“I told you,” Jonah said to the state police detective who sat across from him at the kitchen table. “And him.” He nodded at Maurice who leaned against the counter behind the detective.
Maurice seemed to be taking the detective’s blunt manner in stride, and more than once he had given Jonah a look: It’s formality, humor him so we can find the girls safe sooner rather than later.
“Tell me again. Why the rifle the sheriff found in your closet was recently fired.” The detective, wiry and anemic, pencil-scratch mustache and an odor of wet suede about him, jotted in his pad.
“I was sighting it in,” Jonah said. “Deer season starts soon.”
“Avid deer hunter, are you?” the detective said.
Maurice cut a doubtful look at Jonah.
“I wouldn’t say that,” Jonah said.
“What would you say?” the detective said. “Not many people take up hunting in adulthood.”
“I just took it back up. I hunted as a kid.” Jonah nodded to Maurice. “He can attest to that.”
Maurice nodded, face grim.
“And you just decided to take it up again on a whim?” the detective said.
“I don’t do much on whims,” Jonah said.
“Hmmm,” the detective said.
Jonah’s every word, every action, seemed a mark against him. All of it suspicious. One of a thousand cuts. “I felt that old urge, and, frankly, free meat in the freezer never hurts with the cost of groceries these days.”
“So you have money troubles?”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
The detective scribbled a note. “And the head wound?” He tapped his pen against his own forehead.
“As I told Maurice, I got up too fast, lost my balance, and hit my head.”
“And the dented wall in your daughter’s bedroom?”
A cop strolled past the kitchen doorway toward the front door lugging a hard case. He’d been dusting the house for fingerprints. Insane. No stranger had taken anyone by force from the house. Nothing was out of sorts, if you dismissed the hole in the wall, the knocked-over chair, and Jonah’s head. All easily explained, as Jonah had done twice already to Maurice and to the detective. But the detective did not seem to take Jonah at his word.
“Sir? The hole in the wall of your daughter’s room?”
“The floors are old, you can drop a marble in the middle of any room and it rolls to the corner. The doors catch so you have to push with force. I pushed too hard and the door got away from me. I explained all this.”
“You must have pushed pretty hard.”
“The door got away from me.” Even as he said it, a part of Jonah started to doubt if that was how it happened. If he was remembering it wrong. It all seemed long ago. His head shrieked with pain; he needed aspirin but was afraid if he took some he’d be asked why he needed it, why he had a headache, as if it wasn’t obvious.
He eyed the cigarette pack pressing from the inside of the pocket of the detective’s white shirt. The shirt was wrinkled and its neck had what TV commercials called Ring Around the Collar, which sounded like a child’s playground game to Jonah. The detective’s ring finger was bare. If the detective wasn’t married and had no kids, how could he possibly understand Jonah’s disorientation and anxiety?
“When are you going to start looking for my wife and daughter?” Jonah asked.
“We are as we speak,” the detective said.
“I’ve called neighbors,” Maurice said. “We’ll put together searches, starting tonight. However long it takes. It won’t take long. People are lined up to help, Jonah.”
He came around behind Jonah, hovered protectively, faced the detective. “We done here?”
“No,” the detective said. He stared at Jonah. “Where’d you sleep last night?”
Jonah had already lied to Maurice, because where he’d slept and why were private affairs. There was a difference between privacy and secrecy. He was not hiding wrongdoing. “On my bed.”
“The arrangement of the sheets—”
“On the bed,” Jonah said. “Not in it.” Did this detective not hear? Was he not aware of words having precise meaning? God, the detective was like one of Jonah’s freshman students. “I came to bed late and did not want to wake my wife. So I slept on top.”
The detective jotted a note.
“Now are we done?” Maurice said.
The detective looked at Jonah. “If you want to clarify anything—”
“Like what?” Jonah said, no longer able to brook the insinuations. “What would I want to clarify?”
“I wouldn’t know. Disagreements. Anything that would make us think perhaps”—his eyes drifted to Maurice and back to Jonah—“your wife has left with your daughter of her own accord.”
A theory that had just earlier comforted Jonah now sounded ominous coming from this detective. Jonah wanted to hoist himself up and tell the detective off, but Maurice put a hand on Jonah’s shoulder and said, “I think he’s cooperated fully and could stand the benefit of the doubt here.”
“You’re a sheriff, not his attorney,” the detective said.
“I’ve known him all my life. I can vouch for him.”
“Vouch? You’re not elected sheriff to vouch for anyone. This isn’t membership to a country club we’re talking about here.” He jerked his head for Maurice to follow him to the living room.
The two men stood near the couch, where Lucinda sat gaping as the detective hatcheted the edge of one palm into the open palm of his other hand to drive home a point. His mouth twisted out words Jonah could not decode. When he finished his remonstration, Maurice nodded compliance, head bowed. Jonah had never seen Maurice come to heel so readily and with such abject defeat.
The detective clapped Maurice on the shoulder, glanced at Jonah without acknowledging his presence, and departed out the door.
Maurice, his back to Jonah, looked down at his shoes, flexed his fingers at his sides. He turned and walked back into the kitchen, collapsed in the chair opposite Jonah, shed his sheriff’s cap, and scratched his head above his ear where premature silver glinted against his black crop of hair.
He looked vanquished. He gazed at the ceiling, as if unable or afraid to look Jonah in the eye. Dark bruises marred the flesh beneath eyes extinguished of their innate, alert confidence. He looked as if he might weep, something Jonah had never seen him do. “Sometimes,” he whispered, “this job . . . That detective has zero official authority over me. Still, state police treat me like a mutt to muzzle and chain to a tree.”
This glimpse at Maurice’s feelings of inadequacy were similar to those Jonah felt toward tenured PhDs at Lyndon State.
“I appreciate you going to bat for me,” Jonah said. “Vouching. I—”
Maurice waved him off, looked at him square again, and shook his dourness with the act of donning his sheriff’s cap. “It won’t mean squat if we don’t find Rebecca and Sally. Things like this. From what I studied back at the academy while you were wooing the It Girl with your poetry, an unsolved missing persons case can stick to a man. Never go away.”
“We’ll find them. Right?”
“Right.”
With a deadening heart, Jonah wondered if he believed this, that they’d find Rebecca and Sally safe; and he understood that whatever was about to happen in the days ahead, even if Rebecca and Sally walked through the door in the next minute, the life he’d built up was about to be torn down, as he’d always known one day it would be.
And it was all his fault.