“What do I do now?” she asked.
Walker said, “What do honest people do? Call nine-one-one. Just say someone broke your window. Don’t give them any more information over the phone except your name and address.”
She was dialing when they heard a siren.
He took away the receiver and cradled it. “I forgot. This isn’t Detroit. The neighbors here report this kind of thing. It’s better to leave it to them while you see to that cut. That’s what honest people do. Can you manage it?”
“The cut? Oh, please.”
“The whole thing.”
“You talked to Deborah Stonesmith. What do you think?”
“That’s what I meant. You were cool with her because you had to be. Here, cool’s bad. Your window exploded and a piece of glass cut you. You’ve got the jitters.”
“I do, actually.”
“Good. Turn them loose for the cops.” He went toward the door.
“You won’t be here?”
“I never was. You don’t want to explain why you were entertaining a plastic badge when someone busted your window.”
“What do I say?”
“You were heading for the kitchen and, crash!”
“What if they ask if I’m married?”
“You’re single, Miss Ziegler. Don’t volunteer anything. They may ask if you live alone, no more, and maybe not even that. Every day someone somewhere is shot at, and most of the time it’s at random. Not so often in places like Milford, but it happens. All you’re leaving out is a domestic mess that’s nobody else’s business and that you’re being protected by a hired hand. You don’t know why what happened happened. You don’t, you know. You don’t even know what broke your window. Remember that. If you say it was a shot, they’ll want to know how you know. Even I didn’t hear the report, and I’m supposed to notice such things.”
“Can’t I just tell them I found the bullet in the wall?”
Which they had. He’d paced a straight line to the wall opposite and found the blemish in the plaster.
“You’re a civilian. You’re too dumb to think about looking for such things. Doesn’t matter that anyone who’s ever watched television knows how cops work. They like to think they’re exclusive.”
“Okay.” The siren was getting closer.
“I’ll come back when the coast is clear. Remember, tell them everything about the window, except without me, and you don’t know anything about a shot.”
He left. She’d just finished cleaning and disinfecting the nick behind her ear and sticking on a Band-Aid when the siren wound down in front of the building.
The officer who did most of the talking, pudgy, with a brush moustache and a spray of dandruff on his epaulets, took her identification and recorded the information in a notebook, the dime-store kind with a spiral at the top. His partner said little and did less. He was younger than she was. She’d been told that would happen someday.
The older man was less perfunctory than the police in Detroit; he seemed genuinely concerned that a local citizen had been put in danger. He asked to see her injury and she turned her head and pushed her hair away from the Band-aid.
“Are you sure you don’t need stitches?”
She shook her head. “I was brought up in the country. I know how to deal with scrapes and bruises.”
She answered all his questions in the same tone, the lies as well as the truth:
No, sir, I have no enemies that I know of.
Yes, I live alone.
I’ve lived here almost six weeks.
No special reason, except I got tired of Southfield. I told you, I’m a country girl.
He asked more questions while the partner roamed the living room, being careful to avoid stepping on broken glass.
“Gordy.”
He was standing by the wall opposite the window. His partner joined him, peered at the hole, raised a hand and bored a finger inside. Turned back her way.
“What do you think happened, Miss Ziegler?”
She hadn’t told him she was married. As Walker had predicted, he hadn’t asked about that.
“Someone threw something through my window,” she said. “A rock, I suppose. I haven’t looked for it. I didn’t think I should tamper with the—with the evidence, I guess you’d call it.”
“It wasn’t a rock. This is a bullet.”
She could feign curiosity better than surprise.
“Are you sure?”
“It didn’t sink deep. Must have been almost spent when it came through the glass. We’ll have someone dig it out. He’ll try not to do too much damage than has been done already. If they give you any trouble about your security deposit, refer ’em to the department.”
He flipped his book shut. “I wouldn’t worry too much about this. It’s deer season. Someone fired too close to town, either with a high-powered rifle, which is illegal in this part of the state, or a muzzle-loader, which isn’t; but not pointed this direction. It was probably an accident, but it’s the kind we take seriously. We’ll find the idiot. He won’t be handling a firearm again any time soon. Odds are way on your side it won’t happen again.”
He pointed his notebook at the window. “I’d get in touch with the landlord and have that window boarded up right away. The weather’s not going to stay this mild very long. I can feel a change coming on.”
“Arthritis?” She put sympathy in her tone.
“No, ma’am. Michigan.”
* * *
“They’ll be back,” Walker said.
The man the realty office had sent to repair the window had come and gone. She’d swept up the shattered glass and he’d spent less than five minutes nailing a square of plywood over the frame. He said a glazier would be in Monday to finish the job. Now she and Walker were sitting in the living room drinking gin. He looked piratical with a rectangle of pink plastic pasted under his left eye.
“You sound like you’re talking about hostile Indians.” She’d changed back into her warm quilted robe and stuck her feet in her favorite slippers. Her heart had slowed to normal, replaced with the kind of contentment that settles in after the shock of an accident has worn off and you’re okay; although part of it might have been the alcohol buzz. It was like drinking hot buttered rum in the lodge after a day on the slopes.
“Indians wear warpaint. You never know when a cop’s gunning for you till he drops the hammer.”
She’d turned the TV on for company while he was gone. It was muted now; the Weather Channel was tracking a blizzard through the Ohio Valley that threatened to dump six to eight inches on metropolitan Detroit in the next twenty-four hours. The purple blotch kept creeping in jerky stop-motion from left to right, reversing itself, then repeating the motion. It had been a late Indian summer at that, and none of the residents the locals spoke to were as excited about the shift as the on-air talent. There was nothing like a killer storm to sweep a stand-up reporter into an anchor job.
“I checked out the park,” Walker said. “The frost was gone, so I couldn’t tell if anyone had walked through it or been in the gazebo. I still think he was shooting from an elevated position, most likely a roof; that bullet’s too low on the wall to have been fired at an upward angle. Let the locals find which roof. They’ve got the personnel and it’s what they’re paid for. They’ll bring in some techs from the state lab in Lansing with their calipers and measuring tape and whiz-bang three-D cameras, and when they’re finished they’ll know less than you and I do about who fired the shot.”
“You knocked me down before it happened. Did you see something?”
“Maybe. It’s hard to remember the order of things when they go that fast, but I don’t think I saw movement. I’m not Spider-Man; it just seemed time for something to happen. You get a feeling for it, something building up. If I knew anything about the stock market I’d be dressing better.”
“I understand the building-up part. I can’t stand this waiting. How do you?”
“Patience comes with practice. Someday I hope to have it. As it is I hate this part a little more every time.”
“What else can we do?”
“You? Nothing. Me?” He grinned into his glass. She’d seen more of his teeth in one day than she’d seen of Peter’s since the day they’d met. She never knew when either of them was actually enjoying himself. “That stuff you told the cops,” Walker said, “Heidi can’t wait to get shut of the big bad city; was it just for the yokels?”
“Partly. Mostly I couldn’t wait to leave the farm. You spend all your time worrying about the weather. Even when it’s good, you wonder how long it’ll last, and if you’ll have new clothes the first day of school. When you don’t, the kids who live in town swoop down on you like crows. Then there’s the choice of who you’ll get to spend the rest of your life with. My mother made a strong case for the boy who stood to inherit six hundred acres of soy beans. He found someone after I married Peter, a girl I grew up with. I’m expecting this year’s form Christmas letter any time. Last year they were still living with his parents. One thing people in the country rarely do is die young.”
“I’m guessing you’re missing the bright lights.”
“The lights, anyway. Most people here turn them off around eleven.” She set down my glass and leaned forward. “On short acquaintance, Mr. Walker, I don’t think you’re any better at small talk than my husband is. This isn’t a first date. Why the sudden interest in what I like and what I don’t?”
“Oh, I can talk the arms off an octopus when I need to.”
“Are we discussing flying the coop?”
He glanced toward the TV screen, where a young woman in a stocking cap and all-weather coat too heavy for fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit stood with her back to the Edsel Ford Freeway, shouting into a microphone over the roar of cars whipping past ten miles above the speed limit. When he turned back her way, his grin was broad, drawing a crease across the Band-Aid on his cheek.
“You’re still thinking rural, Daisy Mae. I’m thinking more along the lines of a shell game, with a little help from Jack Frost.”