“What?” Nana pressed at his grip on the front of her shirt. “What are you talking about? You’re going to ruin my shirt.”
“Didn’t you hear me? Forget the fucking shirt!” The words were out and he hated them, but he was also satisfied to see her eyes jump from her shirt to him. He finally had her attention. Nana blinked and inhaled.
“Okay, now that your head’s out of the clouds, let’s get together on this. You told me about some guy on your paper route who drove a green Mercedes. What’s his name? Which house does he live in?”
“Can’t remember his name. I’m sorry, Daddy.” Nana bit her lower lip. “It’s the house beside the one with the big flag, though. It’s got a wall. On Briar. Top of the hill.”
“Okay.” Frank let go of the shirt.
Nana didn’t move. “Are you done being mad?”
“Honey, I wasn’t mad.” And when she said nothing: “Okay, I was. A little. But not at you.”
She wouldn’t look at him, just kept rubbing her goddam fingers together. He loved her, she was the most important thing in his life, but sometimes it was hard to believe she had all four wheels on the road.
“Thank you.” Some of the heat was draining from his face, some of the sweat cooling on his skin. “Thank you, Brighteyes.”
“Sure,” said Nana. The girl retreated a small step, the sound of her sneaker sole against the pavement impossibly loud in Frank’s ear.
Frank straightened up in his seat. “One more thing. Do me a favor and stay out of the driveway. For the rest of the morning, anyway, till I can sort something out. There’s a man driving around crazy. Draw inside with your paper, all right?”
She was biting at her lower lip. “All right, Daddy.”
“You’re not going to cry, are you?”
“No, Daddy.”
“All right. That’s my girl. I’ll see you next weekend, okay?”
He realized his lips were incredibly dry. He asked himself what else he was supposed to have done, and a voice inside him replied, “Well, gee, what else could you have done? Maybe you could have, I don’t know, this will probably sound totally wild, Frank, but hey, maybe you could have not freaked the fuck out?” The voice was like an amused version of Frank’s own voice, the voice of a man who was kicked back in a lawn chair and wearing sunglasses and maybe sipping on an iced tea.
“Okay.” The nod she gave him was robotic.
Behind her, on the pavement, she had drawn an elaborate tree, its canopy spreading up one side of the driveway, its gnarled trunk cutting across. Moss hung from the branches and flowers bearded the base. Roots trailed down to the outline of an underground lake.
“I like what you got there,” he said and smiled.
“Thank you, Daddy,” Nana said.
“I just don’t want you to get hurt.” The smile on his face felt like it was nailed on.
His daughter sniffed and gave him another robotic nod. He knew she was sucking back tears.
“Hey, Nana . . .” He started, but the words he wanted dispersed as the interior voice piped up again, telling him she’d had enough. To just leave it the hell alone.
“Bye, Daddy.”
She reached out and pushed his truck door gently shut. Spun and jogged up the driveway, scattering her chalks, striding across her tree, smudging the greens and blacks of the treetop. Head down. Shoulders shaking.
Kids, he told himself, can’t always appreciate when you’re trying to do the right thing.
4
There were three overnight filings on Clint’s desk.
The first was predictable, but concerning: one of the officers on staff the previous night speculated that Angel Fitzroy seemed to be ramping up to something. At lights-out Angel had attempted to engage the officer over an issue of semantics. The authorities at Dooling were all strictly to be referred to as “Officer.” Synonyms such as “guard,” or “screw,” let alone—obviously!—slurs like “asshole” or “motherfucker,” were unacceptable. Angel had asked Officer Wettermore if he understood English. Of course they were guards, Angel said. They could be officers, too, that was fine, but they couldn’t not be guards, because they guarded. Weren’t they guarding the prisoners? If you baked a cake, weren’t you a baker? If you dug a hole, weren’t you a digger?
Warned the inmate that she had arrived at the end of reasonable discussion and could expect consequences if she didn’t lock it down immediately, Wettermore wrote. Inmate relented and entered her cell, but further asked, How could we expect prisoners to follow the rules when the words of the rules did not make any sense? Inmate’s tone was threatening.
Angel Fitzroy was one of the few women in the prison whom Clint regarded as genuinely dangerous. Based on his interactions with her, he believed she might be a sociopath. He had never glimpsed any empathy in her, and her record inside was fat with infractions: drugs, fighting, threatening behavior.
“How do you suppose you’d have felt if the man you attacked had died from his injuries, Angel?” he had asked her during a group session.
“Aw,” Angel had said, sunken down in the chair, her eyes roaming his office walls. “I’d have felt, oh, pretty bad—I guess.” Then, she’d smacked her lips, gaze fastening on the Hockney print. “Looka that picture, girls. Wouldn’t you like to visit where it is?”
While her assault conviction was bad enough—a man in a truck stop had said something to Angel that she hadn’t liked and she’d broken his nose with a ketchup bottle—there were indications that she’d gotten away with much worse.
A detective from Charleston had driven to Dooling to solicit Clint’s help with a case relating to Fitzroy. What the detective wanted was information concerning the death of a former landlord of Angel’s. This had happened a couple of years before her current incarceration. Angel had been the only suspect, but there was nothing except vicinity to tie her to the crime, and no apparent motive. The thing was (as Clint himself knew), Angel had a history of not needing much of a motive. Twenty cents off in her change could be enough to blow her up. The Charleston detective had been nearly gleeful in his description of the landlord’s corpse: “Looked like the old boy just fell down the stairs, got his neck broke. But the coroner said someone had been to work on his package premortem. Balls was—I forget how the coroner put it, exactly, if he said fractured or whatever. But, layman’s terms, he said, ‘They were basically squished.’?”
Clint wasn’t in the business of flipping on his patients and told the detective so, but he had mentioned the inquiry to Angel later.
With an expression of glassy wonderment she responded, “Balls can fracture?”
Now he made a note to himself to drop in on Angel that day, take a seismology reading.