“Maybe I’ll talk to him. Try to pour a little oil on troubled waters.”
“You’re a fountain of wise sayings this evening, counselor.”
Samuels picked up his can of beer, then put it back with a small grimace. He saw Jeannie Anderson at the kitchen window, looking out at them. Just standing there, her face unreadable. “My mother used to subscribe to Fate.”
“Me too,” Ralph said moodily, “but after what happened to Terry, I’m not so sure. That Peterson kid came right out of nowhere. Nowhere.”
Samuels smiled a little. “I’m not talking about predestination, just a little digest-sized magazine full of stories about ghosts and crop circles and UFOs and God knows what else. Mom used to read me some of them when I was a kid. There was one in particular that fascinated me. ‘Footsteps in the Sand,’ it was called. It was about a newly married couple that went on their honeymoon in the Mojave Desert. Camping, you know. Well, one night they pitched their little tent in a grove of cottonwoods, and when the young bride woke up the next morning, her husband was gone. She walked out of the grove to where the sand started, and saw his tracks. She called to him, but there was no answer.”
Ralph made a horror-movie sound: Ooooo-oooo.
“She followed the tracks over the first dune, then over the second. The tracks kept getting fresher. She followed them over the third . . .”
“And the fourth, and the fifth!” Ralph said in an awed voice. “And she’s still walking to this day! Bill, I hate to cut your campfire story short, but I think I’m going to eat a piece of pie, take a shower, and go to bed.”
“No, listen to me. The third dune was as far as she got. His tracks went halfway down the far side, then stopped. Just stopped, with nothing but acres of sand all around. She never saw him again.”
“And you believe that?”
“No, I’m sure it’s bullshit, but belief isn’t the point. It’s a metaphor.” Samuels tried to soothe the cowlick down. The cowlick refused. “We followed Terry’s tracks, because that’s our job. Our duty, if you like that word better. We followed them until they stopped on Monday morning. Is there a mystery? Yes. Will there always be unanswered questions? Unless some new and amazing piece of information drops into our laps, there will be. Sometimes that happens. It’s why people continue to wonder what happened to Jimmy Hoffa. It’s why people keep trying to figure out what happened to the crew of the Mary Celeste. It’s why people argue about whether or not Oswald acted alone when he shot JFK. Sometimes the tracks just stop, and we have to live with that.”
“One big difference,” Ralph said. “The woman in your story about the footsteps could believe her husband was still alive somewhere. She could go on believing that until she was an old woman instead of a young bride. But when Marcy got to the end of her husband’s tracks, Terry was right there, dead on the sidewalk. She’s burying him tomorrow, according to the obituary in today’s paper. I imagine it’ll just be her and her girls. Along with fifty news vultures outside the fence, that is, yelling questions and snapping pictures.”
Samuels sighed. “Enough. I’m going home. I told you about the kid—Merlin Cassidy’s his name, by the way—and I can see you don’t want to listen to anything else.”
“No, wait, sit back down a minute,” Ralph said. “You told me one, now I’m going to tell you one. Not out of a psychic magazine, though. This is personal experience. Every word true.”
Samuels lowered himself back to the bench.
“When I was a kid,” Ralph said, “ten or eleven—around Frank Peterson’s age—my mother sometimes used to bring home cantaloupes from the farmers’ market, if they were in season. Back then I loved cantaloupe. They’ve got this sweet, dense flavor watermelon can’t get close to. So one day she brought home three or four in a net bag, and I asked her if I could have a piece. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Just remember to scrape the seeds into the sink.’ She didn’t really have to tell me that, because I’d opened up my share of cantaloupes by then. You with me so far?”
“Uh-huh. I suppose you cut yourself, right?”
“No, but my mother thought I did, because I let out a screech they probably heard next door. She came on the run, and I just pointed at the cantaloupe, laying there on the counter, split in two. It was full of maggots and flies. I mean those bugs were squirming all over each other. My mother got the Raid and sprayed the ones on the counter. Then she got a dish towel, wrapped the pieces in it, and threw them in the swill bucket out back. Since that day I can’t bear to look at a slice of cantaloupe, let alone eat one. That’s my Terry Maitland metaphor, Bill. The cantaloupe looked fine. It wasn’t spongy. The skin was whole. There was no way those bugs could have gotten inside, but somehow they did.”
“Fuck your cantaloupe,” Samuels said, “and fuck your metaphor. I’m going home. Think before you quit the job, Ralph, okay? Your wife said I was getting out before Johnny Q. Public fired me, and she’s probably right, but you don’t have to face the voters. Just three retired cops that are this city’s excuse for Internal Affairs, and a shrink collecting some municipal shekels to supplement a private practice on life support. And there’s something else. If you quit, people will be even more sure that we screwed this thing up.”
Ralph stared at him, then began laughing. It was hearty, a series of guffaws that came all the way up from the belly. “But we did! Don’t you know that yet, Bill? We did. Royally. We bought a cantaloupe because it looked like a good cantaloupe, but when we cut it open in front of the whole town, it was full of maggots. No way for them to get in, but there they were.”
Samuels trudged toward the kitchen door. He opened the screen, then whirled around, his cowlick springing jauntily back and forth. He pointed at the hackberry tree. “That was a sparrow, goddammit!”
3
Shortly after midnight (around the time the last remaining member of the Peterson family was learning how to make a hangman’s noose, courtesy of Wikipedia), Marcy Maitland awoke to the sound of screams from her elder daughter’s bedroom. It was Grace at first—a mother always knows—but then Sarah joined her, creating a terrible two-part harmony. It was the girls’ first night out of the bedroom Marcy had shared with Terry, but of course the kids were still bunking together, and she thought they might do that for some time to come. Which was fine.
What wasn’t fine were those screams.
Marcy didn’t remember running down the hall to Sarah’s bedroom. All she remembered was getting out of bed and then standing inside the open door of Sarah’s room and beholding her daughters, sitting bolt upright in bed and clutching each other in the light of the full July moon that came flooding through the window.
“What?” Marcy asked, looking around for an intruder. At first she thought he (surely it was a he) was crouched in the corner, but that was only a pile of cast-off jumpers, tee-shirts, and sneakers.
“It was her!” Sarah cried. “It was G! She said there was a man! God, Mom, she scared me so bad!”
Marcy sat on the bed and pried her younger daughter from Sarah’s arms and took Grace in her own. She was still looking around. Was he in the closet? He might be, the accordion doors were closed. He could have done that when he heard her coming. Or under the bed? Every childhood fear flooded back while she waited for a hand to close around her ankle. In the other would be a knife.
“Grace? Gracie? Who did you see? Where was he?”
Grace was crying too hard to answer, but she pointed at the window.