All the Things You Are (6 page)

Acting Teacher, Madison School of Dramatic Art, 2004–Present.

It's not just that she doesn't use her website: she avoids it.

She looks out across the backyard to the oak prairies of the Arboretum. There's just enough light in the sky now to make out the leafy outlines of the trees, just enough days shy of the first big wind of fall for the leaves still to cling. She has lost herself for hours on end at this window, staring out at the heavy old oaks, listening for the lapping sound of the waters of Lake Wingra. She didn't question that this was where they should live when Danny suggested it, even though he didn't seem particularly keen; she grew up close to woods and a lake herself. But often over the years she has felt it might have been better for him if they had found somewhere with no trace of his family or his past; somewhere to start afresh. Better for them both.

‘Here you are, babe, forty-eight new messages,' Dee says, passing the phone to Claire.

She scrolls quickly through them. None is from Danny. She shakes her head.

Dee does her scrunched-up you-may-not-like-what-I'm-going-to-say-but-I'll-say-it-anyway face.

‘The other thing to consider, maybe, sweetheart, is that Danny got some notion about what you were up to in Chicago, and went there – and forgive me if I'm, like,
fishing
, but you know I'm dying to know – found out something he wasn't supposed to, and went off the deep end and has gone on the lam like a spurned and betrayed Lothario. Care to comment? Paul Casey? Miss Taylor?'

And Claire, looking at the white filigree of dog hair that coats the floor and feeling her spirits flag, begins faintly to nod her head, thinking of Chicago, yes, Chicago a week ago, that reunion of middle-aged people who were once going to be somebody and only succeeded, if at all, in becoming themselves. It might have looked, if you didn't know for sure, like something
did
happen between her and Paul Casey, and she's not one hundred percent sure something didn't, although it doesn't matter a damn now.

But she's also thinking of Chicago fifteen years ago, when she and Paul got around, and did things they don't do any more, and met a lot of people she ordinarily wouldn't have met, including a) one of Danny's oldest friends, and b) the only people she's ever met in her life who could have done what somebody did to Mr Smith, or ordered it done, could have, and would have, without a second thought. And now Claire wonders for the first time if what has happened may in fact be her fault.

C
laire is usually good, perhaps too good, at locating the detached place inside her head, the one that supplies her with apt wisecracks and quotations from books, plays and films, usually at inappropriate moments, just to make reality that bit easier to bear. But the simultaneous arrival, at seven a.m. on Monday morning, of two deputies from the Dane County Sheriff's office, there to serve her a reminder notice (a
reminder
notice)
that the property she is standing in must be vacated within the next thirty-one days, as per the terms of the court-ordered foreclosure against the house three months previously, so as to enable free and vacant possession for its auction one calendar month from now, and two detectives from the Madison Police Department, there for reasons they have yet to disclose, stretches her to the limit. Some vague formulation about a sitcom written by David Lynch scuttles across the shore of her brain, but she's pretty sure it's second-hand.

She's standing, literally shaking (she can see she's shaking because the notice to quit in her hand is flapping in the air) in the doorway of the house as the deputies depart and the detectives move in. Claire knows they are detectives because they show her their badges, and because she knows they are detectives. Who else would come this early in the morning, dressed in suits that don't entirely fit them, the man's gray and shiny at the seams, sagging and loose at the shoulders, the woman's navy and new, bulging between the two buttons of the two-button coat?

The woman, who is in her thirties and not really overweight, eight pounds tops (maybe the suit was a stretch to begin with) looks at the paper in Claire's hand and raises her eyebrows in, not quite sympathy, that would be unprofessional, but what-are-you-gonna-do empathy, or so it seems to Claire, and bats it towards her partner, who is brown-eyed and fleshy faced and has eighties hair in a side parting, and does not look like he is in the empathy business this morning.

‘Ms Taylor?' he says.

‘Mrs Brogan. Ms Taylor, yes.'

‘Detective Fowler, of the Madison Police Department. This is Detective Fox. We'd like you to come take a look at something in your backyard.'

Mr Smith. Oh My God, Mr Smith. Claire had finally fallen into a blessed, bourbon-induced sleep somewhere around four, four-thirty. Since she awoke a couple of hours later, fully clothed, to the sound of the doorbell, she has simply been reacting – to the sheriff's deputies, to the cops – all the while having forgotten most, if not quite all, of what happened last night:

The emptied house;

The vanished family; and

Mr Smith.

(And what happened to Dee? Wasn't Dee here? Where did she go? Home, let's hope, so she doesn't a) get caught up in this; and b) witness Claire's further humiliation.)

Jesus Christ, the court-ordered foreclosure
three months ago
? Her house is about to be seized within the month and auctioned off to the highest bidder, because it isn't her house any more. And now cops are here, like at the beginning of some TV show, leading her to the scene of the crime, and she has to figure out what to say about her dead dog.
Claire is aware, as she follows the detectives past the deck and down towards the apple trees in the backyard, that they are looking at her strangely, as if she is not sufficiently surprised or upset by their arrival. But she knows what they're going to find, and in any case, what is the appropriate way to behave when you're confronted with the kind of news she has had? She has been more or less gaping for the twelve or so hours she has been home, gaping and bailing and gasping for breath and waiting for the camera crew to appear out of the bushes and say ‘Surprise! It's all a big hoax! Here's your husband!'

So she can kill him with her bare hands.

It's not that the death of her dog is the least of it, but she does wonder if, across the United States, whenever a pet is found dead, two detectives are dispatched to the scene as a general rule, or is it just a Mid-West thing? Since she has no direct experience of the police to date, she can't say, but it does strike her as unlikely. And how do they know anyway? The thought sequence, again on loan from a TV cop show: helicopter surveillance (at night); infra-red photography (she's not sure what this is, but has a notion it's what you need to use); cops identify and secure crime scene. And sure enough, she can see two officers in uniform unspooling yellow tape and a police vehicle disgorging a photographer and some kind of forensic specialist in a white paper suit. For a dead dog? It briefly reminds her of a TV detective show the girls used to watch, but instead of humans, everyone was an elephant or a hippo or a chimp, and the dog wouldn't have been dead, it would just have had a sore paw. But the girls would never watch such a show now, considering themselves far too old for such childish nonsense, and neither, probably, would anyone else, unless it winked over the shoulders of the children with allegedly humorous allusions to sex and drugs and political scandals. She tears up suddenly, vivid with the sense of passing time and lost innocence, of infants growing old and cynical, of the sad inevitability of decay and death, an entire bolt of somber, Four-Last-Things thought and feeling unfolding and falling through her mind in a lurid cascade. As they pass beneath the gold- and rust- and red-leaved apple trees, her feet crunching on fallen fruit, shivering now in the sharp October air, she braces herself for the sight of Mr Smith in full light, ashamed that she didn't bury the body, or do more than strew a blanket over it, ashamed that she failed to treat him with the respect she feels was his due. But how could she have buried the family dog without the girls, without Danny?

‘It's Mr Smith I feel sorry for.' That was what Danny used to say whenever some domestic crisis hit, and Mr Smith, merrily oblivious, couldn't understand why no one was playing with him. And of course Mr Smith, in his merry, giddy oblivion, was the great disspeller of domestic crisis, the repository, as the girls grew older and complicated and
human,
the locus of sheer happiness in their house, the only one when domestic crisis hit that you
could
play with, that you
wanted
to. Claire is shaking now, her eyes so blurred with tears that she is upon the scene before she can discern that what is lying there is not remotely what she expected. Her first thought is: maybe it was a dream after all! Because Mr Smith's body is nowhere to be seen. Instead, there is the body of a man, his hair and clothes stained with mulch and dead leaves and clay, his clothes torn, dark smears of what might be blood around the four or five wounds to his stomach and chest. The body of a dead man, not a dead dog. It was like a sneeze, she says later, as involuntary as a sneeze, the sound she makes, the
laugh
she laughs, as if some sorcerer had waved his wand or cast his spell and reality had been overthrown, and there, before the fascinated, appalled eyes of the detectives, stands a woman
laughing
at the sight of a corpse in her own backyard and, indeed, resisting a powerful urge to clap her hands.

‘Ms Taylor?' Detective Fowler says, and there's a tone to it, a ‘pull yourself together woman, for God's sake' undercurrent she almost appreciates, as if it is clear she's being hysterical and in truth deserves a slap.

‘I'm sorry,' she says. ‘It's just …'

‘Just what?' says Detective Fox abruptly.

But Claire can't really say what it's just.

It's just that someone has gotten rid of the body of her slaughtered dog and replaced it with the body of a man she thinks she recognizes, a man she suspects she saw a week ago at the barbecue, disguised as the Angel of Death, standing at her garden gate, waving his hand (or shaking his fist) at her husband.

It's just that her husband armed himself with a knife before he approached this man, and then they disappeared out into the Arboretum together.

It's just that she never asked Danny what had happened (she was in a hurry after the party to get to the airport for her Chicago flight, or at least that's what she told herself) even though she could see he was shaken by whatever
had
happened.

It's just that she didn't see this man's face then, but she recognizes him now. She knows that he's one of Danny's oldest friends; she knows his name.

It's just that she's pretty sure her husband didn't know she knew him. Or that she had met him. Or that she had as good as slept with him.

‘Ms Taylor, have you ever seen this man before? Do you know who he is?'

Claire reckons she has to say something, and better, when the cops are involved, that it be true.

‘Yes. His name is Gene Peterson.'

F
owler and Fox. That's what they went by. It always sounded like an old English firm to Nora, makers of saddles, or boots, or marmalade. Fowler and Fox, by Royal Appointment. And by rights it should have been Fox and Fowler, given she does all the work. All right, that isn't entirely true. Just all the legwork, what most people would call the policework. And the fact that it suits her means she isn't resentful, much. It's just, when they catch a case, when they arrive at a crime scene, when the whole deal is breaking, is
real
, it has gotten so she can actually sense these waves of apathy, of indifference emanating from her partner, indifference and, worse, actual hostility toward the business in hand. It isn't laziness – sit Detective Ken Fowler at a desk and he'd pull a twelve-hour shift – and it isn't because he's eight months away from his twenty (although that hasn't exactly helped matters). He's always been like this.

He simply doesn't like being out and about. In someone else's house, on a call, on patrol, it doesn't matter: if Ken can't be in his own home, he likes to be in the station house. It's something deep in his wiring. He is the most domesticated man she has ever met. Even when his marriage was in trouble on account of his wife running about town drinking and screwing around, he still wouldn't stay out for more than a second drink. ‘I've got to get home,' he would say, and he would go on saying it for as long as she kept making a fool of him, and after she left him, and when it was more than clear even to him that she was not coming back. ‘I've got to get home,' Ken would murmur, and slope off into the night, flicking his hair back from his forehead in that eighties way he had, too much a creature of habit to imagine what his life might be like if he were to contemplate changing it.

So she knows that he will suggest to Claire Taylor that she come down to the station to talk to them there as a matter of course, not because he has weighed up the pros and cons, or thinks she might respond positively to the stimulating environment of an interview room, or has considered whether, because she's probably never even been arrested before, she might in response get intimidated and anxious and freak out and lawyer up on them, but simply because he wants to get back to his zone.

It's not that he's a bad detective. Each of the squad, or at least each of them in the West District, which is all she knows about, has at least one major flaw, something the others have to put up with and work around. With Nora, it's an impatience, a pride in not suffering fools, a harrying, chivying impulse and a caustic tone of voice that can turn a simple cross questioning of a witness – never mind a suspect – into a hectoring confrontation. To guard against which, she has to watch herself like a hawk: no hangovers, no sleepless nights, rigid impulse control. Easy.