Baldino grunted. He was sure she was lying.
“You want to sit here all night, Miss Bissell?” he said. “I don’t—but I will.”
“I’m telling you the truth,” Zoe said. “He came out of the woods, and then he went back into the woods. I didn’t say two words to him. I don’t know who he is.”
“Then why have you been lying to protect him?”
Zoe was close to tears now. She looked to her mother.
Her mother stood up.
“This is totally unacceptable,” she told Baldino. “You’re harassing a girl who’s talking to you of her own free will. You think because I do yoga, I can’t find a lawyer who will kick your ass?”
In the silence that followed, there was a racket on the stairs. It sounded like a prisoner with a ball and chain. Everybody turned.
It was Jonah, looking horribly betrayed. His fingertips were covered with Band-Aids. His right ankle was dragging a skateboard on a piece of purple yarn.
Baldino shook his head and said, quietly for once and to no one in particular, “These people are not normal.”
Jonah told the police everything—because, as Zoe feared, he’d seen everything. He had woken up on Bert and Betty’s couch. He had shouted for Zoe. When she didn’t answer, he’d wiped the window with a cold little hand and peered outside.
Now Jonah was sitting on Zoe’s lap at the table, and pointing at the Instagram.
“That’s Stan,” he said. “He said his last name was The Man, but he maybe made that up so you should check.”
Jonah stopped for a second.
“I threw a rock at him,” he said, then looked at his mother uncertainly: “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay just this once,” she said. “Your dad introduced me to Stan many years ago, sweetie—way before you kids were born—and I wanted to throw a rock at him, too.”
“What else can you tell us, son?” Vilkomerson asked.
“Stan was mean,” Jonah said, his voice breaking for the first time. “He hurt Bert and Betty, and he tried to hurt my dogs. I don’t know why. This other person in the picture, the kind of naked one … I don’t know his name, but he’s magic—and he saved them. He also made the ice get all orange like that.”
When Jonah finished speaking, everyone let his words settle. No one spoke, except for Officer Maerz who said, “Seriously—it’s a filter.”
Baldino turned back to Zoe.
“Young lady, can you corroborate any of what your brother is saying?”
“I can corroborate all of it,” she said.
Did he think she didn’t know what the word meant?
“Interesting,” said Baldino, the patronizing edge creeping back into his voice. “Even the part about the magic?”
“Especially the part about the magic.”
Chief Baldino announced that he was sick of being lied to—of being “trifled with by a damn teenager”—and soon he and his men were driving off into the night. The Bissells watched from the front door until darkness swallowed the squad car a quarter of a mile down the road.
Zoe’s mom asked her and Jonah to follow her out to the garage.
“There’s some mess we have to clean up,” she said.
“Now?” said Zoe.
It was four in the morning.
“Now,” said her mother.
“I hate raccoons,” said Zoe.
Her mother seemed not to have heard her—she probably hadn’t slept in 24 hours—but at length she responded.
“Hmm?” she said. “Yeah, I hate them, too.”
The garage stood on the other side of the circular drive. Zoe had lived on this plot of ground her whole life, but it still amazed her that it could be so quiet—deep-space, science-fiction quiet—when it was nighttime and there wasn’t a wind. Silence, her mother liked to say, could heal you or it could make you crazy. It all depended on how you listened to it.
Zoe couldn’t tell what the silence would do to her tonight.
“Why’d you tell me to shut up when I said the thing about the cops not going to get Dad’s body?” she asked her mother.
“First of all,” her mother told her, “I would never tell you to shut up, because those are uncool words. But nothing good’s going to come from stirring everything up now. The police didn’t do their job. End of story.”
Zoe let it go, and they trudged along some more.
“I know you think we were lying about what happened with Stan,” she said as they crossed the drive.
“We weren’t, Mom,” Jonah interrupted. He had stopped to stab holes in the snow with a stick. “We weren’t lying at all.”
“Of course you weren’t, sweetie,” said Zoe’s mom.
“Stan really did hurt Bert and Betty,” he said. “And the magic man really did save Spock and Uhura.”
“Of course he did, sweetie.”
Zoe was annoyed by the way she was just yes-ing him. She fell behind to walk with her brother, who was still hacking at the snow like it was his enemy.