The sergeant wants to go with me, but I talk him out of it and go by myself. We don’t want to frighten the poor woman into silence, after all. I made the mistake of telling Mrs. Dennett that this was on my schedule for today. She didn’t ask to go, but she did hint. I laid a cautious hand on her arm and promised, “You’ll be the first one I call.”
It takes about two hours. Only fifty some miles, but for the mass amounts of semis along I-90, I lollygag around at about thirty miles per hour. I make the mistake of picking up coffee at a drive-through, and have to nearly piss my pants by the time I arrive. I run into a gas station in Gary, grateful for the arsenal hiding beneath my clothes.
Kathryn Thatcher lives in a pale blue ranch. The home is dated, straight out of the ’50s. The lawn is overrun, the shrubbery overgrown. Potted plants lie dead.
I knock on the screen door and wait on a concrete stoop that desperately needs repair. The day is dreary, a typical November day in the midwest. It’s just blah, the forty degrees feeling cold, though I know in a month or two, we’ll pray for a forty-degree day. When there’s no answer, I open the screen door and knock on the wood door, beside a wreath that hangs from a rusting nail. The door is open. It gives with the slightest touch of my hand. Damn it, I think to myself. Maybe I should have brought the sergeant. I reach for my gun, tiptoe in and call, “Mrs. Thatcher.”
I walk into the front room, so outdated I have to remind myself I’m not in the home of my grandmother: shag carpeting, wood paneling on the walls, peeling wallpaper and the furniture—everything mismatching, torn taupe leather beside flowered upholstery.
The dull sound of off-tune humming from the kitchen puts me at ease. I slide the gun back into its harness so I don’t scare the shit out of the lady. And then my eyes come to a standstill on the image of Colin Thatcher, and what I presume to be Kathryn, dressed to the nines, in a small frame atop a 27-inch TV. The TV is on and muted, a soap opera filling the screen.
“Mrs. Thatcher,” I call again but there is no response. I follow the humming to the kitchen and knock on the frame of the open doorway, only after watching for a moment as her trembling fingers try once, twice, three times to peel back the plastic covering from a TV dinner. The woman herself looks old enough to be the grandmother of Colin Thatcher and I wonder if we’ve made a mistake. She wears a robe and fuzzy slippers on her feet; her legs are bare and I’m trying not to believe that there’s nothing on beneath the robe.
“Ma’am,” I say, my feet crossing onto the vinyl floor. This time when she turns, nearly jumping out of her skin at the sound of my voice and the presence of a complete stranger in her home, I hold out my badge to reassure her she’s not about to be killed.
“Good Lord,” she stutters, a shaky hand finding its way to her heart. “Colin?”
“No, ma’am,” I say, stepping closer. “If I may,” I say, reaching across her fragile frame to pull the plastic from the TV dinner. I drop the moist wrapper into an overflowing wastebasket beside the back door. It’s a child’s microwave dinner with chicken nuggets and corn and a brownie.
I hold out a hand to steady Mrs. Thatcher. To my surprise, she accepts. There’s very little stability whether walking or standing still. She moves with painstaking movements, her face void of expression. She stands stooped, her feet shuffling before her; I’m certain at any moment she might fall. Saliva drips from her mouth.
“My name is Detective Gabe Hoffman. I’m a policeman with the—”
“Colin?” she asks again. This time she begs.
“Mrs. Thatcher,” I say, “ma’am, please sit.” I help her to a nearby breakfast nook, where she sits down. I carry the TV dinner to her and fish a fork out of a drawer, but her hand shakes so persistently she can’t get the food to her mouth. She gropes the nugget with a bare hand.
The woman looks old enough to be seventy, but if she’s Colin Thatcher’s mother, chances are she’s only fifty or so. Her hair is gray, though in the not-so-outdated photo in the front room, it’s a chestnut-brown. She appears to have dropped a dress size or two as her robe hangs around her like a garment bag and the flesh I can see is all sticks and bones. There’s a display of medicine bottles across the countertop, and rotten fruit in a basket. And of course there are the bumps and bruises scattered here and there across Mrs. Thatcher’s skin, reminders, I’m assuming, of recent falls.
I know there’s a name for this. It’s on the tip of my tongue.
“Have you seen Colin?” I ask.
She says that she hasn’t. I ask her when she last saw him. She doesn’t know.
“How often do you see Colin?” I ask.
“Every week. He mows the lawn.”
I peer out the kitchen window at a yard covered in shriveled leaves.