Pearl listens, then drops the second cigarette to the concrete and rubs it out with her foot. She chews her lip like she’s thinking. Finally she says, “I want a house.” That’s her dream. She and Terry and the kids in a proper house, the kids with proper bedrooms, not whaling on each other like they do in the motel room, all up in each other’s spaces. Some privacy and a good night’s sleep. They’ve been talking about a house, but to afford it they’ll both have to take on more hours and then who’ll look after the kids? Maybe Ricky could rent a bedroom from them, in exchange for fifty bucks a week and help with the children.
Ricky says this is how it happened, the two of them talking under the stars. They became friends, and when he moved in with her and her husband and the kids he became better friends with Terry. Before he moved in he told them he was on parole for molesting a child. But they could see he was trying. They accepted him. They trusted him.
Pearl? She never mentions this night. Not the smoke, not the stars, not Ricky’s talking about his dreams and not her admitting to hers. She says Ricky became friends with Terry, and that the two of them invited him to stay on account of that. She never says he told her he was a molester. Not after one of her son’s friends goes missing, and she asks him to leave. Not after they find that boy dead in her house. Not even after her son and her husband die colliding with an Amtrak train, and it’s only her and her daughter left and she flees to New Mexico, where for a long time not even the lawyers can find her.
But she never says she didn’t know, either.
*
For a few weeks, Ricky has the life he wants. He and Pearl and Terry rent a big white two-story house on a street the landlord calls Watson Road. The street doesn’t really have a name, the lane so far back it might as well be in the woods, and the house is run-down and strange-looking, with a staircase running out the back of the second floor, into the woods. But it’s the only two-story house in the neighborhood, and this makes it special. Pearl and Terry pay to have the phone line turned on. The only phone in the neighborhood; this, too, makes the house special. Ricky goes to his job at the Fuel Stop and looks after June and Joey and takes good care of his khakis and polo, washing them nice and even ironing them sometimes, and when he gets a little extra money saved he buys himself a bottle of schnapps and goes out to the river to do some fishing and suddenly he isn’t a loner out there, suddenly he isn’t a weirdo, but a workingman who lives in a nice house, spending his day off enjoying some much-needed downtime.
Ricky is normal.
But nothing in this life can last. One afternoon, Joey’s friend Jeremy comes over. Ricky draws a bath for Jeremy and Joey. He brings them soap, the files say. Maybe Joey calls to him that they need it. Or maybe Ricky, half knowing what he’s doing, goes to the cabinet and gets a new bar. Takes it to the bathroom, where he sees Jeremy in the bath. Says, “Oh—I thought you needed soap.”
That night, Ricky can’t sleep. He keeps thinking about Jeremy. The next evening, he and Pearl are sitting on recliners in the living room, watching a crime television show, one of their favorites. Carefully, as casually as he can, he asks, “Whose kid was the blond boy from yesterday?”
“That was Lori’s son,” she answers.
He doesn’t want to let on how curious he is, so he waits. On the screen, I imagine, the show has just shown the actress playing the victim. Next they will reenact the scene. Ricky watches. Then he asks, “Where do they live?”
“With Melissa, just down the street.”
The actress is lying on the couch now, conspicuously not noticing the man at her window. “You think Joey will have him back over again soon?”
This time Pearl gives him a queer look. She doesn’t answer.
When, the day after that, Ricky opens the door and Jeremy’s standing on the threshold, Terry Lawson off fishing with June and Joey, and Pearl nowhere to be found, he thinks, Oh, you’d better run, kid. He has a flash of what’s going to happen. There will be no turning back now.
He could shut the door. Instead he opens it wider. Jeremy steps across the threshold, into the house.
Where Ricky kills him.
Ricky will spend the rest of his life puzzling over this act. An hour after Lucky and Dixon arrest him, he confesses to the murder, but tells them he didn’t molest Jeremy. An hour later, he confesses again, slightly different details, and says he did. On three videotapes and over several months in notepads hastily scribbled on by prison guards when Ricky says he has something to add, he gives different versions of the murder. He describes undressing Jeremy to molest him. (When Jeremy was found, he was clothed.) He says he killed Jeremy in an effort not to molest him. (Possible, but Ricky’s semen was on Jeremy’s shirt.) He says the crime wasn’t sexual at all, but murder, and what he really wanted was to get a gun and go down to the elementary school, “do some shooting.” (Maybe, but it’s pedophilia that Ricky’s struggled with for decades. Not violence.) He says he killed Jeremy because he was “overcome with a feeling” of not wanting Jeremy to become like him. Ten years later, he’ll still be confessing, unable to stop telling this story different ways. He casts about for stories as if he’s casting about for an identity, trying to figure out who he is and who this means he’ll be.
When they take him locked up in handcuffs to the parish jail for his holding hearing, there’s a news van waiting for the police cruiser. Lucky gets him out, and the reporter scurries over, zooming the news camera in close on Ricky’s face. Ricky looks into the lens, grins wide, seems to realize he shouldn’t, looks down. He’s awkward in his body, shuffling along. It’s as though half of him wants to be seen and the other half wants to hide away. The sun’s clear and bright behind him, making the orange jumpsuit glow against the blue sky and the scrub grass and the trees. The jail’s a squat building of red-brown brick and institutional beige. Along one side of the building slouches a group of corrections officers, smoking. When they see the reporter their heads bob up like apples and they stare at Ricky. Among them is Sergeant Larry Schroeder, thirty-two years old and working as a transport guard for the Louisiana Department of Corrections. For the past five years he’s spent his days accompanying inmates all over the state. Today he’s responsible for a man called Jackson and a couple others. But really Larry’s a local. He lives in Lake Charles and he’s raising his children here. So he recognizes Ricky immediately. Iowa’s only eight miles away. Larry’s “not one of them local-news watchers,” he’ll say later, he prefers CNN, but everyone knows who Ricky is. Ricky’s mug shot was all over the state.
After they’ve all gone inside and the day’s hearings have begun, Larry’s sitting on a folding chair in the hallway outside the courtroom, waiting for Jackson’s case to be called, when he hears banging. The sheriff’s deputy in charge of the holding cell signals him to come over. It’s Jackson, twitchy and agitated, hitting the door of the group cell. When he sees Larry he stops. His eyes are all bugged out. “Man, you got to get me out of here,” Jackson says. “Move me or something.”
“Calm down,” Larry says. “Calm down or I’ll have you put in lockdown when we’re back.”