The River Burns (39 page)

■   ■   ■

Wind, snuffed in the valleys,
sullied the mountaintop. Women battled to keep their hair and hems in place, while men clamped hands over grey tufts to preserve a semblance of grooming and pulled closed their lapels. The minister's buoyant words suffered in the stiffer gusts. Despite the difficulties, dust came to dust, and ashes to ashes, and Tara's heart, really for the first time through the morning, slung low.
Death.
She could remind herself that it came to everyone, that every creature ever to step upon the earth either died or had that moment coming, as did those as yet unborn. Whatever time she would know after her death she probably knew something similar before she was born, be it nothingness or
somethingness
, so really, what was the difference? The fear, the dread, she supposed, and the unknown, composed the difference. When dread was allowed to knock on the door, when she permitted herself to anticipate the end, to speculate on whatever came next, she suspected that no matter what came next it was nothing new—
just new compared to yesterday, or maybe not even—
she quivered. Internally, she quaked. She wished, in a way, that she could attend a funeral—she'd been to a mere half dozen as an adult—without thinking about dying herself.
That's Alice in that box. What if she wants out? What if I want out when my time comes? But that's not Alice in that box. Girlfriend, tell yourself this—that'll never be you. Your chunk of change—okay. Your old now useless lifeless bod. But not—me.
She wished she could just think about Alice, and as easily as that commune with her. But death, as happened at these things, got in the way.

In departing the cemetery, Tara cast her gaze across the windswept lawn of the departed, and over the robust hills. A river flowed a long way below in the valley, invisible from above save for a portion of its darkened gulley. Clouds on a scud.
You can see forever if you can see an inch, dear Alice.
A good choice of burial plot, as a prime minister who'd been a Nobel laureate deduced before her. Alive, Alice envisioned this, the sight lines, the intemperate winds, the trees, the sheer expanse of vista, the immaculate, changing skies. Alive, this seemed a good place to be, a decent spot to stow her last material possession, her lonesome old impoverished carcass, a good place to lay it down gently within a beautiful earth.

She spied, one gravestone over, the maternal family name. Alice's middle name. This time, the translation hit her.
Beauchamp.
Good field. Beautiful field. Close enough to
wake field
, in a way, to be spooky. As if she was born for a fine grave such as this, and here.

Tara did not know what she was going to do with her life, what the future might stimulate, what adventures and travels might arise or where she might die and when, or with whom, and she knew that it would be nothing but silly to forsake the whims of fate to cause this fresh inner desire to come true, but she did feel that she wouldn't mind being buried here—
ashes, though, not the whole damn body, cremate me, please, the worms
—when her time came. She'd be content to join dear Alice on this slope. Did the grand old lady not suggest it?

No rush, though. Just saying.

And perhaps that was it, this careless intimacy with her own death that put her awash, instigating feelings both romantic and more private than she wanted them to be, a lustiness gathering steam and taking precedence.
Sex and death, whoo boy.
And a need, reborn, for love and frolic. She stepped off the grass of the cemetery onto the gravel road and she felt herself weakening, warmish, damp and at least inwardly wild.
Willis, this could be your lucky morning,
a joke to herself as he drove her off the mountain of the dead. A joke she banished the instant it surfaced to focus instead on
my policeman. He's in uniform right now. Looks good in uniform, doesn't he? Oh mercy, I want him. I want him to want me. Holy! Girl, girl, get a hold of—

■   ■   ■

Officers Maltais and Vega both
signed a petition to restore the old covered bridge and have it named after Alice B. McCracken. Neither thought the effort was anything but impractical and a bit dopey, and both were aware that as officers of the law they were expressly forbidden from signing petitions or publicly taking a side. But they needed a measure of traction in this town. They came up against a public that refused to have anything to do with them. People clammed up. The detectives remembered the old lady with some fondness, although she was no different than the rest, but in supporting this petition, others might think better of them, loosen up a little. Talk. At the funeral they spotted Denny O'Farrell and followed him and his family home. They already knew where he lived but catching him in was proving difficult. This time they parked along the curb just as his truck came to a halt in the driveway.

When Denny clambered out of his vehicle, he spotted them stepping out of theirs. His wife said, “Den.” He calmly instructed her to take the kids inside. She did. He wandered down the driveway and met the officers at the edge of his property.

“Some people in this town,” Maltais said in English, “want us to talk to them on the street. Like we might contaminate their grass or something.”

“I don't even know who you are,” Denny said.

“Sure you do. But you're right. We haven't been properly introduced.”

“We're not here to piss on your lawn. We're friends of your brother,” Vega said, but he didn't extend his hand. He reached into his pocket as Denny was essentially forcing him to do and pulled out his badge. He held it up and the shield glinted in the sunlight. “Vega,” he said.

“Maltais,” the other one said and he also showed his badge. “Do you have any more formalities in mind?”

Denny said, “Pardon me?” A way of questioning the man's attitude, but then he broke from that poor start and invited the policemen into the backyard for a beer. He wanted to demonstrate that he wasn't afraid of them, and not antagonistic either. He wanted them to know that, whether or not it was true.

“It's early,” Maltais noted.

“I was at a funeral,” Denny said. “That can build up a thirst.”

“We're working,” Vega pointed out.

“You're friends of my brother, you said. So you don't have to call it work. Come around out back, guys. We can sit at least.”

Maltais agreed to sit, and perhaps to drink beer. Vega shrugged in partial agreement. “We were at that funeral, too.”

“You were? Why?”

“We met her. Mrs. McCracken. We liked her. We interviewed her.”

“You interviewed Mrs. McCracken? She probably shook you down.”

Vega smiled. “Maybe that's why we went to the funeral, out of respect.” Each of the three men knew that that was a lie.

“Come on back,” Denny encouraged them. “There might be food, too.”

They moved more slowly than he did, which caused Denny to look back a couple of times to check on their delay. Vega, his suit jacket open, walked with his hands in his trouser pockets and his head up, looking around as though gathering impressions. Maltais cinched his belly with a single jacket button, which did appear on the verge of springing loose. He directed his observations to the ground. Denny's first instinct was to dismiss him, perhaps because he appeared slovenly and depressed, but his second thought was to scratch that opinion. The man's nose to the ground that way, he looked like an overweight bloodhound, droopy of flesh and bleary-eyed, but a bloodhound as an investigator was not someone to ignore. From his testicles up through his gullet, through his lungs and heart and windpipe, Denny felt fear inexorably rising.

Val was ahead of him. She put out the beer and salsa and chips. Then she went back inside but Denny knew she'd be listening in. He twisted a beer cap off and handed the bottle to Vega.

“Okay without a glass?”

“No problem. Thanks.”

“I could get a glass.”

“In a backyard, beer is best straight from the bottle.”

Maltais agreed and accepted his beer and Denny rushed to untwist a third cap and to swallow. He was not certain if the beer helped him relax but it felt good to quench his flaring thirst.

“So was it worth it?” Vega asked quietly.

“Excuse me?”

Neither man answered him. They sipped their beers while Denny took another long pull.

Then Vega said, “I mean, you could get ten years. More or less. I know it's not worth that. But the stress. The worry. Even if you get away with it, was it worth it?”

“I don't know what you mean,” Denny said.

“I'm sorry to hear that,” Vega told him.

Denny took the bait. “What are you sorry to hear?”

Vega shrugged first. “Because that's what a guilty man would say. A guilty man says, ‘I don't know what you mean.' Both the innocent man and the guilty man know exactly what I mean, but only the guilty man asks me to repeat the question or tells me that he doesn't understand it. Did you know that?”

Denny said that he didn't know that.

“There you go. You see?”

“I don't see anything,” Denny said.

“You don't know how a guilty man responds, no reason why you should, so you said no. Plain and simple. You didn't say to me,
I don't know what you mean
. That time, you gave me an answer.
No
. Now, if I say, was it worth it what you did, and you're an innocent man, you would say . . . well, you tell me, what do you say, if you're innocent? I'll give you a second chance.”

“You're playing games with me.”

“No, I'm not, and you just failed your second chance. Ten years you can get, Denny. Maybe an even dozen.”

“You'll lose your house,” Maltais added.

“Your family.”

“Maybe not his family.”

“Maybe not your family. But your house.”

“Your truck.”

“Both trucks. Maybe fifteen years.”

“Fifteen?” Maltais whistled in mock surprise. “That long? Wow. Your good life. Gone. Your friends, they'll enjoy the new bridge.” Maltais rubbed the fingers of his right hand under the thumb. “They'll make the big bucks.”

“But not you,” Vega told him. “Counting down your time.”

Denny drank some more. “So what would an innocent man say?” he wanted to know.

“Ask the innocent. But since you agree with me that you're not innocent, he would not say what you just said.”

Val came out onto the back porch and she crossed her arms. “Okay, that's enough,” she said.

The three men looked at her.

“We're having a hard time with wives on this trip,” Maltais noted.

“They keep kicking us off their properties.”

“Nobody's kicking,” Val said. “But you are playing games and that's not fair. This is serious. Ask serious questions. We have the rumours to fight against. We can't do that if you play games.”

“Where were you the night of the fire?” Vega asked her.

“Me?”

“It's a serious question.”

Her eyes shot to Denny and back. “I was here,” she said.

“I believe you. Was your husband here?”

She needed the bulk of her strength not to look at Denny again. “No,” she said. “I mean, he was, of course, for dinner, but then he left.”

“You see?” Vega said, but she didn't see and he wasn't willing to tell her what she was supposed to see.

“That doesn't mean he did it,” Val protested.

“Of course not,” Maltais said.

“But if everything you say is true—” Maltais pointed out to her.

“—it probably means that you didn't do it yourself,” Vega finished the thought. “You're in the clear yourself, but of course, we never suspected you. But it also means that you can't say if he's innocent or guilty. Unless he's admitted it to you, you probably don't know. If he's denied it to you, well, that doesn't mean much, does it? So the point is, you're not a witness. We accept that. So if you don't mind, we'd like to talk to your husband alone, ma'am.”

She lingered, and looked at Denny finally. He nodded, and she went back inside. Denny was touched that she didn't slam the door, and he took that as a signal to stay in control of himself just as she was doing of herself.

“Rumours and innuendo. Interview games. Seriously, guys, what else you got? I mean, I doubt if you guys could care less if I'm guilty or innocent—”

“That's cynical, Mr. O'Farrell.”

“—you only want to know if you can pin this on me or not. So I don't care if you think I'm guilty or innocent, and I don't care if I act innocent or guilty because I don't know how the innocent or how the guilty act. Psychological bunk to me. You know it won't hold up in a court of law—”

“I've always noticed,” Vega interjected, “that only the guilty ever mention a court of law.”

“Oh, fuck off with that. What do you have? What evidence do you have to even be talking to me? I wondered, at first, why you never came to talk to me, because I know what people in town say. But now I get it. You wanted to build up your evidence first. To have something on me. Fair enough. So here you are. It took you a while, so what do you got? Speak now or bug out, that's what I say.”

“Or bug out?” Vega repeated.

“You see? I could say now that that's what a cop would say who didn't have any evidence. A cop who was talking to a guilty man, who knew
why
he was a guilty man, would have pinned back that guilty man's ears by now. Instead, you just repeated what I said with some kind of mock alarm. So, yeah, bug out. Since you've got nothing.”

“Your house. Your trucks. Maybe your family. Even if it's only five years.”

“Threats? Yeah, you got a lot of those. I'm waiting to hear some evidence. You don't have any. And do you know why you don't have any evidence?”