Sitting beside Matt Lincoln on the sofa, Cara explains herself. “Music is the one thing Adam cares about the most. If every other neural pathway’s been blocked, music is the superhighway open to Adam’s brain. He has perfect pitch, a perfect memory for music. He can sing back anything he’s heard once, any song, any language. I’ve been going over this and over this, and I keep thinking that for Adam to have fallen apart so completely, music must have had some part in it. Someone was singing, music was playing, something. Last night, for the first time in months, he asked to watch The Magic Flute and I kept thinking, Why this one? And then it occurred to me, it’s so simple, really. There’s a forest full of music. Papageno’s playing his flute, the fairies are singing. That’s what took him out there. There was music in the woods.”
Lincoln nods, writes all of this down. He is all business now, as if he never stopped by last night, as if they never got into high school reminiscences. He shakes his head: “It’s interesting, I’ll admit. But you shouldn’t have gone there by yourself. Frankly, that was a dangerous and stupid thing to do.”
“I had to. I had to see what he could hear. And it’s amazing—he could hear a Walkman.”
“Why are you so sure he heard music?”
“That’s what draws him. That would have compelled him enough to break a rule about leaving the playground.”
“Any music?”
“He has favorites. An opera would have been the biggest lure. Something more contemporary would have been less likely. He doesn’t really respond to rap or hip-hop.”
Surely he sees the way this helps, that it rules out a world of teenage suspects.
“All right, Cara, I’m going to be honest with you,” he says. “These ideas are good, but I’ve got a DA’s office that’s already written Adam off. That’s how these guys think. They want a perfect witness who can testify in court, they want a case they can prosecute, neat and tidy. Now, my instincts are different. I think, if I’ve got the right guy, I’ll build the case. I’ll shred his alibis, I’ll get a confession. I’ll do whatever I have to. But in this instance, I have to say—I agree with them. I don’t think anything Adam does or says is going to tell us much.” He shifts in his seat, looks at the door Adam and Morgan have disappeared behind. “Watching Adam now, the way his eyes stay down on the ground, the way he shuts out what’s around him, I have to say: I don’t think he saw anything.”
Cara shakes her head. “Of course he saw something. Look at him.”
“There’s no question he’s traumatized, I don’t doubt that. He knows everyone around him is upset. He knows something bad happened, but does he know the girl is dead? Have you talked to him about it? Explained dead?”
What can she say? We’re getting there? I will? “No,” she says.
“Look, it’s not just Adam. A lot of kids are terrible witnesses. This happens all the time, a kid stands ten feet from a murder, and you want to know what they can usually tell you? The color of the guys’ pants. They’re too scared to look up. Faces are scary. Most of the time, a kid standing in the same room when a murder takes place can’t tell you what weapon was used. They can’t see that stuff. Their brains don’t process it.”
Cara guesses he’s talking about three-or four-year-old witnesses—that the preschool brain is developmentally unable to fathom such a thing. And maybe he’s right to put Adam in this group. It’s sad yet also a relief, actually: Maybe the mazes and walls of his impenetrable brain have, in some way, spared him.
Except for sitting on the swings at the playground, Morgan hasn’t been alone with Adam before and it’s hard to judge what he should do after Cara asks him to stay with Adam in the family room while she talks to the policemen. “Want to play Boggle?” he asks, though Adam doesn’t seem to be listening. He is staring out the window, his back to Morgan.
He can hear Cara talking to the policemen in the other room. If this doesn’t work, he’ll go listen at the door, try to hear what they’re saying, he decides, and then Adam turns slightly, away from the window, and Morgan tries again. “Do you want to play Boggle? You don’t have to.”
Instead of answering, Adam crosses the room to the shelf, pulls down the Boggle box. He carries it to the table, opens it up. Morgan thinks, It’s interesting how Adam understands more than he lets on. Adam takes out the Boggle cube, shakes it, and holds up the timer. It occurs to Morgan that maybe he could just ask, Hey, Adam, who killed the girl? He takes a seat, picks up his pencil. Now that he’s thought of the words, it’s hard not to say them. They’re stuck in his mind.
Though it’s a bad jumble of letters—only two vowels—Adam starts writing and for once in his life, Morgan doesn’t care about winning, doesn’t pick up his pencil or write anything at all. He stares at the sand timer and leans across the table. “Hey, Adam. About that girl…” he starts to say, and then he looks down and notices the words Adam is writing. They’re impossible, way too long for words on a Boggle list, which should be only three or four letters each. Morgan can’t read them all—Adam’s handwriting is terrible—but he looks at the letters in the game, looks over at the list. It’s ridiculous. He’s got elefant written down and there isn’t even an E.
“There’s something else,” Lincoln says. “This morning we got the autopsy back, and blood loss suggests she’d been dead longer than we originally thought, approximately an hour when we found her, which means the perpetrator didn’t run away because he heard the police. He got interrupted at least thirty minutes before the police got there. The most likely scenario is that Adam stopped him.”
Cara looks up, surprised. “Adam?”
“It might have simply been with his presence. He might have appeared, and the guy was startled enough by the prospect of an eyewitness to run away. That’s a possibility. There’s another, though.” He hesitates. Cara looks over at Teddy, who has accompanied them home and now stands in the living room, his arms folded. After all his silence, it finally occurs to her: Teddy’s angry at me. It’s been ten years, and he still thinks what happened is my fault.
Lincoln keeps going: “The question we’re asking ourselves is why, when a guy has been so thorough in his cleanup, which he has—we found two tire marks on the side of the road, but not a single footprint around them, meaning the guy must have prepped somehow, planned what he was doing, really quite meticulously—so why would a guy this thorough not have killed Adam as well?” Cara swallows and nods. Is Teddy hearing all this? My son almost died and you’re still mad at me? “One idea we have is that he knew Adam and liked him well enough to spare him. Or simply knew his limitations as an eyewitness. If we go with that theory, it puts Adam at an increased risk right now, which is why we want to station an officer here at your house. For the time being, we’ll ask that you not take Adam out without letting us know. And, obviously, that you not return to the crime scene.”
“All right,” she nods, and instantly worries: Will Teddy be the first officer he stations?
Lincoln looks down at his notebook, turns a page. “There’s one more thing from the autopsy notes. We have very little evidence that Amelia put up a fight—no defensive wounds, nothing under her fingernails—which could suggest a couple of things. She knew the assailant, or she was attacked too quickly to fight back. It’s rare to find so little forensic evidence on a victim, though it happens, it’s possible. The thing is: some fibers were found on her clothes.”
He stops talking, forcing her to look up. “And—?”
“And they’re a match to Adam’s sweater.”
For a long time, she doesn’t say anything.
“That might not mean much, but it does mean they didn’t just walk out there together. At some point, they touched.”
After he leaves, Cara is grateful to remember that Morgan is here and will need a ride home; she has to find car keys, her wallet. “I’m allowed, right?” she says, her first words to Teddy since Lincoln has left. “I’m allowed to drive this boy home, am I not?” If he’s angry at me, she thinks
, I’ll be angry back. It was ten years ago, and it wasn’t all my fault.
“Yes. You’re allowed.”
In the car, alone with Morgan and Adam, Cara talks quickly. “I had to go there, had to test the sound dynamics. See if something he heard might have made him cross the field, which is exactly what happened. They’re going to thank me for this, I swear to God. I’m going to be right. What I don’t understand is how Adam and Amelia got across without being seen. A huge empty expanse of green—how can two kids cross it without being noticed?”
“It isn’t empty,” Morgan says.
“Yes it is. They’re not allowed to play soccer at recess.”
“They don’t play soccer. They play this weird game, Battle Zone, where you’re not supposed to get seen. So you run across, and if you’re seen someone points a finger at you and that means you’re dead. People start dying a few minutes before recess is over. They lie down on the grass and teachers don’t care. They just blow their whistles and tell people to come in.”
“Kids are lying around on the field pretending to be dead?”
Morgan shrugs. “Not always. But yeah, sometimes. I don’t know. They used to play that game last year. Maybe they stopped. It’s stupid. Stupid people play. Maybe Amelia and Adam ran into the woods to get away from that game.”
“God, it reminds me of why I hated elementary school.” Cara shakes her head. “The only thing I hated more was junior high.”
He stares at her, eyes wide, as if this is a stunning revelation. “Really?”
“Everyone is so self-conscious. I always got caught up in things that didn’t matter—who was my friend, who wasn’t.”
“I don’t have any friends.”
She smiles. “Oh, Morgan, I’m sure that’s not true.”
“It is. That’s why I’m in this group for people who have no friends. It used to be I didn’t care. Now I guess I do. A little bit.”
She doesn’t know what to say. “Well, Adam and I are your friends now. That’s a start.”
He nods, and seems to think for a moment. “Why would Adam and Amelia have walked out to the woods? Were they friends?”
In all innocence, he’s posing the question she can hardly bear to consider herself. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about her.” Maybe she has made a mistake, not pursuing this more. Maybe she can’t bear to hear what she fears: The girl did like Adam, pursued him somehow. She looks at Adam in her mirror, sees from his expression that he’s listening to the music playing thinly over the radio, hearing none of this conversation, which means she might as well be honest, make it clear to Morgan. Every year, during the first week of school she takes pictures of his classmates and glues them to a poster board with MY FRIENDS written at the top. It’s a way for Adam to learn names and faces, and she’s also hoped, to understand an abstract word like friends, that they are meant to be children, approximately his age, though it’s never really worked. When asked to choose a friend for an activity, his eyes always flick first and most hopefully at the teachers, even though time has taught him that Mrs. Wolf and Mrs. Ellis are not choices he’s allowed to make, that friends are not the bosomed women he feels most comfortable around, but the unpredictable, frightening boys around his height who play games at recess that he doesn’t understand. “I think that, for Adam, friendship has a different definition. He thinks of teachers as his friends or other adults. He’s never had another child as a friend. Other kids are usually…confusing to him.” It’s hard for her to admit, but maybe her saying this will help Morgan see why he matters. “That he’s even talked to you, played a game, gone and sat on the swings with you, all of that is very unusual for him.”
Does he understand what she’s trying to say?
“This detective says they touched, that she’s got his clothing fibers on her, but he hates being touched. He’d do anything to avoid it, so I don’t really understand how that could have happened.” It’s taken years of practice to learn the sort of touch his body can bear, and now she knows it well, deep pressure, bear hugs. What Adam hates above all is the incidental touching that happens daily between children: shoulders brushing, fingers tapping. If his sweater fibers are on her body, does that mean she terrified him in some inadvertent manner—did she brush his arm or pluck at his sweater long enough to unloose fibers?
“Because I could find out,” Morgan says.
She looks up into the mirror. “What do you mean?”
“I know a few people from her classroom. I used to volunteer in there a little. I could go back. See what they say.”
Back home, Cara is grateful for the smallest of favors: Teddy is outside, seated in his car, which means there’s no need for a conversation that dances around what neither of them, apparently, wants to talk about. She steers Adam inside to the family room where she finds his Boggle list that makes no sense: elefant, tres, berd, flut. Adam’s spelling is bad but not usually this bad. It means these are words he’s heard or thought of but hasn’t seen in print any time recently. Nor do they have much to do with the letters in the Boggle cube. She carries the list over and kneels down in front of him. “What is this, baby? Why did you write elephant?”
She doesn’t expect an answer of course, but his vacant stare unnerves her. “Can you read this, sweetheart? What you wrote?” She holds the paper up because sometimes this works—he can read an answer he would otherwise not be able to give. This time, though, he doesn’t.
His eyes move away and she lowers the paper.
That night, she makes a bowl of chicken soup that Adam will only eat if she lifts the spoon to his mouth. She dips the spoon carefully, no noises, nothing to startle him. His eyes are absent, his face empty of expression, though his lips open each time to receive the food.
Before dinner, she picked out the books they’d look at as they ate. This is one of their oldest traditions, what they do to get through the meals she insists they eat together as she always did with her parents. Usually, she lets him pick two and she picks two. His choices are always childhood favorites: Dr. Seuss books, Farmer Duck, books most nine-year-olds have long outgrown. Her selections usually have an agenda, books about bike riding or fractions, the things he needs motivation to learn. Tonight, though, she moves one of his old favorites—Green Eggs and Ham—in between them. It only takes a few pages to remember that she hates this book, and the way it goes on, foxes and boxes, goats and boats. Years ago she used to push it, back when the goal of her homespun curriculum was “trying new foods.” Now Adam loves the book but still eats approximately the same five foods every night for dinner: rice, peanut butter, chicken, ham, carrots.
Halfway through, she tries an experiment and skips a whole chunk of text. Usually, with an old favorite, his brain won’t allow it. He’ll back them up, fill in whatever should come next; pore over the page until the rhythm is correct again. This time, though, he says nothing. He doesn’t notice. She skips some more, her heart beating, fearing she might cry if he doesn’t stop her soon. She stops reading, closes the book, and they sit, for a length of time she can’t measure. Then, out of nowhere, Adam opens his mouth and says in a voice not his own: “Watch yourself!”
She stares at him, stunned. “What was that, baby?”
He rocks in his chair, his hands on the table edge.
“Adam, sweetheart. Say that again.”
“Watch yourself!” The voice is low, exactly like a grown man’s. It’s uncanny, the imitations he’s capable of. There’s almost an accent to it, but what would it be? Swedish? German? Adam gets up from the chair and circles the table, humming. He doesn’t seem upset by the memory, though it’s hard to say—agitation and excitement can look the same with him. “Did a man say that to you? In the woods?”
He shakes his head, looks around the room, and then at her, perplexed, as if he has no idea what she’s talking about.
Later, she straightens the kitchen, gathering her thoughts before she calls Lincoln to tell him—that if Adam didn’t see anything, he
did hear something, and his brain is like a tape recorder with a playback mode. He can remember anything he’s ever heard, and now he has remembered something. His ears were still operating, in their extraordinary fashion, taking in everything, she thinks, and then she turns and sees something she hadn’t noticed before, tucked behind the garbage can. There’s a tuft of white fur. At first, she fears it’s some small dead creature, then she bends down and takes a moment to realize exactly what it is: the rabbit’s foot from his backpack, pinned to the ground by a steak knife driven through its center.
Alone at night, June waits for him to come, planning speeches she wants to say, but fears she never will. This murder has made her worry about everything—Teddy, his safety, all of her students. She worries that without warning, anyone might die suddenly, never knowing how she feels about them. With Teddy, she has held back for so long, she hardly knows how she’d express herself now. Such was Teddy’s naïveté at the beginning of their relationship—when it was all nervous coffee dates—that she thought of him as a student of sorts, someone who needed and would follow her gentle instructions. (“It’s okay to undress me,” she once whispered in the dark. “Okay, sure,” he said happily.) Now, every night, she fears getting a phone call telling her he is dead and this will be the tenderest thing she can remember saying to him.
When Teddy finally comes, it is later than usual, almost one o’clock; she opens the door and sees, on his face, something is different. “I met the boy,” he says.
She knows, without being told, who he means. His hands are shoved in his back pockets, his equipment sags down on his hips. There’s an urgency to what he wants to say but no words to say it. “He doesn’t talk,” he says.
“Yes he does. Not very much, but he does talk. He will again.” She has spoken with Teddy about her work, and about these kids. He shouldn’t be shocked, but he obviously is.