Eve truly was appalled by herself, but only for three or four ticks of the wall clock. “I never asked you to lie,” Eve said.
Manuel thinned his lips. “Though I think you might be a little grateful. You’ve really given me quite a burden to shoulder, you know.”
“I’ve given you a burden, have I?”
Manuel waved a blank sheet of paper, as if to show he was already so tired of this nonsense.
“So arrest me now, if that’s what you want,” Eve said. “But maybe first you could do me the favor of explaining why it is then that you have chosen now, of all times, to have this particular conversation.”
Manuel loosened his hand, puffed his cheeks, blew. “Maybe I’m here,” Manuel said, “because when this particular tape landed on my desk, I got to thinking that after all this covering I’ve done for you, I’m starting to feel like I just don’t want to do it anymore. Not when it turns out you weren’t straight with me from the get-go.”
“Meaning what exactly?”
Manuel held his stubble-white chin with three fingers, the posture of a man in distant theoretic discourse with himself. “Eve,” Manuel said, “why did you lie to me?”
“Excuse me?” A wasp alighted on the table, then flew across the kitchen and hurled itself futilely against a window. “And what was it that I supposedly lied to you about?”
“Charlie told me something interesting the other day. Says that Oliver wrote a bunch of love poems for that Sterling girl.”
“Charlie told you that?” Eve managed to say these words as a question, pressing her fingertips to the desk to keep the shriek of betrayal in her chest. What did Charlie have—some list of people he might visit to inflict maximum agony upon her? “And so what? So what if Oliver wrote a few moony love poems years and years ago? What difference could that fact have possibly made? For God’s sake, Manuel.”
“Sure,” Manuel said. “Maybe you’re right, maybe it couldn’t make any difference now. But if it didn’t matter at all, why not tell me about it? Doesn’t that seem strange?” Manuel renewed his grasp on his face, covering his mouth for a long moment, looking like the speak-no-evil monkey. “I’ll tell you what,” he added. “For years, I’ve been saying it to myself, that if I couldn’t ever offer you any real answers, the least I could do, after all y’all have been through, was to help you where I could. But maybe I’ve let that guilt of mine make me a little blind. Maybe I should have pressed you a little harder on this particular topic, all that time ago. Look. Maybe there’s no explaining Hector, or maybe all those folks are right, maybe he really was just trying to make some sort of point. But I still can’t believe it. I can’t believe there is simply no reason why a boy would just suddenly turn into a monster without warning.”
“And so,” Eve spoke levelly, at the table, “what you believe is that some love poems my son wrote a decade ago are somehow going to explain away three dead children?”
“My question, if you recollect,” Manuel said, “is why Oliver was at that classroom that night. And also why Hector let Rebekkah just walk away. That maybe Hector was jealous of what Oliver and Rebekkah—”
“Oliver and Rebekkah! Oliver and Rebekkah, you keep saying, like they were some couple. They weren’t. They weren’t! Wouldn’t I have known about that?”
“Apparently,” Manuel said, “there’s no telling what you might know.”
Eve wouldn’t reply; she wouldn’t even shake her head.
“You know that we have a term for lying to an officer don’t you?” Manuel said. “It’s called obstruction of justice.”
“So you should really do it, then. You should arrest me! And while you’re at it, you should probably arrest Jed, too. Or was it apparently only up to me to describe every little detail of how Oliver used to spend his time?”
Manuel pushed the end of his pen against his finger, twirled it as he spoke. “It’s been almost ten years now, Eve, and I’ve followed more dead ends than I care to admit, heard so much craziness. A good number of people dear to me have left town, treated like criminals because their folks came from the other side of the river. But still I can’t bring myself to quit this place. I just need to know how it happened. Whatever there is to know. Anything. I need to know. Don’t you?”
Eve inhaled deeply. The image before her, that security photo of a rail-thin middle-aged lady dropping a computer into her bag, was like a vivid medical exhibit on the pathology of her own secret-keeping, so why not just tell Manuel at last? Between the moment Eve gathered her next thought and actually, finally spoke the oft-imagined admission out loud, there was just a single free-fall second of terror. “He tried to talk to me about her once,” Eve heard herself say.
“Oliver? He tried to talk with you about Rebekkah?”
Eve tipped her head slowly, up and down. “He tried to tell me something about her once, how he was worried about her, but I never let him explain it to me.”
Manuel tilted back in the kitchen chair, its vinyl moaning. “I see,” he said.
“But do you?” Eve looked up at Manuel now, as she had looked pleadingly at many security guys before him. “Do you see what it would be like, to spend ten years wondering what might have happened if only you’d listened one night? Do you see why I couldn’t, just could not, bear to talk about something like that?”
Manuel didn’t answer. He only studied her, as if each word, the twitch in her nose, the way she felt for her bun of hair, might have suggested another conversation entirely.
“He’s speaking!” Eve blurted. “Did you know that? If you have so many questions, you can just ask Oliver yourself.”
“Speaking?”
Eve did her best to calm herself and explain again about the thenar muscles, the alphabet. The latest miracle, which just now sounded, in Eve’s trembling voice, like some dubious lie she was inventing on the spot. Manuel certainly squinted at her that way, as if she was only telling more stories of the sort he’d learned better than to believe. “Well.” Manuel drew his mouth into a sideways pucker. “That is interesting.”
“Interesting?” Eve asked. “It’s more than interesting. It’s the truth. It’s the wonderful truth.”
“But didn’t it occur to you,” Manuel said, “that if this wonderful thing has suddenly happened, then that might also be a fact I’d be interested in knowing?”
“I didn’t think it was any of your business. I mean, what do you have in mind now? You’re going to carry on some kind of interrogation with a boy who has to spend five minutes to type out a single word?” Eve was choking on her tears.
“I really am sorry for you,” Manuel said. “I am.” And the horrible part was how truly sorry he really did look, the patronizing expression of a man speaking to an insane person. He reached across the table again, but this time she jerked her hands away. “I’ll tell you what,” he added. “How about I just go to Crockett State in the morning to see for myself?”
“See for yourself what?”