“Why are you telling me this now?” Tackrey wanted to know. “Why now, and not when we first found the bones?”
Birchie’s blue eyes went bright, but no tears fell, and her voice did not shake as she said, “I didn’t want Wattie to know. I never wanted her to know that my father was her father, too.” This was gospel. She held her sister’s hand, and I could see how the skin of Wattie’s fingers had gone gray and ashy in the last hard days. Her eyes were red from nights spent weeping. She looked like a woman whose world had been turned. It had, though I suspected that Wattie had always known some of it. She knew why Birchie picked that hammer up, but she’d never done the long math. She hadn’t wanted to be Birchie’s sister, not this way.
“But she knows now?” Tackrey asked. “How?”
“The Lewy bodies told her,” Birchie said, regretful. “I say things I don’t mean to say. I do things I don’t mean to do. Awful things. Just ask Frank here.” I saw two men on Tackrey’s side of the table exchange a knowing glance. They knew about the Fish Fry, and that meant they had Birchville ties. Now that I was looking, I could see that the left one was some kind of Partridge, with his ginger hair and bubble hips. So Birchie’s tale would beat us home. Birchie was still talking, though. “Sometimes I see my father. He comes to make me sorry when the Lewy bodies let him. I see rabbits, you know, too. You have six of them lined up right behind you.”
“So you told Mrs. Price?” Tackrey said.
“Not exactly,” Birchie said, and smiled beatifically. “I switched our DNA out. Hers for mine.”
All at once, my face felt burny and my lips felt as thin as Wattie’s looked. My eyes went down, too, and I felt my mouth opening. How many shared sins could Birchie be allowed to eat alone in one confession? Birchie reached over and took my hand in her free one, squeezing it hard. So hard the bones hurt, and my mouth snapped shut. “Wattie gave a sample first, to show me how to do it.”
Tackrey, startled, said, “How on earth . . . ?”
Birchie made a tutting noise. “My granddaughter set Wattie’s stick down near me, and I swapped it right out when Cody wasn’t looking. He’s a terrible policeman, I will have you know. You really should have sent me Willard here,” Birchie lectured. She turned to Willard. “You never would have let me get away with that, now, would you?”
Chief Dalton, looking as horrified as I felt, but for his own reasons, choked out two words: “Lord no!”
“But why?” Tackrey asked, appalled. “It makes no sense!”
“Lewy bodies often don’t,” Birchie told her, shaking her head.
“Why would you?” Tackrey asked, talking over her. She was filled up with a righteous fury, but behind that her politician’s wheels were turning. She’d insisted on Cody. He’d been her man, and he had screwed this up. Well, that much was true—he had. “Why swap the DNA if you didn’t want Mrs. Price to know?”
“The rabbits told me it was a good idea. Though now, of course, I see the problem,” Birchie said. She touched her hat and let her voice go petulant. “I also don’t know why they should all be on your side of the table. Lined up against me. They are my rabbits, after all.”
I almost spoke, but just then Digby tapped and stretched, keeping his own small council. I put my hands over him, and I decided to keep mine. I didn’t see how letting him be born in prison would help anyone. Birchie, demure in her pink hat, was more in control than she had been in weeks; I didn’t think there was a single rabbit in the room as she confessed to the worst things every human in the room had ever done.
That was where Frank stopped it. “I think my client has almost reached her limit,” he said. “She isn’t a well woman.”
Tackrey was savvy enough to reach over and turn the camera off before she said, “No kidding.”
We left the building and walked to our cars.
It wasn’t until Frank was getting into his that he told me in low tones, “That may well be the end of it.”
If he meant legal proceedings, I thought he was right. It would be an ugly scandal if the swap got out and the blame could land on Tackrey. Birchie’s story absolved Wattie, and no one was left alive to dispute her version. Legally, I thought we might be in the clear. But if Frank thought it was over, well, that was na?ve. There had been a Partridge in the room, and Tackrey, whose family had always been in tight with the Macks, would have a bellyful to say to that family now.
The air was electric with telephone lines lighting up in crisscross patterns all over the county. The three of us got into my replaced rental car, and we followed Birchie’s story home.
25
It begins with Digby. Digby in the Second South.
Months before my son was born, I’d hoped Digby into being with a pencil. When I’d set him by Violet in the ruined town square, I’d released the name into my art. He belonged there, an avatar of the real boy I couldn’t wait to meet. He started the story in ways that even Violet couldn’t.
Digby doesn’t realize he’s in danger in the opening panel. He leaps through the scant grass on the edge of the park, running along the back side of the square. A few of the shops are visible to his left, and behind him the roof of the brick church rises up into the blackened sky. The steeple is broken, pointing its jagged finger at a shrouded sun.
He is in his shorts and work boots, using a slingshot to hunt a postapocalyptic rabbit monster. It looks like the tattered rabbits that remained around Violet at the end of the old graphic novel, but its katana ears owe a little bit to Kelley Jones’s Batman in Red Rain. Digby is so skinny, so hungry, that his skin is stretched tight over his skull. You can see his swagger, though; his immortal baby braveness is present in the lines of his body as he hunts. There is only one word on that first page, written inside a small white square to show that it is a thought, not dialogue.
Hello.
The view expands. Violet, sheltered by the cemetery’s stone wall, watches him through the wrought-iron gate. She’s wearing camo togs, the pants belted by a frazzled length of rope. Her hair is looped and knotted down her back in six long braids, held off her face by the tattered rag of what used to be her yellow sundress. In this second panel—and in every panel where Digby is seen through Violet’s eyes—his footsteps leave a trail of leafy vines and birds and mice and yearning baby squirrels and unmutated rabbits. His grimy red shirt glows for her.
Violet thinks, A person. A real person, like a living sunbeam in this dark and filthy place.
The view pans out farther: Digby hunting, Violet watching, and slouching shadow shapes that coalesce in the ruined shop windows and listing doorways. My lumpy, stick-armed Lewy bodies have evolved into a pack of postapocalyptic cannibals that Digby calls the Exes. Ex-people, he means. They hunt Digby as he hunts the rabbit.
Violet sees them first.