Axel looks down at the lectern, as if he might divine a right answer in the grain of its faux-wood veneer. He has his suspicions, but does he have the balls to make an accusation on live TV? “I think there may have been some confusion at a few candidate forums about my priorities,” he says, stumbling over the words. On camera, it plays as evasion at best, outright fudging of the truth at worst. And then the candidates are instructed to move on to their closing statements. Axel goes first, then Wolcott gets the last word, reciting her belief in the need for “smart growth,” lest a few poor decisions in city hall undermine the city’s stability once again, something she believes Mr. Hathorne does not fully understand. It’s smart of Wolcott to pick at this tiny pill of perceived difference between the two law-and-order candidates. On paper they are nearly identical, but saddling Axel with the cumbersome and expensive bayou project makes him appear unsophisticated about issues beyond crime.
Jay crosses the room to the armchair. He picks up his suit jacket from the day before, fishing through the pockets, inside and out. By the time he finds what he’s looking for–the copy of the campaign’s schedule for Tuesday, November fifth–the debate is over. The candidates are already shaking hands. Channel 13 cuts away from the debate to a promo for the nightly news broadcast, and the first image that pops up on-screen is Sandy Wolcott with her arm around Maxine Robicheaux, the lead story for the ten o’clock news: Mayoral Candidate Reaches Out to Missing Girl’s Family. It’s as if Reese Parker hand-scripted the day’s narrative: the leaked question about the bayou project during the debate and then the footage of Wolcott providing succor to the weeping mother on the nightly news. No wonder Neal hates Parker. She’s better at this than he is. Jay turns his attention to the campaign’s Election Day schedule, searching through the messy grid for Neal’s name or initials.
Some of it looks familiar.
Neal mentioned much of it in the car today.
Tuesday, he was scheduled at GOTV (“get out the vote”) events in Westchase and Sharpstown; a media event in the parking lot of the Windsor Village megachurch; and visits to polling places, union halls, and community centers, among others, with time penciled in for several stops back at campaign headquarters. And of course there was the planned gathering at the home of a major donor, where the Hathorne family had plans to watch the returns with VIPs (not in Pleasantville as Sam had told their supporters). What is not here is any indication of Neal’s whereabouts from his last GOTV stop, at a rally with volunteers at a satellite campaign office on the west side, to the time he was due at the viewing party, a window from about seven fifteen to nine thirty, which Jay finds highly odd. Neal simply drops from the schedule, right around the time Alicia was last seen. According to this, Axel’s campaign manager could have been anywhere. Detective Moore probably had this information the whole time Jay and Neal were holed up in that interrogation room: Neal has no alibi.
Jay walks his TV tray and dirty dishes back to the kitchen, leaving the whole mess for tomorrow, Neal, all of it. He kisses his son good night, and puts himself to bed. He’s undressed and knocked out cold by eight o’clock.
A few hours later, he hears a crash outside his bedroom window, a banging sound that so startles him he reaches for his wife’s hand across the sheets–something he hasn’t done in months. He sits up, feeling in the dark for his glasses, the ones he started wearing at night when he crossed forty. He’s supposed to keep a pair in his car for night driving, but has only the one, which he never seems to remember he needs. They are resting on the nightstand. He slides them on and turns on the lamp beside the bed. The room is exactly as he remembers, lushly furnished, but spare of heart, the only sign of life his clothes left across the back of the armchair. The clock on top of the bureau puts the time past twelve. The house is completely still, save for the soft rumble of Ben’s perpetually stuffed sinuses, which Jay can hear through their thin shared wall. The house is so still in fact that the fuzzy lamplight takes on a dreamlike quality, reminding Jay of those nights right after Bernie died, before she was in the ground even, when he would wake up not remembering any of it, when he wandered the rooms of his house, looking for his wife. He wonders if it was grief that woke him, tapping on his shoulder, demanding to be attended to.
But then he hears the sound again.
Trash cans, he realizes, the ones lined up along the side of the house.
Someone must have knocked them over.
The motion sensors in the backyard are going off, lighting up the garage and the back patio. Someone is creeping along the back of the house, setting them off, one by one. The black mastiff in his neighbor’s yard is barking loudly.
Jay goes for the .38 in his sock drawer.
The bullets have scattered everywhere, some slipping to the bottom of the drawer. He feels around for them, feeling the time tick past, counting seconds by the beat of his own heart drumming in his ear. He slides two copper-tipped bullets, the only two he can find, into the cylinder, before slamming it back into place. Barefoot, he slips out of the bedroom and down the main hall and through the den to the sliding glass door leading to the patio and the backyard. There are two ADT consoles in the house, one by the back door and one in Jay’s bedroom. He turns off the alarm so he won’t wake his kids. Then, slowly, he unlocks the sliding door. It squeaks when opened all the way, has since they first moved in, and Jay is careful to give himself no more than a foot of space to squeeze through as he starts into the yard in cotton pajama pants and no shirt. The air outside is so damp it fogs his eyeglasses, momentarily blinding him, causing him to stab at the air with the nose of his pistol. When his lenses clear, he sees the side door to the garage is wide open. Someone picked the lock and let himself in. Jay starts toward it, and as soon as he crosses the threshold, he’s hit by a burned singe in the air, the familiar smell of marijuana. He remembers the break-in at his office, just as he remembers the Nissan Z idling outside his house two nights ago. He imagines the kid with the red eyes and the taunting smile waiting for him inside the darkened garage.