“Morning, Sheriff.” She stands. She’s wearing the same torn jeans and plaid shirt and t-shirt she’d worn the previous night and her hair’s pulled back in a ponytail that says, I’ll deal with you later. “So,” she says, “you planning to tell me just what the hell happened last night?”
Before Cooper can answer, which he’s not eager to do, Isaac runs out the screen door, letting it slap closed behind him.
“Look at these cards,” Isaac says. He holds up a fresh pack of trading cards, a souvenir from the movie they’d gone to see together offsite a few months back. That wasn’t an official furlough—Cooper just snuck that one in himself. He sat beside Isaac in the air-conditioned theater for two hours, munching popcorn, keeping watch, though he can’t recall a single thing about the movie now. Some animated action film for kids with guardian robots in it and monsters who eventually learn to accept themselves.
“I got these, they just came to the store,” Isaac says, fanning the cards out, fresh from the pack, the cardboard still dusted pink with the residue of the bubblegum they arrived with. The cards depict battling robots; apparently, it’s some kind of game. Isaac holds them out proudly. He has his mother’s dark hair, though on his head it’s scalloped into tight curls. He’s a sweet-looking kid, Cooper thinks—he looks a lot like his mother. Kids always look to Cooper like the as-yet-unruined version of their parents, like some remnant of the you that existed before you made all your bad decisions.
“You going to share that bubblegum with me?” asks Cooper.
“I already confiscated it,” says Fran. “Or did we finally get a dentist in this town?”
“Can we go to another movie?” asks Isaac. He speaks in a clipped, insistent, urgent bark, like he’s never had to wait his turn, and he’s accustomed to everyone’s instant attention. Maybe that’s what happens when you grow up the only kid in a town full of adults, Cooper thinks. There used to be another kid for a while—Cooper wonders if Isaac remembers that boy. No one expected kids here; no one planned for it. Once Isaac arrived, the town just made it work. But that was back when he was only a baby, a toddler. Now that he’s going on eight, it’s just not a tenable situation—Cooper’s known this for a while. And he knows that Fran understands that, too. It’s just convincing her to go anywhere else that’s hard. Not that he blames her. Nothing good ever happens to people who leave the Blinds. Including that other boy.
Jacob was his name. Jacob Mondale. And his mother, Jean. It’s important to remember their names, Cooper thinks.
“We’ll see,” he says to Isaac. “I sure had fun last time. But we’ll have to ask your mother.” He winks at Fran, who doesn’t soften.
“Isaac,” she says, “why don’t you go inside and put those cards somewhere safe.” Isaac runs back into the house. She says to Cooper, “I asked Spiro to order those cards a month ago. They finally came through the commissary. I thought they’d make for a nice souvenir. He really did have a good time. Though I still don’t know if it was a good idea.”
“He’s got to see the world eventually. He can’t stay here. Not forever.”
“I thought that was the whole point of this place. To hide from the rest of the world.”
“For most of us. Not for him. He’s not—”
“We’ve had this discussion, Cal. Now are you going to tell me about that gunshot?”
Cooper considers his words. “We had an incident, it’s true. Not a good one. At the bar.”
“An incident? Like, the kind of incident that involves a gun going off into someone’s body?”
“I’m calling a town meeting about it this afternoon. I’ll explain everything then.”
“Can you give me a sneak peek? I have a kid here, Cal. Was it a suicide, like the other one?”
“Not likely, no.” Cooper nods toward the house. “Did it wake him?”
“No, thank God. He sleeps like a teenager.”
“Count that as a blessing.”
“For him or for me?”
“Depends how many late-night bad habits you’re hoping to hide.”
Fran eyes Cooper, then smiles slightly—finally, a concession, a crack. “There was a time when you were very familiar with my late-night habits, Sheriff Cooper.”
For the second time today, Cooper thinks this would be an excellent moment for a hat. Instead, he just rubs his forehead and squints out at the block. “I can’t let you know anything until I let the whole town know.”
“No special privileges, huh?”
“Not with this.”
She unfolds her arms and squeezes his shoulder. This is as much of a physical intimacy as they’ve ever allowed themselves in public, even back when their private meetings were much more intimate. “Just let me know he’s safe, Cal.”
“He’s safe. You’re both safe. I can promise you that.” He regrets this promise as soon as he’s spoken it. He’s had a lifelong habit of offering promises he’s in no position to deliver. But it’s too late to back down on it now, so he says, “I’ll ring the bell for the town meeting sometime around one. Then I’ll tell you everything I know. I promise that, too.”
As he walks down her steps and back into the street, he regrets that last promise even more.
4.
SO WHAT DO WE KNOW about Hubert Humphrey Gable?” asks Dawes, flipping through her notebook.
“Nothing. Not a fucking thing. That’s precisely the founding principle of this town,” Cooper says. “But more to the point, Dawes—what are you doing sitting at my desk?”
“I warned her,” says Robinson, who’s standing over a pair of uniform pants slung across an ironing board, affecting an earnest but clumsy imitation of ironing.
“I just thought I’d see what the view looked like from here, while we waited for you,” says Dawes, looking up from Cooper’s swivel chair, at Cooper, who’s standing in the doorway of the trailer, having just arrived back from his entirely unsatisfactory visit to Fran Adams.
The three of them have gathered in what passes for the town’s police station: a single room housed in a trailer at one end of the main thoroughfare. The office is crammed with filing cabinets and discarded furniture of various fake wood grains, in various stages of disrepair. A sadly failing and mostly ornamental A/C unit sits wedged in the lone window. Only Cooper gets a desk. Cooper gets the desk because Cooper’s the boss, he was here first, and when he started, it was only him. When they hired Robinson five years back, Cooper ordered a second desk. They’re still waiting for it to arrive. Cooper never bothered to order a desk for Dawes.