I don’t believe you anymore. I think you’re making this all up.
The waffles with raspberry syrup the innkeeper prepared were actually heavenly. I thought of telling her so, in just that way, but decided against any sort of hijinks. She was clearly a decent person, and she might think that I was trying to tease her about religion. Which would have been unkind. Maybe it was my mood, however, but the eldritch nature of the whole place was enhanced by portraits of children, the same boy and girl, that hung all over the dining room walls, old-fashioned colorized photos.
“My kids,” she said affably.
“Grown up now?”
“Oh, no,” the woman replied. But there were no sounds of children, nor any bookbags or boots scattered near the door. The place was prim and clean as a vault.
By the time I’d eaten and changed clothes, it was time for me to see Pete Sunday. I told Sherri I’d be back later on and that I probably would stay the second night—a possibility I’d left open. I was still exhausted.
The detective and I had arranged to meet at a coffee shop on Pottawatomi Street, where I fortified myself with a double-shot latte. He walked in, wearing a slim-fitting blazer in a Prince of Wales check over charcoal trousers and a striped shirt. We shook hands. He looked unchanged. After he ordered his own coffee, he asked me to follow him to the public safety building, just a few blocks away. When we got there, he settled me comfortably in his office.
“Why do you work here?” I asked him.
“Why does anybody work anywhere?”
“You dress like you’d work in a big city.”
“Ah,” Sunday said, spinning his desk chair and sitting down to face me. “People tell me that all the time.” He went on to say that he’d recently applied for a transfer, to Dane County, and was starting to be afraid he’d actually get it. “I know that’s hardly a big city. I want the challenge but not the change. I’d miss it here. I’d miss the quiet and the lakes and the trees and my mom and dad and all my brothers. Speaking of that, I heard from one of them that you had a little scare last night. Big whistle.”
“That was your brother? You guys go all in for the fraternity of police stuff, huh?”
“No, that was my actual brother, Judson. Jud and Ross are both county sheriff’s deputies, Jud here, Ross in Marathon County. My other brother lives in town here, too. He’s a librarian at the university.”
“What do your kids think about moving away from these north woods?”
“No children yet,” he said. “No wife yet. Just small crimes and good suits.”
“Not all small crimes.”
“Mostly. Not all.” As if apropos, he pointed to the banker’s box on the floor beside him.
“I don’t want you to get the wrong impression about our local cordiality. All the reports from Belinda McCormack’s death are in that box. I copied them for you and I won’t even make you pay the copy costs.”
To my next question, he answered that he had never heard anyone mention the name Esme. He showed me a list that Jill McCormack had compiled of Belinda’s close friends at the time of her death: Caroline, Celeste, Laura, Kilty and Anastasia. While he agreed that this was a notorious case, it was Pete’s opinion that if Belinda had not been a beautiful blonde girl on campus, whose mother had the wit and determination to focus on dating abuse as an issue, there would be no echoes. Women in America died every day at the hands of the men they loved. They ran the gamut, from poor unemployed mothers, flight attendants to Broadway actors, advertising executives. They answered the phone at the water utility or taught second grade. When I told him that many of those very women had reached out to Jill’s organization, he shrugged and said he hoped awareness would make a difference because many of the women whose lovers hit them felt oddly guilty, as if they deserved it. Your own side of that story, he said, might not be so popular; but there were plenty of people on the wrong side of the equation in a case of violent death—yet deserving of a certain kind of empathy too. There was no such thing as too much understanding.
I told him about the strange incidents at our house, not just the demonstrations (he already knew about those) but about the unexplained car fire and how someone came in when we weren’t home and drew black dots over the eyes on our photographs.
“Ruined them forever...” he said, genuinely downcast.
“No, it was just on the glass. But whoever it was used some kind of oil-based marker, so it was hell to get it off.”
I told him about the slender young man in the hoodie and the aviator glasses, his appearances on my street, on my campus, and now here. “It’s probably one of the most frustrating things about something like this that yes, it’s wrong and scary and creepy, but it’s not a crime, not until there’s some kind of threat.”
“And then I bet it’s too late most of the time.”
“Once in a while it’s too late, but not most of the time. Unless somebody is really nuts, a person will usually obey a restraining order. But it’s the ones who don’t obey it that worry you. Either they know the system, and they don’t care about it, or they don’t care about anything.”
Why I didn’t tell him more about Esme-or-Emily, right then, about her texts and phone calls, and what they seemed to entail, I’m not sure. I hadn’t even told Julie everything about Esme. Until I had a fuller picture, it somehow seemed to be a risk.
I assured Pete Sunday that I didn’t need help carrying the box to my car, but he carried it anyway. We shook hands and parted. I stowed the box in my trunk, thinking it would fit right there next to my nonexistent assault weapon. Lethargic now, as if all the docked hopes for what I might learn and what I might do with it were brewed into some kind of sedative, all I wanted to do was to crawl beneath my scenes-of-the-holy-land quilt at the inn and sleep the rest of the time before checking out and heading home early in the morning. Actually, I reprimanded myself. I would sleep for an hour and then read these reports, so I could call Pete Sunday on my way home if I had any more questions. Why it seemed easier to call him from my car than from my kitchen at home, again, I have no idea. I drove back to the inn, fell on the bed, and slept until the afternoon sun and my lunchless stomach teased me awake.
I’d passed a diner on the way to the inn. Maybe they had chili.
The diner was one of those pods that resembled an overgrown Airstream trailer. I ate my chili quietly. It wasn’t half bad. When I was finished, I came out into a hushed street.
Did anyone really go to school here?