The Watcher Page 7

  “Are you okay?” I asked. I saw him unclench his jaw.

  “Yes,” he said. But he didn’t move.

  I tipped my head. “Can I come in?” I asked. “I have a problem,” I added. “I need an adult.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, and moved then, letting me into a black-and-white kitchen with a big enamel sink and a pink counter top. I watched while he turned his head and wiped his forehead with the cuff of his shirt sleeve. He had a tattoo on his forearm I had never noticed, the face of a pocket watch, with the chain wrapped around his elbow.

  “I’ve never seen that,” I said, pointing.

  He sniffled, and pulled at the waist of his pants, which I noticed were too big. “I have another,” he said.

  “Can I see it?” I asked.

  He pressed his lips into a flat line. “No,” he said. “It’s late,” he said again. “What’s wrong? What’s the problem?”

  I tried to look him in the eye. His top lip was beaded with perspiration. He needed to shave.

  “Did you take something?” I asked.

  “Like what?” he said.

  “Like a drug. Are you on something?”

  “I’m not on anything,” he said, suddenly frank and sharp.

  But I detected something. I knew my mother had two different kinds of sweats, one when she had just dosed and another when she needed to. I couldn’t tell what this was.

  “Really?” I asked.

  He laughed a hard, unjoyful laugh and turned from me to walk into the living room.

  The living room was a small square. Off of it were one small bedroom, lit with a milk glass lamp, and a bathroom, tiled in pink and black. In the bedroom the bed was made and there was no detritus of living, no books on the nightstand, no socks or shoes on the floor. Nothing that wasn’t put away, dusted, straightened.

  “What’s your problem?” Baby Jane asked me.

  “There’s no water or electricity at my house,” I said. “And the county is auctioning it for back taxes.”

  He motioned to a squared-off, avocado-green sofa. “Please,” he said. When I sat, he asked, “How much do you owe?”

  “A lot. Like more than the house is even worth.”

  He sat next to me, his leg crooked, his body turned to face me. He leaned his face on his hand, watching. “What about the utilities?” he asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” I said.

  He pushed his hand up so that it held back his hair. He had a darkness under his eyes I’d never noticed in the car, and his cheekbones seemed sharp. I thought he’d lost weight. I inched closer, looking intently.

  “Baby,” I said.

  “It’s just not a good day,” he said.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “For me?” he said. “No. You can stay if you want.” I thought of Birdie sitting on the bed in the dark with my mother.

  “It’s not just me,” I said.

  His eyes went dark. “Your mother made these choices herself,” he said. “She can figure them out.”

  “She can’t,” I said. “She literally cannot. If I leave her to it, she will just sit in that house without electricity or water until they auction it.”

  “How is that your problem?” he asked.

  “It just is,” I said. Her name formed behind my lips, but I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t break the seal on the secret.

  “You can stay,” he said again. “On the couch.”

  I looked at the green velvet sofa and felt the corners of my mouth sink. It looked more comfortable than my twin mattress at home. It wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to rattle him, shake him up. Push him down.

  “Put the house in your name,” he said then.

  “How?” I asked.

  “Is there a mortgage?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Have your mother sign it over to you. It’s the least she can do.”

  “Why?” I asked. It seemed like that would make it mine and mine alone.

  “Because then you can take over the utilities,” he said, “and start from zero, and maybe you can do that with the taxes too. It’ll buy you time,” he said.

  “How do you know this?” I asked.

  “I’m really good at buying time,” he said.

  He walked into the bedroom and left the door open. I saw him untuck his shirt, unbutton it, lay it across the top of a ladder-back chair. And then his shoes, his pants. Out of my sight line, he changed into pajama bottoms but left his shirt off, his chest and stomach thatched with dark hair and his back covered in a tattoo of a sword that ran down the length of his spine and two wings that sprouted from his shoulder blades.

  “Wow,” I said from the doorway. He brushed his teeth, and leaned over the sink to spit.

  “Are you staying?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He took a chenille bedspread off the bed and got in between cool blue sheets. “Turn the light off,” he said. “There’s a blanket on the back of the couch.”

  “Can I lie down?” I asked.

  “On the couch,” he repeated.

  “With you,” I said quietly. I leaned in the doorway to his bedroom, the light still on. He was covered up to his armpits, his arms out and folded over his chest. When he closed his eyes, I tried not to think of him lying in a casket, in blue satin instead of blue cotton.

  “Please?” I said.

  He snapped open his eyes and breathed in sharply. I was fidgeting with my fingers, creeping into the room.

  “On top of the covers,” he said.

  I laughed. “Are we in middle school?” I asked.

  “Take it or leave it,” he said.

  I took my shoes off and lay on top of the blanket next to him. I didn’t dare touch him. He seemed stiff, like his whole body was on guard against me lying there. “Where were you before this?” I asked.

  “Jail,” he said.

  I didn’t jump, but the hairs on my neck stood up. “Why?” I asked.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Have you killed someone?” I asked.

  He turned on his side to face me. “Yes,” he said. “But not in the way that you think.”

  I looked into his blue, blue eyes.

  “Go to sleep,” he said, and closed them, and I lay there for a long time, clenched and awake, watching him breathe. I didn’t know if he was sleeping, but he didn’t move, and at some point I fell deeply asleep, curled on my side with my forehead touching his shoulder.

  * * *

  When I woke up, he was gone.

  I looked in the bathroom for anything personal. There were razors and shaving soap that you lathered with a brush. Witch hazel and alcohol. A bottle of aspirin. Nothing with his name on it, nothing that wasn’t also completely generic.

  In the kitchen there was no coffee, only tea, and only black. There was bread, and whiskey, and in the refrigerator, some eggs and cheese.

  On the little metal table in the kitchen, where there might be a bowl of fruit or a bouquet of flowers, were still lifes of bone. A piece that was flat and curved, like a shoulder blade or a hip, and another that was a circular section of spine. Beside them, a white glass vase. Instead of flowers, there was a bunch of feathers, black and brown ones, striped ones, like from a hawk. More delicate than flowers and sturdier, I thought. They wouldn’t lose their beauty. They wouldn’t die. Neither would the bones. What was already dead couldn’t die again.

  * * *

  I went back to the house at first light, roused Birdie, and walked her out to the public bathroom in the park. My mother had gotten up in the night, eaten an entire box of gingersnaps, left a mess of crumbs and a broken plate in the kitchen, and then gone back to sleep. Beside her, I found a bottle of Rebel Yell, tipped over and empty. At six, she was still sleeping it off, so I covered up Birdie and kissed her head, took the keys off the hook, and drove the truck to work in the same dirty clothes I had slept in.

  At the end of my shift, damp with dishwater and sore, I asked Ju
nior if I could use the house phone. “Okay if I?” I said, picking up the receiver. I knew it would be, but I also knew I should ask first, because I couldn’t always predict Junior’s pan-throwing moods.

  I almost hung up.

  I held the stranger’s card in my hand. He’d asked me to call. I went over the conversation several times. I’d said I could work. He’d said he would hire me. He’d thrown out the flyer right in front of me. I pictured the pixie smile on his face, the curls of his hair, the way he’d wadded up the paper and lobbed it into the trash can.

  “Bear Miller,” he said on the other side. The way a man with an actual profession answers the phone.

  “Hi.”

  I instantly felt stupid. Like I was back in school. A kid, trying to sound grown-up. I knew something had to change. I’d felt it deep in my sleep beside Baby Jane. The notion that everything was ending. That I would learn to do something else. That I could push my body to a limit it hadn’t known. Work an eighteen-hour day, sleep, work again. Get everything in order.

  “Um, it’s Shannon,” I said. “We met at the diner?”

  “Of course,” Bear said, smooth. “I’m so glad you called.”

  “I’m happy to work,” I said. “I need to work. Could we talk about it? When could I start?” I asked.

  I held the card so tight I bent it. I had worried all its edges soft and fuzzed.

  “Where are you?” Bear asked, at once more direct and more intimate than I’d expected.

  “At the diner,” I said.

  “Are you done for the day?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Stay there,” Bear said, and hung up.

  “Okay,” I said, embarrassed that it had all happened so quickly. “Thanks,” I said, and “Bye,” into the dead phone before placing it back on the hook so it sounded like a normal conversation. I felt my face fold in, threatening to cry, from everything: Birdie, the house, the whiskey, Baby Jane. I started coughing and excused myself from Junior, who wasn’t paying attention anyway.

  I went into the bathroom and scrubbed my hands. They were permanently dry from the hot water and bleach in the kitchen. I washed my face with the cheap pink soap that Junior stocked the place with and dried off with rough, brown C-fold towels. I pushed my hair off my head with my fingers. It didn’t matter. It was dirty, dark at the roots. A cowlick was sticking up in the back that wouldn’t go down until I washed it. It needed to be cut. The longer it got, the younger and girlier I looked. My whole body was sore and tired, gritty under everything. I took three butter mints from the register and hoped I didn’t smell from a distance, or that if I did, it was only like bacon, or the grill.

  Bear showed up in a dark-green Land Rover with caramel leather seats. He shook my hand tight, with full palm.

  His face was like something I’d only read about. High cheekbones. Green eyes. His hair was pulled back in a loose bun near the top of his head. His jeans looked expensive, dark and slim but not tight, and his leather boots looked so soft I wanted to rub my face on them.

  “You want to come see the house?” Bear asked.

  “The house?” I said. My gut spasmed in panic, and I felt like my heart was beating outside my chest.

  Bear smiled. “Where you’ll be working,” he said.

  I glanced at my mother’s shitty little truck, slightly crooked off its frame and parked with the front tire in a deep puddle. On the way out of the park this morning, the fuel light had come on.

  “I’m pretty dirty from work,” I said.

  “Why don’t you go home first,” Bear said. “Shower and change, and then meet me over there.”

  So logical. So normal. And so ridiculously impossible that I started laughing. I was afraid I sounded hysterical. I wiped at my eyes, and my lips pulled down in a hard, uncontrollable frown.

  “Whoa,” Bear said, when I had hoped he wasn’t paying attention. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Oh.” I waved my hand. Blinked my wet eyes. “It’s more than you want to know,” I said.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  I took a rough breath. “The water and electric were turned off at my place,” I said.

  “Okay,” Bear said.

  “So, I need to work,” I said. I tried to keep my eyes on the clouds behind him and not on his beautiful face. They were heavy clouds, the kind that bring snow. The air, even though it was warm, had a bite to it.

  “Are you hungry?” Bear asked.

  “I mean, I’m not in a commercial with a swollen belly and a fly on my face,” I said and laughed, bitter.

  “I meant right now,” Bear said, and he smiled. “Not chronically.”

  “Oh.” I blushed hard, and I felt my heart again, pounding. “Yeah,” I said.

  He got into the Land Rover then and pushed open the passenger side door from inside. “Get in,” he said, and after a second of hesitation, I did. I got in and sat on the buttery leather seat that was warm from the sun, or maybe from a built-in heater.

  “I’m pretty sure I can get you what you need,” Bear said.

  NINE: KATERI

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18

  Kateri’s phone rings in the early hours, before the sun has come up. In her deepest sleep, she struggles to recognize the chirp of her phone. In her dream, a cricket as big as her hand climbs the wall, its copper wings making the sound of her phone ringing.

  “Fisher,” Hurt barks as soon as she accepts the call. “I need you out at Mercy.”

  Her heart starts and she draws a quick breath. “Did they find the kid?” she asks.

  “No,” he says. “Come now.”

  His call has her immediately on alert. Still, she stops at the twenty-four-hour Stewarts for coffee before she drives the two-lane highway out to Mount Snow. She watches the sun in her rearview mirror, leaking yellow over the horizon, lightening the black trees, spreading gold over the pavement. By the time she gets to Mercy, there’s a circle of seven trooper cars, lights going, an ambulance, Hurt’s Honda, and a petite buff BMW that, turns out, belongs to Elise Diaz.

  The car is submerged in deep reeds in a swampy patch behind the way back of the parking lot. Kateri watches as a tow truck pulls out a small, nondescript Nissan, water pouring from the doors, from the trunk. The waiting seems to take forever, but it’s Hurt who finally goes over and instructs the mechanic to unlatch the trunk, and there is the missing officer, Craig O’Neil, bound and gagged in his own trunk. In the water, the hands have turned puffy and blue. The head leans back at an unnatural angle. Elise Diaz is in the swamp water up to her ankles in rain boots. Cameras go off. Radios sound.

  “Craig O’Neil,” Hurt says.

  “The cop,” Kateri says. “He never made it inside.”

  “Not from the looks of it.”

  “Rookie?” Kateri asks.

  “Twenty-two,” Hurt says.

  Elise sloshes her way out of the cold marsh and approaches the detectives. “I estimate time of death between seven and nine yesterday morning,” she says. “I’ll give you my decision on a cause,” she adds.

  Hurt looks at the sky, squinting. “Everything’s gone,” he tells Kateri. “Badge, cuffs, firearm.”

  “So we’ve got an armed and dangerous,” Kateri says. “Willing to kill a cop. With a five-year-old girl.”

  “That’s what it looks like,” Hurt says.

  Diaz pats Hurt on the arm. “Meet me at the morgue?” she says, an eyebrow arched.

  “I wish that didn’t sound like a standing date,” Hurt says.

  Kateri watches as Elise peels off her gloves and hands them to a young male assistant. The stretcher comes away from the water and is loaded into the back of the ambulance. Radios are loud with messages and static.

  “We’re going to have to go public,” Hurt says. “And there’s bound to be a frenzy.”

  Kateri rubs her face. All she did was wash and dress, wind her hair into a ponytail, and rush out. She remembers that she’s still tired.

  “Ambushed rook
ie cop,” Kateri says.

  “I can do the press conference if you want,” Hurt says.

  “Why would you? Why wouldn’t I?”

  He looks off behind her. “Look,” he says. “Anything that goes wrong with the case … anyone not caught or who, God forbid, strikes again … they’ll come right back to you mishandling it, if yours is the face they associate with it.”

  “They won’t do that to you?” Kateri asks. She feels her jaw tighten up into her ears and the beginnings of a headache.

  “Come on, Fisher,” he says.

  “Come on what? Because I’m a woman? Elise Diaz is a woman.”

  “She’s sixty,” Hurt says. “You’re …”

  “I’m thirty-two, Hurt. I’ve been in the force for twelve years.”

  “You look young to people,” he says. “And …”

  “What?” Kateri asks.

  “Attractive,” Hurt says, deadpan.

  Kateri laughs outright.

  “I’m not saying it’s right,” Hurt says. “I’m just telling you how it is. If we put you on TV associated with this case, it’s going to put you in an uncomfortable spotlight, and if people go digging …” he says.

  “Digging?” she asks.

  “Into your past,” he says.

  She lets her hands fall to her sides and stands with her shoulders square, looking him in the eye. “I didn’t realize anyone was already digging,” she says.

  “We were all curious.”

  She turns around to walk back to her own car. “Then ask me,” she calls out over her shoulder. “Fucking ask me.” She has to try not to slam the door.

  * * *

  On her way back into Spring Falls, she finally catches sight of Shannon Jenkins. It startles her and she pulls across two lanes of traffic into the Stewart’s parking lot.

  He wasn't at work when Junior Savage said he should have been. The multiple times she tried his phone, it appeared to be off, with no voice mail or text messages received.

  It’s the morning rush at Stewart’s, and she’s in danger of losing him. His height, his slight build, the way he shrinks his shoulders make him easy to miss. He ducks through the crowd and into the store, and he disappears for a minute.