The Ruinous Sweep Read online

  “You are . . .”

  There it was again.

  He had talked to someone. Why couldn’t he get hold of this?

  “See?”

  But he couldn’t — couldn’t see a thing: nothing but a sudden onrush of light and then blackness. And then . . . He groaned. He imagined himself back in his father’s apartment all alone picking up the pieces of broken china and trying to make them into a bowl. And into that bowl he would place every kernel of popcorn. Then he’d piece the beer bottles back together painstakingly, and the crystal scotch glass. And then his father. He’d put his father back together and make him whole again. Maybe when you killed someone this is what happened. You killed them again and again, and the memories came without rhyme or reason and you couldn’t escape them and yet the memory of actually doing it — that was T = 0. Someone had explained the big bang theory to him . . . well, they’d tried to. There was nothing and then there was something. And the something came out of nothing at the precise moment that Time equaled zero. When everything began. Or maybe when everything ended?

  He heard a sound behind him and flipped onto his side to peer through his spy hole. Someone was at a lit upstairs window of the farmhouse. A woman. She had opened the window and was peering out. She hugged herself against the cold, then shut the window. Now she pulled down a shade and he watched her shadow withdraw from the bright rectangle.

  He got to his feet — couldn’t sit there another moment. He walked, out from behind the trash heap, tentatively toward the house, his eyes on the lit window. He saw a silhouette of the woman again, distorted, passing by. The shadow passed the shade again. He held his breath, waited, saw her profile, tantalized. Then her light went off. So anticlimactic: the allure of a woman’s body in silhouette, gone. He shook it off. Without taking his eyes off that newly dark window, he made his way toward the door in the shed. That must have been where she was coming from when he saw her cross the yard. He placed his hand on the doorknob, turned it. The door was unlocked and he slipped inside.

  He had dared to hope it might be warmer than outside but it wasn’t, not really. However, it was drier. He couldn’t turn on a light, but he had a plan. This lunatic flight from reality had to stop. He needed to go home. He had panicked. There was no blame in that. And . . . He shook his head again. No use trying to make sense of it. Go home.

  Somewhere in that shed there must be an electrical outlet. There were lights after all, even if he didn’t dare to turn them on.

  He wanted to charge his phone, just enough to get word to Bee. Suddenly the ache of missing her, of wanting to tell her — tell someone — cut through the multitude of dull aches in his body, the cuts and bruises, the shivers that felt as if they would rattle him to pieces. The warmth he had thought might be hypothermia had deserted him. “So I’m not dead,” he said, in case anyone wanted to know. That was something. But Bee not knowing where he was or what had happened — making her worry like that — that was the worst ache of all. She would know what to do. If he could just reach her, that would be the start of everything becoming bearable again, whatever else was going to happen.

  He stood stock-still, his hand on the inner doorknob. Skylights let in what there was of the moon, and that tricked out all the things stored here, gave some shape to the crowded darkness. He heard a faucet dripping somewhere. He waited, every sense alert, taking in the looming shadows, until he felt he could walk. Just to his left a pile of empty pallets was stacked against the west wall, right beside the door, a stack almost as tall as he was. He leaned against the stack, gripped the edge of the wood as if his feet might suddenly be swept out from under him. Anything could happen. Nothing would surprise him.

  He sniffed: weed. He’d smelled it at the kitchen window, and the cops had noticed it right away when they arrived. It was stronger here. A heady aroma. Sweet, almost comforting . . . Well, maybe under other circumstances. But the last thing he needed was to have any more of his mental powers compromised. He was running on empty in the brain department right now. And he had a task to perform.

  Across the expanse of floor, he thought he saw a desk. It would probably prove to be something else, but its desk-ness drew him forward, and he walked tentatively toward it, putting one foot before the other uncertainly, feeling ahead like a blind man into the darkness with one hand out front and one guarding his crotch. His toes felt ahead for the gaping hole there that would take him down to Hell Central. But there was no hole, not so far. The way was clear, free of rubble. His senses told him the place was kept neat. A neat shed; that should have been a clue.

  He reached the desk-like shape, and it was a desk: an old wooden desk, by the feel of it, and an old wooden wheely chair. He pulled the chair out on its rollers, swiveled it toward him, and leaning forward, felt the cushion. It was vaguely warm. The woman must have been sitting here, however long ago it was. He gingerly sat down. The chair squeaked under his weight but in a comforting way, and Donovan groaned involuntarily with happiness at the softness of it. He leaned back and the chair leaned with him. He rotated the chair to face the desk and carefully felt its surface. A wide, old office desk with an expansive pitted top. His eager fingers located a stapler, a ruler, some kind of book with a spiral spine. Pencils, pens. A small bowl he picked up and felt: a container for paper clips with a magnetic top. It all felt wonderfully tangible and prosaic and real. And everything was dry, which was a victory of some kind. He felt the base and neck of a desk lamp. He found and followed the electric cord, standing and then kneeling beside the desk, finding the wall outlet. There was a free socket below the lamp’s plug. He withdrew the charger from his hoodie pocket and the cell from his left pants pocket and connected them. He plugged in the phone.

  The charging message came on: a battery woefully empty but soon to be full — or full enough. “Bee,” he said, as quietly as a prayer. He would tell her that she had been right. That he needed help. But no — first of all he had something else he needed to tell her. Ask her. A question: “Are you . . .” Oh, why wouldn’t it come to him? Never mind. It would be enough to even hear her voice.

  He rested the phone on the desktop. In its glow he could see that the wood was a warm golden-brown, old but well tended. And although the floor was concrete, there was no dust. So the woman, or somebody, worked here a lot, he gathered. He got to his feet again and moved around to the front of the desk, where he sat down. He would wait here. He folded his arms on the desktop, then let his head fall forward onto them. His eyes closed, tired of trying to see things in the dark. Tired of running. Tired of not knowing.

  And then the lights came on.

  Wilton Crescent should have probably been called Wilton Comma. It was barely two blocks long and where it began to curve, it actually became Oakland Avenue, so where was a crescent in that? It started out at Bank Street across from the stadium and no one but residents would be likely to turn onto it at all, unless they were going to immediately turn left onto Queen Elizabeth Lane, which led down to the parkway along the canal. It was part of the southern boundary of the Glebe. She smiled, remembering an early conversation with Donovan.

  “What is a glebe?” he’d asked. “Isn’t there a bird called a glebe?”

  “That would be a grebe.”

  “Right. So . . .”

  She’d stopped and looked at him. “You live here,” she said.

  “Yeah, but I never thought about it until now. Which is your fault.”

  “My fault?”

  “Yeah. You’re making me question everything.”

  If it was a compliment, it was a sly one. She had smiled anyway, wanting to take it as flattery.

  “You know what it means, don’t you?” he said.

  She nodded. “It’s a Scottish word meaning church lands. This area used to be called the glebe lands of Saint Andrew’s Presbyterian Church.”

  He had nodded knowingly. “That makes it official,” he’d said.

  “What?”

  “You know everything.”<
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  Bee shook the memory from her mind. If only, she thought.

  A driver who continued down Wilton might easily suspect it was a cul-de-sac, unless he or she was one of the few dozen people who lived there, in modest houses stretching, in the last block, along only the north side of the street. The south side gave way to a wooded slope with pleasant views between the trees and shrubbery of Brown’s Inlet directly below, a tamed and lovely pond that didn’t, as far as Bee could tell, actually empty into the canal. She wasn’t sure how it got the name “Inlet.”

  This is where she drove not long after lunch on Saturday. She’d slept like a log and then woken up with a start at eleven wanting only to head back to the hospital. It was all her mother could do to get her to shower and eat something. There was still no word from Trish Turner. No word from the hospital, although she wasn’t sure they considered her family enough to contact, even though she’d left her name with the ward clerk.

  “You’re his amanuensis,” Bee’s father had said over fresh bagels from Kettleman’s.

  “Should I see a doctor about it?” she asked.

  He chuckled as he slathered mustard on the corned beef in his sandwich. “A scribe,” he said. “A fancy word for it.”

  “Amanuensis,” said Bee, liking the sound of it. “If all you’ve written down is less than a dozen words, do you still get to call yourself an amanuensis?”

  Her father considered the question seriously and then shook his head. “Probably just stick to scribe,” he said.

  She didn’t care. It was something to do. She wasn’t sure she could sit in that blinking, beeping, ticking room without some task to perform, however menial, however sporadic. The space capsule seemed so far away from her sun-splattered kitchen. For after a night of rain, the sun had come out of hiding and was ready for interrogation. Where were you on the night of Friday, April fifteenth? A foolish question to ask the sun, which, after all, had a foolproof alibi. But such was the cast of Bee’s mind that she saw everyone as a suspect right now. Everyone but Turn.

  As much as she was in a hurry to resume her place at his bedside, amanuensing or scribing or just scribbling — whatever it was — she turned onto Wilton on her way to the hospital and pulled over to park as soon as she found a place. She locked the car door and set off on foot. In only minutes the sky had darkened again, and, just like that, the promise of a sunny Saturday was compromised, the sun trapped behind a leaden veil, a lot of veils — a regular harem of veils. She prayed for a wind to blow the veils away. The stillness disturbed her. The sound of her boots on the sidewalk disturbed her. She stopped and closed her eyes, breathed in deeply the new greenery, the sweet fragrance of the rain-wet street. Whatever else was happening, the earth was breaking free from winter’s stranglehold. She wondered whether she should dig up a handful of dirt to take to Donovan. A whiff’s worth: aromatherapy.

  She passed Donovan’s house, the windows shuttered. No lights on. No one home. Donovan’s house: just three doors up from the accident scene.

  The sight of the yellow crime-scene tape made her forget about spring awakenings. Made her wish she hadn’t wolfed down her brunch. There were no cop cars there, only two or three neighbors with dogs on leashes, standing on the periphery of the tape, staring down the hill, talking in low murmurs. Maybe someone would know something. She moved closer.

  From what she could piece together, he had been hit facing the vehicle. A vehicle that, thanks to Staff Sergeant Bell’s slip, she knew might have been a pickup, a red pickup. A red pickup so high off the ground that instead of throwing Donovan up over the hood had launched him into the thicket on the hillside above the inlet.

  There were tire tracks on the grass verge by the curb on the south side of the street. The vehicle had humped itself up onto the grass before stopping. The tracks went only a yard or so. She stared at them, muddy from the rain. Was there enough of a pattern there to distinguish a make of tire? Bell hadn’t said anything about that, just the paint chip, a paint chip not as big as her baby fingernail, embedded in Donovan’s clothes somewhere. She shuddered. She looked at the burnt rubber on the road, where the back tires had squealed to a stop, or was it that they’d squealed as he backed up and split the scene, the tires spinning and spinning as the vehicle sped away, heading up toward Bank Street?

  She looked around. Someone must have heard something. Seen something.

  She turned to look down the street, the direction in which the truck or whatever it was must have come in order to have climbed the curb in this manner. The corner, where the comma ended and Oakland began, was less than twenty yards away. The car had to have been coming from that direction, and yet that meant rounding the curve — a tight curve, almost ninety degrees. No one — no one in his right mind — could have come around that curve fast enough to launch a boy into orbit. He’d have heard the vehicle squealing as the driver held the turn.

  So how did it happen?

  There was a path at the juncture of Wilton and Oakland that continued down through the trees to the inlet.

  Might the vehicle have been parked on the path? It was paved and wide enough. That would have given it a more or less straight trajectory toward the point of impact. But what was a vehicle doing on a pedestrian pathway? Unless it was waiting for him.

  Waiting for Donovan.

  But that was ridiculous. Who would do such a thing? Donovan’s enemies included pitchers he’d burned for a home run, infielders who’d gotten in his way when he was sliding aggressively into base. Oh, there were guys at school who hated him, no doubt: What was there not to hate? He was good-looking, pleasant, smart, and talented. But school grudges didn’t usually escalate to murder. She shivered at the thought, swore at herself for even thinking it. It wasn’t murder. Not yet. Hopefully it wouldn’t ever be murder because he was going to wake up and be with her again. The point was that it was inconceivable there could be anyone who hated him enough to do this.

  “Probably drunk,” one of the dog walkers said.

  Bee wondered. It didn’t seem likely. A drunk driver would have had even less control; he would have never made it around Oakland onto Wilton. He’d have ended up flying down the hill himself, crashing into a tree.

  “Or stoned,” said someone else. “Probably wearing headphones. Stepped right into it.”

  Bee froze. They weren’t talking about a drunk driver: they were blaming what happened on Donovan. Suddenly, she couldn’t stand to be there for another minute. She shoved her hands into her pockets and headed back toward the car.

  “Fucking idiots,” she said as she passed the gawkers.

  “Hey!” said one of them. And his hideous little dog started yapping at her.

  “Show a little respect,” the other one called after her. “Someone died here.”

  He assumed that the woman standing at the door was the one he had seen leaving the shed. He had watched her at her window shade half hoping for a peep show. She shut the door behind her. Donovan did not move. He wasn’t even sure he could. What he could do was get the cell phone out of her sight line by sliding the chair to his right.

  “You didn’t waste any time,” she said.

  He looked at her. She was leaning against the door. The door was red. She was blond, her hair short and manageable. She was wearing blue jeans and a denim jacket over a pale-green print T-shirt. She was probably in her midthirties, he thought. There was something about her, he . . .

  “Cat got your tongue?” she said.

  “I didn’t take anything,” said Donovan.

  “No,” she said. “I can see that.”

  “I just needed to get inside out of the . . .” He couldn’t begin to say what it was he wanted to get away from — pretty well everything.

  She nodded as if she understood. “And charge up your phone,” she said.

  The fallen look on his face seemed to amuse her but not for long. Her expression grew stern. “Was it you who killed my dog?”

  He would have thought nothing could
surprise him. He was wrong.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard what I said.”

  “I didn’t see a dog,” he said. “Didn’t hear a dog.”

  “Which, you’ve got to admit, is surprising on a farm.”

  Donovan tried to swallow, found he had nothing to swallow. His mouth was bone-dry. Had there been a dog that other time? He had been here before, it was just . . . He shook his head, not able to connect the dots.

  The woman leaned back against the door. Her hands were in her back pockets. As far as he could tell, she didn’t have a weapon on her. She wasn’t as big as he was, but she sure didn’t look worried. And he hardly looked dangerous. He tried to imagine gimping over to her and taking a swing, knocking her out and running off into the night. Ha!

  “I don’t know anything about your dog, lady.” His voice was a grave, shadowy thing. “Honest to God.”

  Her right eyebrow rode up about a quarter inch. It was the only change to her expression. Then she nodded toward the back of the shed. He followed her gaze. In the shadows, there was a king-size freezer, surrounded on one side by a stack of oversize tires and on the other side by a generator. Donovan had to look twice before he saw what she wanted him to see. She flipped on another light and there was no doubt. A dog. It was lying on the top of the freezer, unmoving.

  “The bowhunter,” she said. Donovan didn’t understand. It was as if she had spoken to him in another language. “Bowhunter,” she repeated, and drew an imaginary bow, letting an invisible arrow fly straight at him.

  He swallowed hard. Looked back at the lifeless dog. A big black Lab by the look of it, and now he saw it — an arrow, embedded in the dog’s neck. He turned to look back at her. “I’ve never even held a bow and arrow in my life.”