Slowly he raised his arms and turned around. His skin was sallow and sick. He looked like he hadn’t slept since Friday night.
“She wouldn’t let me end it. She kept pushing and pushing.” The next words were hardly more than a mumble, but they tore into the room like a gunshot.
“She’d still be alive if she would’ve just let me go.”
PETER / Thursday, April 17, 2008
THE SHERIFF wouldn’t stop pointing the gun at me. He ordered me to face the wall and put my hands behind my back, just as the younger officer came in and put me in handcuffs. I’d never been in handcuffs before. They were cold.
“Aren’t you supposed to read me my rights?”
“I’m figuring the best way to get you back to the station without getting your head blown off by any of those fine folks out there.”
I hadn’t thought of that. For two days I’d imagined all the possible scenarios after the DNA test came back. They could have come for me at school or at home. I knew they wouldn’t let me drive in on my own, despite the obvious fact that I hadn’t skipped town or disappeared from my life. I went to school yesterday, went through the motions of teaching as the entire staff and half the students watched me like I was the worst kind of predator. I sat across from Mary at the dinner table last night while Elsa, oblivious, rambled on about family names and all the possible horrors we might inflict upon our unborn child. Marcy. Etheline. Albus. I stared at the plate and listened for gravel crunching in the driveway, waiting for the swing of headlights through the living room windows. I could even see Sheriff Goodman pulling me aside after the funeral and shoving me in the back of his squad car while news cameras ate up the moment in greedy clicks, but it hadn’t occurred to me that I might be shot by one of Hattie’s mourners. I don’t know why not. It made perfect sense. Winifred Erickson had killed her husband after she got tired of him and never served a day in prison. Of course they’d shoot me.
They decided to take me out the exit behind the cafeteria next to the dumpsters. A high fence gated off the area, trapping the stench of sour milk and mold. The deputy left to pull his cruiser around, leaving me alone with the sheriff. Even with the handcuffs, the smells, and the fury leaking out of the old man’s eyes, it was still better than sitting in that gymnasium staring at the box that held Hattie’s dead body. The details had spread like wildfire through the school on Monday morning: the stab through her heart, the slashes destroying her face, her body half-submerged in the lake. It was impossible to sit quietly in that room with her body, imagining her terror and her pain. I’d stumbled out of the gym before I broke down completely.
“I didn’t kill her.” As the words came out, I wondered why I hadn’t said them before.
He looked at me like I was the thing rotting in the dumpster. Then he read me my rights.
The deputy pulled up and they put me in the back of the squad car.
“Book him and let him sweat.” The sheriff slammed the door. “I’ll be along as soon as we get the procession back from the cemetery.”
The deputy nodded and pulled out of the alley slowly, like he’d been checking security around the building. Three media vans were parked on the street with cameramen and reporters milling in front of them.
As we pulled out of the parking lot, the reporters spotted me and suddenly cameras flashed and bodies swarmed closer to the car. I sat woodenly, indifferent to what any of this would mean for my life.
“Hmm, I guess the secret’s out. Smile pretty.” He eased out into the street.
“I didn’t kill Hattie.”
“Good one. Next you’re going to tell me you don’t fuck your underage students, either.”
She wasn’t underage—I bit back the impulse before I could say it. He laughed low and mean at my silence as we cruised the few blocks down Main Street.
“Not going to bother denying that one, are you? Now shut up and don’t give me any excuses.”
At the station he hauled me through fingerprinting and photos and shoved me in the first of three empty cells in the back room. Then everything was quiet.
There were actually bars on the cells. It seemed so clichéd. I paced and, without even trying, the list of names started forming—William Sydney Porter, Ken Kesey, Paul Verlaine, every Russian writer ever—and the discussion questions rose to frame them. How did time spent in prison inform their work? Compare and contrast the societal pressures against Oscar Wilde versus Solzhenitsyn. I could even see the handout I would type up and distribute to the students along the front row, igniting that flush of anticipation in Hattie’s complexion. She would read every excerpt by the next class and then she’d insist—
Hysterical laughter dropped me to the cot and turned into a half-bellow. I covered my face and strangled the sound so the deputy wouldn’t come back and threaten to beat the shit out of me for something I hadn’t done.