palms and shook out the container onto his lap.

Wayne had bought Jenny lingerie. A silk camisole and matching panty, in red, folded small.

Jenny liked red. Her skin took to it somehow; she was always a little pink. The bust of the camisole was transparent, lacy. She would look impossible in it. That was Jenny, though. She could slip on a T-shirt and look like your best pal. Or she could put on a little lipstick and do her hair and wear a dress, and she’d look like she ought to be up on a movie screen someplace. Larry ran his fingers over the silk. He wondered if Wayne had touched the lingerie this way, too, and what he might have been thinking when he did. Did he know, when he bought it? When had he found out?

Don’t be coy with me, Wayne had said on the phone. He’d called Larry at his house; Emily would have picked up if her hands weren’t soapy with dishwater. Larry watched his wife while he listened. I know, Wayne said. I followed you to the motel. I just shot her, Larry. I shot her in the head.

Larry dumped the lingerie and the wrappings into the garbage bag.

He took the bag upstairs with him, turning off the living room light behind him and turning on the one in the stairwell. He had to cling tight to the banister to get past the spot where Wayne had shot the dog, a big husky named Kodiak, rheumy-eyed and arthritic. Kodiak didn’t care much for the children, who tried to uncurl his tail, so most of the time he slept in a giant basket in the sewing room upstairs. He must have jumped awake at the sound of gunshots. He would have smelled what was wrong right away. Jenny had gotten him as a puppy during high school. Larry had been dating her then; he remembered sitting on the kitchen floor with her at her parents’ house, the dog skidding happily back and forth between them. Kodiak had grown old loving her. He must have stood on the landing and growled and barked at Wayne, and Wayne shot him from the foot of the stairs. Through the head, just like everyone else. Larry had seen dogs driven vicious by bloodshed; it turned on switches in their heads. He hoped Kodiak had at least made a lunge for Wayne before getting shot.

Larry walked into Wayne and Jenny’s bedroom. He’d been in it before. Just once. Wayne had gone up to Chicago on business, and the kids were at school, and Jenny called Larry — at the station; she told dispatch she thought she saw someone in the woods, maybe a hunter, and would the sheriff swing by and run him off? That was smart of her. Larry could go in broad daylight and smoke in the living room and drink a cup of coffee, and no one would say boo.

And, as it turned out, Jenny could set his coffee down on the dining room table and then waggle her fingers at him from the foot of the stairs. And he could get hard just at the sight of her doing it, Jenny Sullivan smiling at him in sweatpants and an old T-shirt.

And upstairs she could say, Not the bed.

They’d stood together in front of the mirror over the low bureau, Jenny bent forward, both of them with their pants pulled down mid-thigh, and Larry gritting his teeth just to last a few minutes. Halfway through he took his hat from the bureau top — he’d brought it upstairs with them and couldn’t remember why — and set it on her head, and she’d looked up and met his eyes in the mirror, and both of them were laughing when they came. Jenny’s laugh turned into something like a shriek. He said, I never heard you sound like that before, and Jenny said, I’ve never sounded like that before. Not in this room. She said, This house has never heard anything like it. And when she said it, it was like the house was Wayne, like somehow he’d walked in. They both turned serious and sheepish — Jenny’s mouth got small and grim — and they’d separated, pulled their clothes up, pulled themselves together.

Now he went through the drawers of the bureau, trying to remember what Jenny wore that day. The blue sweatpants. The Butler Bulldogs shirt. Bright pink socks — he remembered her stumbling around, trying to pull one off. He found a pair that seemed right, rolled tight together. Silk panties, robin’s egg blue. He found a fluffy red thing that she used to keep her ponytail together. Little fake ruby earrings in a ceramic seashell. He smelled through the perfumes next to her vanity, found one he liked and remembered, and sprayed it on the clothes, heavily... it would fade over time, and if it was too strong now, in ten years it wouldn’t be.

He packed all of it into the plastic bag from the kitchen.

Then he sat at the foot of the bed, eyes closed, for a long few minutes. He could hear his own breath. His eyes stung. He looked at the backs of his hands and concentrated on keeping steady. He thought about the sound of Wayne’s voice when he called. I left her sexy for you, Larry.

That made him feel like doing something other than weeping.

When he was composed he looked through the desks in the bedroom and the drawers of all the bed tables. He glanced at his watch. It was only eight.

He walked down the hall into the sewing room and sat at Jenny’s sewing table. The room smelled like Kodiak: an old dog smell, a mixture of the animal and the drops he had to have in his ears. Pictures of the children and Jenny’s parents dotted the walls. Wayne’s bespectacled head peeped out of a few, too — but not very many, when you looked hard. Larry opened a drawer under the table and rooted through. Then he opened Jenny’s sewing box.

He hadn’t known what he was looking for, but in the sewing box he found it. He opened a little pillowed silk box full of spare buttons, and inside, pinned to the lid, was a slip of paper. He knew it right away from the green embossment — it was from a stationery pad he’d found at the hotel he and Jenny had sometimes used in Lebanon. He unfolded it. His hands shook, and he was crying now — she’d kept it, she’d kept something.

This was from a year ago, on a Thursday afternoon; Wayne had taken the boys up to see his folks. Larry met Jenny at the hotel after she was done at the school. Jenny wanted to sleep for an hour or two after they made love, but Larry was due home, and it was better for them to come and go separately anyway, so he dressed quietly while she dozed. He’d looked at her asleep for a long time, and then he’d written a note. He remembered thinking at the time: evidence. But he couldn’t help it. Some things needed to be put down in writing; some things you had to put your name to, if they were going to mean anything at all.

So Larry found the stationery pad and wrote, My sweet Jenny, and got teary when he did. He sat on the bed next to her and leaned over and kissed her warm ear. She stirred and murmured without opening her eyes. He finished the note and left it by her hand.

A week later he asked her, Did you get my note?

She said, No. But then she kissed him and smiled and put her warm, small hands on his cheeks. Of course I did, you dummy.

He’d been able to remember the words on the note — he’d run them over and over in his head — but now he opened the folded paper and read them again: My sweet Jenny, I have trouble with these things but I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t love you.

And then he read on. He dropped the note onto the tabletop and stared at it, his hand clamped over his mouth.

He’d signed it Yours, Larry — but his name had been crossed out. And over it had been written, in shaky block letters: Wayne.

December 24, 1975

If Jenny ever had to tell someone — a stranger, the sympathetic man she imagined coming to the door sometimes, kind of a traveling psychologist and granter of divorces all wrapped up in one — about what it was like to be married to Wayne Sullivan, she would have told him about tonight. She’d say, Wayne called me at six, after my parents got here for dinner, after I’d gotten the boys into their good clothes for the Christmas picture, to tell me he wouldn’t be home for another couple of hours. He had some last-minute shopping, he said.

Jenny was washing dishes. The leftovers from the turkey had already been sealed in Tupperware and put into the refrigerator. From the living room she could hear Danny with her mother; her father was playing with Alex in the playroom. She could hear Alex squealing every few minutes or shouting nonsense in his two-year-old singsong. It was 8:40. Almost three hours later, she told the man in her head, and no sign of him. And that’s Wayne. There’s a living room full of presents. All anyone wants of him now is his presence at the table. And he thinks he hasn’t done enough, and so our dinner is ruined. It couldn’t be more typical.

Her mother was reading to Danny; she was a schoolteacher too, and Jenny could hear the careful cadences, the little emphasis that meant she was acting out the story with her voice. Her mother had been heroic tonight. She was a master of keeping up appearances, and here, by God, was a time when her gifts were needed. Jenny’s father had started to bluster when Jenny announced Wayne was going to be late — Jennifer, I swear to you I think that man does this on purpose — but her mother had gotten up on her cane and gone to her father, put a hand on his shoulder, and said, He’s being sweet, dear, he’s buying presents. He’s doing the best he knows.

Danny of course had asked after his father, and she told him, Daddy will be a little late, and he whined, and Alex picked up on it, and then her mother called both of them over to the couch and let them pick the channel on the television, and for the most part they forgot. Just before dinner was served, her mother hobbled into the kitchen, and Jenny kissed her on the forehead. Thank you, she said.

He’s an odd man, her mother said.

You’re not telling me anything new.

But loving. He is loving.

Her mother stirred the gravy, a firm smile on her face.

They ate slowly, eyes on the clock — Jenny waited a long time to announce dessert — and at eight o’clock she gave up and cleared the dishes. She put a plate of turkey and potatoes — Wayne wouldn’t eat anything else — into the oven.

Jenny scrubbed at the dishes, the same china they’d had since their wedding, even the plates they’d glued together after their first anniversary dinner. She thought, for the hundredth time, what her life would be like if she were in Larry’s kitchen now instead of Wayne’s.

Larry and Emily had bought a new house the previous spring, on the other side of the county, to celebrate Larry’s election as sheriff. Of course Jenny had gone to see it with Wayne and the boys, but she’d been by on her own a couple of times, too. Emily spent two weekends a month visiting her grandmother at a nursing home in Michigan. Jenny had made her visits in summer, when she didn’t teach, while Wayne was at work. She dropped the boys at her folks’ and parked her car out of sight from the road. It was a nice house, big and bright, with beautiful bay windows that let in the evening sun, filtering it through the leaves of two big maples in the front yard. Larry wouldn’t use his and Emily’s bed — God, it wouldn’t be right, even if I don’t love her — so they made love on the guest bed, narrow and squeaky, the same bed Larry had slept on in high school, which gave things a nice nostalgic feel; this was the bed where Larry had first touched her breasts, way back in the mists of time, when she was sixteen. Now she and Larry lay in the guest room all afternoon. They laughed and chattered; when Larry came — with a bellow she would have found funny if it hadn’t turned her on so much — it was like a cork popped out from his throat, and he’d talk for hours about the misadventures of the citizens of Kinslow. All the while he’d touch her with his big hands.

I should have slept with you in high school, she told him during one of those afternoons. I would never have gone on to anyone else.

Well, I told you so.

She laughed. But sometimes this was because she tried very hard not to cry in front of Larry. He worried after her constantly, and she wanted him to think as many good thoughts about her as he could.

I married the wrong guy was what she wanted to tell him, but she couldn’t. They had just, in a shy way, admitted they were in love, but neither one had been brave enough to bring up what they were going to do about it. Larry had just been elected; even though he was doing what his father had done, he was the youngest sheriff anyone had ever heard of, and a scandal and a divorce would probably torpedo another term. And being sheriff was a job Larry wanted — the only job he’d wanted, why he’d gone into the police force instead of going off to college like her and Wayne. If only he had! She and Wayne had never been friends in high school, but in college they got to know each other because they had Larry in common, because she pined for Larry, and Wayne was good at making her laugh, at making her seem not so lonely.

And then Larry met Emily at church. He called Jenny one night during her sophomore year to tell her he was in love, that he was happy, and that he hoped Jenny would be happy for him, too.

I’m seeing Wayne, she said, blurting it out, relieved she could finally say it.

Really? Larry had paused. Our Wayne?

But as much as Jenny now daydreamed about being Larry’s wife (which, these days, was often) she knew such a thing was unlikely at best. She could only stand here waiting for the husband she did have — who might as well be a third son — to figure out it was family time, and think of Larry sitting in his living room with Emily. They probably weren’t talking, either. Emily would be watching television, Larry sitting in his den, his nose buried in a Civil War book. Or thinking of her. Jenny’s stomach thrilled.

But what was she thinking? It was Christmastime at the Thompkins house, too, and Larry’s parents were over; her mother was good friends with Mrs. Thompkins and had said something about it earlier. Larry’s house would be a lot like hers, except maybe even happier. Larry and his father and brother would be knocking back a special eggnog recipe, and Emily and Mrs. Thompkins, who got along better than Emily and Larry did, would be gossiping over cookie dough in the kitchen. The thought of all that activity and noise made her sad. It was better to think of Larry’s house as unhappy; better to think of it as an empty place, too big for Larry, needing her and the children—

She was drying her hands when she heard the car grumbling in the trees. Wayne had been putting off a new muffler. She sighed, then called out: Daddy’s home!

Daddy! Danny called. Gramma, finally!

She wished Wayne could hear that.

She looked out the kitchen window and saw Wayne’s car pull up in front of the garage, the wide white circles of his headlights getting smaller and more specific on the garage door. He pulled up too close. Jenny had asked him time and time again to give her room to pull the Vega out of the garage if she needed to. She could see Wayne behind the wheel, his Impala’s orange dash lights shining onto his face. He had his glasses on; she could see the reflections, little match lights.

She imagined Larry coming home, outside a different kitchen window, climbing out of his cruiser. She imagined her sons calling him Daddy, and the thought made her blush. The fantasy was almost blasphemous, but it made her tingle at the same time. Larry loved the boys, and they loved him; she sometimes stopped at the station house, and Larry would take them for a ride in his cruiser. His marriage to Emily might be different if they could have children of their own. Jenny wasn’t supposed to know — no one did — but Emily was infertile. They’d found out just before moving into the new house.

Wayne shut off the engine. The light was out over the garage, and Jenny couldn’t see him any longer; the image of the car was replaced by a curved piece of her own reflection in the window. She turned again to putting away the dishes. I think he’s bringing presents, she heard her mother say. Danny answered this with shouts, and Alex answered him with a yodel.

Jenny thought about Wayne coming in the front door, forgetting to stamp the snow from his boots. She was going to have to go up and kiss him, pretend she didn’t taste the cigarettes on his breath. He would sulk if she didn’t. This was what infuriated her most; she could explain and explain (later, when they put the kids to bed), but he wouldn’t understand what he’d done wrong. He’d brought the kids presents — he’d probably bought her a present. He’d been moody lately (working long hours was what he’d told her), and — she knew — this was his apology for it. In his head he’d worked it all out; he would make a gesture that far outshone any grumpiness, any silence at the dinner table. He’d come through the door like Santa Claus. She could tell him, The only gift I wanted was a normal family dinner, and he’d look hurt, he’d look like she slapped him. But, he’d say, and the corners of his mouth would turn down, I was just trying to — and then he’d launch into the same story he’d be telling himself right now—

They had done this before, a number of times. Too many times. This was how the rest of the night was going to go. And the thought of it all playing out so predictably—

Jenny set a plate down on the counter. She blinked; her throat stung. The thought of him made her feel ill. Her husband was coming into his house on Christmas Eve, and she couldn’t bear it.

About a month ago she’d called in a trespasser while Wayne had the kids at a movie in Indy. This was risky, she knew, but she had gotten weepy like this, and she and Larry wouldn’t be able to see each other for weeks yet. She’d asked if the sheriff could come out to the house, and the sheriff came. He looked so happy when she opened the door to him, when he realized Wayne was gone. She took him upstairs, and they did it, and then afterward she said, Now you surprise me, and so he took her out in the cruiser, to a nearby stretch of road, empty for a mile ahead and behind, and he said, Hang on, and floored it. The cruiser seemed almost happy to oblige him. She had her hands on the dashboard, and the road — slightly hilly — lifted her up off the seat, dropped her down again, made her feel like a girl. You’re doing one-twenty, Larry said, calm as ever, in between her shrieks. Unfortunately, we’re out of road.

At the house she hugged him, kissed his chin. He’d already told her, in a way, but now she told him: I love you. He’d blushed to his ears.

She was going to leave Wayne.

Of course she’d thought about it; she’d been over the possibilities, idly, on and off for the last four years, and certainly since taking up with Larry. But now she knew; she’d crossed some point of balance. She’d been waiting for something to happen with Larry, but she would have to act even sooner. The planning would take a few months at most. She’d have to have a place lined up somewhere else. A job — maybe in Indy, but certainly out of Kinslow. And then she would tell Larry — she’d have to break it to him gently, but she would tell him, once and for all, that she was his for the taking, if he could manage it.

This was it: She didn’t love her husband — in fact she didn’t much like him — and was never going to feel anything for him again. It had to be done. Larry or no Larry, it had to be done.

Something out the window caught her eye. Wayne had the passenger door of the Impala open and was bent inside; she could see his back under the dome lamp. What was he doing? Maybe he’d spilled his ashtray. She went to the window and put her face close to the glass.

He backed out of the car and stood straight. He stood looking at her for a moment in front of the open car door. He wiped his nose with his gloved hand. Was he crying? She felt a flicker of guilt, as though somehow he’d heard her thoughts. But then he smiled and lifted a finger: Just a second.

She did a quick beckon with her hand — Get your ass in here — and made a face, eyeballs rolled toward the rest of the house. Now.

He shook his head, held the finger up again.

Jenny crossed her arms. She’d see Larry next week; Emily was going to Michigan. She could begin to tell him then.

Wayne bent into the car, then straightened up again. He grinned.

She held her hands out at her sides, palms up: What? I’m waiting.

1970

When Wayne had first told her he wanted to blindfold her, Jenny’s fear was that he was trying out some kind of sex game, some spice-up-your-love-life idea he’d gotten out of the advice column in Playboy. But he promised her otherwise and led her to the car. After fifteen minutes there, arms folded across her chest, and then the discovery that he was serious about guiding her, still blindfolded, through waist-high weeds and clinging spiderwebs, she began to wish sex was on his mind after all.

Wayne, she said, either tell me where we’re going or I’m taking this thing off.

It’s not far, honey, he said; she could tell from his voice he was grinning. Just bear with me. I’m watching your feet for you.

They were in a woods; that was easy enough to guess. She heard the leaves overhead, and birdcalls; she smelled the thick and cloying smells of the undergrowth. Twice she stumbled, and her hands scraped across tree trunks, furred vines, before Wayne tightened his grip on her arm. They were probably on a path; even blind she knew the going was too easy for them to be headed directly through the bushes. So they were in Wayne’s woods, the one his parents owned. Simple enough to figure out; he talked about this place constantly. He’d driven her past it a number of times, but to her it looked like any other stand of trees out in this part of the country: solid green in summertime and dull gray-brown in winter, so thick you couldn’t see light shining through from the other side.

I know where we are, she told him.

He gripped her hand and laughed. Maybe, he said, but you don’t know why.

He had her there. She snagged her skirt on a bush and was tugged briefly between its thorns and Wayne’s hand. The skirt ripped and gave. She cursed.

Sorry! Wayne said. Sorry, sorry — not much longer now.

Sunlight flickered over the top of the blindfold, and the sounds around her opened up. She was willing to bet they were in a clearing. A breeze blew past them, smelling of springtime: budding leaves and manure.

OK, Wayne said. Are you ready?

I’m not sure, she said.

Do you love me?

Of course I love you, she said. She reached a hand out in front of her and found he was suddenly absent. OK, she said, enough. Give me your hand or the blindfold’s off.

She heard odd sounds — was that metal? Glass?

All right, almost there, he said. Sit down.

On the ground?

No. Just sit.

She sat, his hands on her shoulders, and found, shockingly, a chair underneath her behind. A smooth metal folding chair.

Wayne then unknotted the blindfold. He whipped it away. Happy anniversary! he said.

Jenny squinted in the revealed light, but only for a moment. She opened her eyes wide and saw she was sitting, as she’d thought, in a meadow, maybe fifty yards across, surrounded on all sides by tall green trees, all of them rippling in the wind. In front of her was a card table covered with a red-and-white checked tablecloth. The table was set with dishes — their good china, the plates at least — and two wineglasses, all wedding presents they’d only used once, on her birthday. Wayne sat in a chair opposite her, grinning, eyebrows arched. The wind blew his hair straight up off his head.

A picnic, she said. Wayne, that’s lovely, thank you.

She reached her hand across the table and grasped his. He was exasperating sometimes, but no other man she’d met could reach this level of sweetness. He’d lugged all this stuff out into the middle of nowhere for her — that’s where he must have been all afternoon.

You’re welcome, he said. The red spots on his cheeks spread and deepened. He lifted her hand and kissed her knuckles, then her wedding ring. He rubbed the places where he’d kissed with his thumb.

He said, I’m sorry that dinner won’t be as fancy as the plates, but I really couldn’t get anything but sandwiches out here.

That’s fine. She laughed. I’ve eaten your cooking, and we’re better off with sandwiches.

Ouch, he said. He faked a European accent: This kitten, she has the claws. But I have the milk that will tame her.

He bent and rummaged through a paper bag near his chair and produced a bottle of red with a flourish and a cocked eyebrow. She couldn’t help but laugh.

Not entirely chilled, he said, but good enough. He uncorked it and poured her a glass.

A toast.

To what?

To the first part of the surprise.

There’s more?

He smiled slyly, lifted his glass, then said, After dinner.

He’d won her over; she didn’t question it. Jenny lifted her g lass, clinked rims with her husband’s, and sat back with her legs crossed at the knee. Wayne bent and dug in the bag again, and then came up with sliced wheat bread and cheese and a package of carved roast beef in deli paper. He made her a sandwich, even slicing up a fresh tomato. They ate in the pleasant breeze.

After dinner he leaned back in his chair and rubbed his stomach. When they’d first started dating, she thought he did it to be funny; but really, he did it after eating anything larger than a candy bar. She was willing to bet he’d been doing it since he was a toddler. It meant all was well in the land of Wayne. The gesture made her smile, and she looked away. Since they’d married he’d developed a small wedge of belly; she wondered — not unhappily, not here — if in twenty years he’d have a giant stomach to rub, like his father’s.

So I was right? she asked. This is your parents’ woods?

Nope, he said, smiling.

It’s not?

It was. They don’t own it anymore.

They sold it? When? To who?

Yesterday. He was grinning broadly, now. To me. To us.

She sat forward, then back. He glanced around at the trees, his hair tufting in a sudden gust of the wind.

You’re serious, she said. Her stomach tightened. This was a feeling she’d had a few times since their wedding — she was learning that the more complicated Wayne’s ideas were, the less likely they were to be good ones. A picnic in the woods? Fine. But this?

I’m serious, Wayne said. This is my favorite place in the world — second favorite, I mean. He winked at her, then went on: But either way. Both my favorite places are mine, now. Ours.

She touched a napkin to her lips. So, she said. How much did — did we pay for our woods?

A dollar. He laughed and said, Can you believe it? Dad wanted to give it to us, but I told him, No, Pop, I want to buy it. We ended up compromising.

She could only stare at him. He squeezed her hand and said, We’re landowners now, honey. One square mile.

That’s—

Dad wanted to sell it off, and I couldn’t bear the thought of it going to somebody who was going to plow it all under.

We need to pay your parents more than a dollar, Wayne. That’s absurd.

That’s what I told them. But Dad said no, we needed the money more. But honey — there’s something else. That’s only part of the surprise.

Jenny twined her fingers together in front of her mouth. A suspicion had formed, and she hoped he wasn’t about to do what she guessed. Wayne was digging beside his chair again. He came up with a long roll of paper, blueprint paper, held with a rubber band. He put it on the table between them.

Our paper anniversary, he said.

What is this?

Go ahead. Look at it.

Jenny knew what the plans would show. She rolled the rubber band off the blueprints, her mouth dry. Wayne stood, his hands quick and eager, and spread the prints flat on the tabletop. They were upside down; she went around the table and stood next to him. He put a hand on the small of her back.

The blueprints were for a house. A simple two-story house — the ugliest thing she had ever seen.

I didn’t want to tell you too soon, he said, but I got a raise at the bank. Plus, now that I’ve been there three years, I get a terrific deal on home loans. I got approval three days ago.

A house, she said.

They were living in an apartment in Kinslow, nice enough but bland, sharing a wall with an old woman who complained if they spoke above a whisper or if they played rock ’n’ roll records. Jenny put a hand to her hair. Wayne, she said, where is this house going to be?

Here, he said and grinned again. He held his arms out. Right here. The table is on the exact spot. The contractors start digging on Monday. The timing’s perfect. It’ll be done by the end of summer.

Here... in the woods.

Yep.

He laughed, watching her face, and said, We’re only three miles from town. The interstate’s just on the other side of the field to the south. The county road is paved. All we have to do is have them expand the path in and we’ll have a driveway. It’ll be our hideaway. Honey?

She sat down in the chair he’d been sitting in. She could barely speak. They had talked about buying a house soon — but one in town. They’d also talked about moving to Indianapolis, about leaving Kinslow — maybe not right away, but within five years.

Wayne, she said. Doesn’t this all feel kind of... permanent?

Well, he said, it’s a house. It’s supposed to.

We just talked last month. You wanted to get a job in the city. I want to live in the city. A five-year plan, remember?

Yeah. I do.

He knelt next to her chair and put his arm across her shoulders.

But I’ve been thinking, he said. The bank is nice, really nice, and the money just got better, and then Dad was talking about getting rid of the land, and I couldn’t bear to hear it, and—

And so you went ahead and did it without asking me.

Um, Wayne said, it seemed like such a great deal that—

Okay, she told him. OK. It is a great deal. If it was just buying the woods, that would be wonderful. But the house is different. What it means is that you’re building your dream house right in the spot I want to move away from. I hate to break it to you, but that means it’s not quite my dream house.

Wayne removed his hand from her shoulders and clasped his fingers in front of his mouth. She knew that gesture, too.

Wayne—

I really thought this would make you happy, he said.

A house does make me happy. But one in Kinslow. One we can sell later and not feel bad about when we move—

She wasn’t sure what happened next. Wayne told her it was an accident, that he stood up too fast and hit his shoulder on the table. And it looked that way, sometimes, when she thought back on it. But when it happened she was sure he flung his arm out, that he knocked the table aside, that he did it on purpose. The wineglasses and china plates flew out and disappeared into the clumps of yellow grass; she heard a crash. The blueprints caught in a tangle with the tablecloth and the other folding chair.

Goddammit! Wayne shouted. He walked a quick circle, holding his hand close to his chest.

Jenny was too stunned to move, but after a minute she said Wayne’s name.

He shook his head and kept walking the circle. Jenny saw he was crying, and when he saw her looking, he turned his face away. She sat still in her chair, not certain what to say or do. Finally she knelt and tried to assemble the pieces of the broken dishes.

After a minute he said, I think I’m bleeding.

She stood and walked to him and saw that he was. He’d torn a gash in his hand on the meaty outside of his palm. A big one — it would need stitches. His shirt was soaked with blood where he’d cradled his hand.

Come on, she said. We need to get you to the hospital.

No, he said. His voice was low and miserable.

Wayne, don’t be silly. This isn’t a time to sulk. You’re hurt.

No. Hear me out. OK? You always say what you want, and you make me sound stupid for saying what I want. This time I just want to say it.

She grabbed some napkins and pressed them against his hand. Jesus, Wayne, she said, seeing blood well up from the cut, across her fingers. OK, OK, say what you need to.

This is my favorite place, he said. I’ve loved it since I was a kid. I used to come out here with Larry. He and I used to imagine we had a house out here. A hideaway.

Well—

Be quiet. I’m not done yet. His lip quivered, and he said, I know we talked, I know you want to go to Indy. Well, we can. But it looks like we’re going to be successful. It looks like I’m going to do well, and you can get a job teaching anywhere. I’ll just work hard, and in five years maybe we can have two houses—

Oh, Wayne—

Listen! We can have a house in Indy and then this — this can be our getaway. He sniffled and said, But I want to keep it. Besides you, this is the only thing I want. This house, right out here.

We can talk about it later. You’re going to bleed to death if we don’t get you to the emergency room.

I wanted you to love it, he said. I wanted you to love it because I love it. Is that too much to ask from your wife? I wanted to give you something special. I—

It was awful watching him try to talk about this. The spots of red in his cheeks were burning now, and the rims of his eyes were almost the same color. The corners of his mouth turned down in little curls.

Don’t worry, she said. We’ll talk about it. OK? Wayne? We’ll talk. We’ll take the blueprints with us to the emergency room. But you need stitches. Let’s go.

I love you, he said.

She stopped fussing around his hand. He was looking down at her, tilting his head.

Jenny, just tell me you love me and none of it will matter.

She laughed in spite of herself, shaking her head. Of course, she said. Of course I do.

Say it. I need to hear it.

She kissed his cheek. Wayne, I love you with all my heart. You’re my husband. Now move your behind, OK?

He kissed her, dipping his head. Jenny was bending away to pick up the blueprints, and his lips, wet, just grazed her cheek. She smiled at him and gathered their things; Wayne stood and watched her, moist eyed.

She finally took his good hand, and they walked back toward the car, and his kiss, dried slowly by the breeze, felt cool on her cheek. It lingered for a while, and despite everything, she was glad for it.

Then

The boys were first audible only as distant shrieks between the trees.

They were young enough that any time they raised their voices they sounded as though they were in terror. They were chasing each other, their only sounds loud calls, denials, laughter. When they appeared in the meadow — one charging out from a break in a dense thicket of thorned shrubs, the other close behind — they were almost indistinguishable from one another in their squeals, in their red jackets and caps. Late afternoon was shifting into dusky evening. Earlier they had hunted squirrels, unaware of how the sounds of their voices and the pops of their BB guns had traveled ahead of them, sending hundreds of beasts into their dens.

In the center of the meadow, the trailing boy caught up with the fleeing first; he pounced and they wrestled. Caps came off. One boy was blond, the other was mousy brown. The brown-haired boy was smaller. Stop it, he called from the bottom of the pile. Larry! Stop it! I mean it!

Larry laughed and said with a shudder: Wayne, you pussy.

Don’t call me that!

Don’t be one, pussy!

They flailed and punched until they lay squirming and helpless with laughter.

Later they pitched a tent in the center of the meadow. They had done this before. Near their tent was an old circle of charred stones, ringing a pile of damp ashes and cinders. Wayne wandered out of the meadow and gathered armfuls of deadwood while Larry secured the tent into the soft and unstable earth. They squatted down around the gathered wood and worked at setting it alight. Darkness was coming; beneath the gray overcast sky, light was diffuse anyway, and now it seemed as though the shadows came not from above but from below, shadows pooling and deepening as though they welled up from underground springs. Larry was the first to look nervously into the shadowed trees while Wayne threw matches into the wood. Wayne worked at the fire with his face twisted, mouth pursed. When the fire caught at last, the boys grinned at each other.

I wouldn’t want to be out here when it’s dark, Larry said, experimentally.

It’s dark now.

No, I mean with no fire. Pitch dark.

I have, Wayne said.

No you haven’t.

Sure I have. Sometimes I forget what time it is and get back to my bike late. Once it got totally dark. If I wasn’t on the path, I would have got lost.

Wayne poked at the fire with a long stick. His parents owned the woods, but their house was two miles away. Larry looked around him, impressed.

Were you scared?

Shit, yeah. Wayne giggled. It was dark. I’m not dumb.

Larry looked at him for a while, then said, Sorry I called you a pussy.

Wayne shrugged and said, I should have shot that squirrel.

They’d seen one in a tree, somehow oblivious to them. Wayne was the better shot, and they’d crouched together behind a nearby log, Wayne’s BB gun steadied in the crotch of a dead branch. He’d looked at the squirrel for a long time before finally lifting his cheek from the gun. I can’t, he’d said.

What do you mean, you can’t?

I can’t. That’s all.

He handed the gun to Larry, and Larry took aim, too fast, and missed.

It’s all right, Larry said now, at the fire. Squirrel tastes like shit.

So does baloney, Wayne said, grim.

They pulled sandwiches from their packs. Both took the meat from between the bread, speared it with sticks, and held it over the fire until it charred and sizzled. Then they put it back into the sandwiches. Wayne took a bite first, then squealed and held a hand to his mouth. He spit a hot chunk of meat into his hand, then fumbled it into the fire.

It’s hot, he said.

Larry looked at him for a long time. Pussy, he said and couldn’t hold in his laughter. Wayne ducked his eyes and felt inside his mouth with his fingers.

Later, the fire dimmed. They sat sleepily beside it, talking in low voices. Wayne rubbed his stomach. Things unseen moved in the trees — mostly small animals, from the sound of it, but once or twice larger things.

Deer, probably, Wayne said.

What about wildcats?

No wildcats live around here. I’ve seen foxes, though.

Foxes aren’t that big.

They spread out their sleeping bags inside the tent and opened the flap a bit so they could see the fire.

This is my favorite place, Wayne said, when they zipped into the bags.

The tent?

No. The meadow. I’ve been thinking about it. I want to have a house here someday.

A house?

Yeah.

What kind of house?

I don’t know. Like mine, I guess, but out here. I could come out onto the porch at night, and it would be just like this. But you wouldn’t have to pitch a tent. You know what? We could both have it. We’d each get half of the house to do whatever we want in. We wouldn’t have to go home before it gets dark, because we’d already be there.

Larry smiled but said, That’s dumb. We’ll both be married by then. You won’t want me in your house all the time.

That’s not true.

You won’t get married?

No — I mean, yeah, I will. Sure. But you can always come over.

It’s not like that, Larry said, laughing.

How do you know?

Because it isn’t. Jesus Christ, Wayne. Sometimes I wonder what planet you live on.

You always make my ideas sound dumb.

So don’t have dumb ideas.

It isn’t a dumb idea to have my friends in my house.

Larry sighed and said, No, it isn’t. But marriage is different. You get married, and then the girl you marry is your best friend. That’s what being in love is.

My dad has best friends.

Mine too. But who does your dad spend more time with — them or your mom?

Wayne thought for a minute. Oh.

They looked out the tent flap at the fire.

Wayne said, You’ll come over when you can, though, right?

Sure, Larry said. You bet.

They lay on their stomachs, and Wayne talked about the house he wanted to build. It would have a tower. It would have a secret hallway built into the walls. It would have a pool table in the basement, better than the one at Vic’s Pizza King in town. It would have a garage big enough for three cars.

Four, Larry said. We’ll each have two. A sports car and a truck.

Four, Wayne said. A four-car garage. And a pinball machine. I’ll have one in the living room, rigged so you don’t have to put money in it.

After a while, Wayne heard Larry’s breathing soften. He looked out the tent flap at the orange coals of the fire. He was sleepy, but he didn’t want to sleep, not yet. He thought about his house and watched the fire fade.

He wished for the house to be here in the meadow now. Larry could have half, Wayne the other. He imagined empty rooms, then rooms full of toys. But that wasn’t the way it would be. They’d be grownups. He imagined a long mirror in the bedroom and tried to see himself in it: older, as a man. He’d have rifles, not BB guns. He tried to imagine the rooms full of the things a man would have and a boy wouldn’t: bookshelves, closets full of suits and ties.

Then he saw a woman at the kitchen table, wearing a blue dress. Her face kept changing — he couldn’t quite see it. But he knew she was pretty. He saw himself open the kitchen door, swinging a briefcase that he put down at his feet. He held out his arms, and the woman stood to welcome him, making a happy girlish sound, and held out her arms too. Then she was close. He smelled her perfume, and she said — in a woman’s voice, warm and honeyed — Wayne, and he felt a leaping excitement, like he’d just been scared — but better, much better — and he laughed and squeezed her and said into her soft neck and hair, his voice deep: I’m home.