After a couple hours he pulls into a motel. They’re somewhere in Pennsylvania, out in the country, just this roadside place with a sign that says Vacancy and a small café where you can maybe get a beer. They hurry through the sleet into the little office, where this old lady comes out and hands them a key.
They lose two days getting drunk and eating onion rings from the café and she shows him her thin naked body, her tiny wrists, her hungry sad eyes, her toes like mushrooms. I knew him, she says. I knew George Clare.
How? What happened?
I just did, that’s all.
You were friends?
No. Not friends.
Well, then, what?
You don’t want to know.
The way she says it, he thinks she might be right.
What, did he try to pick you up?
Yeah. He tried kind of hard.
He waits for her to say more, but she won’t and he’s not so sure he wants her to.
I’m afraid of him, she tells him later, after they make love. I just want to get as far away as I can.
He does all the driving. She’s a city girl, there’s no point trusting her behind the wheel. He has a little money, not much. All across the country they stay in one cruddy motel after another. They sleep on a blanket under the stars in South Dakota and wake the next morning to a stampede of cattle. They see some of the sights, the Black Hills, Mount Rushmore. Bryce Canyon. Near the Utah border one morning, an old gray coyote crosses the interstate right in front of their car. There’s nobody else on the road but them, and Eddy sees it as a sign. The wild dog grinning. On his way into the hills.
She says she knows someone in San Francisco who’s in a band. So that’s where they go. He ends up selling the hearse for cash to an outfit that does haunted cemetery rides; he figures his uncle will understand. For a while they stay in this old motel near the bus station, cats crying all night in the dumpsters, and he comes to know her way. She is a quiet girl, mysterious. Sometimes she murmurs in her sleep. He’ll watch her when they are sitting around doing nothing, just the way she looks in the sorry gray light through the window, the curtains billowing. How the shadows always find her.
He likes it there, the city on water. The wind funneling through the streets. The wharf with its noise and fish smells and stragglers with lazy eyes. It makes him want to play his horn, to play for her. When he does, her eyes slow down like the fog in this city, how it comes in sneaky and wet and like magic can make you disappear.
—
THEY FIND a place to rent on Hyde Street, over a Chinese restaurant. The apartment, if you can call it that, is the size of an eighteen-wheeler, with a little porch off the back that overlooks the parking lot of a church. You see brides in their netting and lace, their cars trailing soda cans, or sometimes big white limos or black ones and hearses and now and again the spooky gleam of a coffin, its pallbearers holding it like a battering ram to break open the gates of heaven. You see them adjusting their corsages or tugging at their sleeves.
Willis finds work as a waitress at a fish place on the wharf. Her friend Carlo introduces him to somebody affiliated with a marching band. It’s for funerals, he explains. This fat Chinaman listens to him play and gives him the job. It’s called the Green Street Band and they’re pretty famous. When somebody dies, usually a Chinese person, they march through the streets of Chinatown playing a dreary repertoire. It’s all about the horns, so it’s good practice for him and he likes the other players and they sometimes play cards. They’re mostly older, red-faced men beat up by too much of one thing or another. They give him a suit. He washes the shirt out every night.
Rainer sends him articles about the murder, cut with surgical precision from the Times Union. Eddy opens the envelopes with trepidation and pulls out scraps of newsprint, never with an actual letter, like his uncle thinks he had something to do with it. Like he knows something and that’s why he left.
Every time he pictures holding her that one time in her kitchen, he is overcome with pure despair. He should have done something. Saved her. How she cried that day after he took her to the clinic, how he held her hand for a long time till she stopped trembling.
He lays the articles out for Willis to see. She chooses one picture of George Clare and studies it carefully, like it was some telling artifact.
Do you think he did it?
A look of fear crosses her face. Don’t think, she says. Know.
8
YOU HAVE to let them come to you. The dead. Eventually, they tell you. He had learned that in Troy, on the few homicide cases he’d worked before coming out here. But you have to be open to it. It’s not just the body that matters. It’s all the other stuff around it, the stuff nobody bothers to notice.
The house is all taped off. You can see the white barns, the fields flooded with moonlight. It’s a bright, beautiful night. He gets out, letting the cold inside his jacket, wanting to feel it, and goes in through the porch the same as before, retracing the steps of the killer. The house is dark, but moonlight shines through it and lights up the stairs. He climbs slowly, carefully placing each step on the treads, the wood creaking under his feet, producing a noise bothersome enough, he thinks, to wake a sleeping woman. He finds it hard to believe she was still asleep when the intruder finally got to her room with his ax.
Travis stands there, looking down at the bed. What happened to you, Catherine?
In a few days they’ll have the autopsy report and the lab work back from serology. But his instincts tell him that whoever did this already anticipated those things.
He sits down on her side of the bed and turns on the light. A few books on her nightstand attract his attention, thin volumes of poetry, the wire spirals of a sketchbook. He fishes the sketchbook out and flips through the pages, seeing various drawings of the Hale boys, mostly, working around the farm. She’d done a good job getting a likeness, one face a variation of the other. Brothers, he thinks. They’d sure had a full share. They’d gone through something and come out the other side.
When he starts down the stairs the windows begin to tremble. Momentarily disarmed, he freezes, discerning the distant clatter of the train and its mournful wail, a mile of freight rolling through the night.
The next afternoon, he and Wiley drive over to Division Street. They find Rainer snoring on the couch, something rattling around in his chest like an old muffler. Burke shakes him awake. What do you want now? he says, displeased.
Hello, Rainer.
We got nothing to do with it, so don’t even ask, I might get insulted. I got a real nice clientele right now, we don’t want no trouble.
We got no quarrel with your men.
Rainer looks as if someone’s cracked an egg on his head that’s starting to run down and he doesn’t like the feeling. What do you want, then?
We know your nephews did some work over there, Travis says.
Yeah?
We just want to talk to them.
Well, Eddy’s gone.
Gone?
Ran off with some girl.
Any idea where they went?
California. He’s in some kind of a band out there. The other boy enlisted—but you already knew that.
Travis nodded. Good for him. He’ll make a fine soldier.
Collecting himself, Rainer sits up and scratches his head groggily.
What’s ailing you, Rainer?
I got emphysema. They tell me I’m dying.
I wouldn’t count on it. Your kind don’t die easy.
I’m telling you. I ain’t long for this world. To cheer himself up, he puts a cigarette in his mouth.
Might help if you quit those things.
What for? Gonna die anyway, so it don’t make no difference now. He lights the cigarette and spits out the smoke. Here comes the boy now. He could know something.
With his backpack over his shoulder, Cole Hale climbs onto the porch and steps through the door. He has the same gaunt slouch as his father, the same sharp blue eyes.
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Say hello to the sheriff, Cole, Rainer says.
But the boy only nods, the pallor of surprise washing across his face.
Where’s your milk and cookies, Rainer? This boy looks hungry. Travis reaches out his hand. Hello, Cole.
Sir.
The boy knows what to do. His mother raised him right. He shakes Lawton’s hand first, then Burke’s. Something tells Travis he’s been expecting them. He has a fleeting memory of Ella Hale roaming the aisles of Hack’s with her boys, gripping them at the neck when they misbehaved like stray kittens.
Am I in trouble?
No, son. We just want to ask you some questions about those people who bought your mother and daddy’s farm.
Travis gives him a minute, letting this statement and all it implies sink in a bit. You worked for them, isn’t that right? You and your brothers?
Cole wipes his face on the back of his sleeve like he’s broken a sweat. We painted the barns.
You did a real fine job.
Those folks got a hell of a deal, too, Rainer says.
I wonder what your impressions are of the Clares.
The boy gives him a blank stare.
They want to know what you think of the husband, his uncle says.
He was okay, I guess.
Did you notice anything unusual? Any strange habits? Anything at all?
No, sir. None that I can think of.
What about Mrs. Clare?
The boy flushes, embarrassed. She was nice.
Oh, she was nice all right, his uncle says. She liked you. Used to make him cookies. Fix his socks. She was a real nice lady. Wasn’t she, boy?
I just worked there.
I bet you miss her, Travis says gently. I know I would.
For the first time, Cole meets his eyes man to man. But says nothing. Reveals nothing. Travis knows he’s not the type to share his feelings.
I think he might have hit her once, he says finally, and describes an evening after a party where the wife came home in a ripped dress. She had her hand over her eye like this. The boy demonstrates, putting his hand over his eye.
Do you remember whose house they went to?
Cole shakes his head. Somebody from the college, I think.
When was the last time you were there?
I can’t remember.
Travis stands there waiting.
Last week, the boy adds uncertainly.
You didn’t happen to be there that day, did you?
What?
I think their daughter might’ve mentioned you were there.
No, sir. I had school.
As I recall, it was a half-day, isn’t that right?
The boy’s eyes go watery. I wasn’t there, he says.
Take it easy, son, Rainer says, putting his hand on the boy’s shoulder. He ain’t accusing you of nothing.
Can I go now?
Yeah. Sure. Thanks, buddy. You done real good.
Rainer walks Travis out and they stand on the porch for a minute under the yellow light that’s always on no matter what time of day. Them boys had nothing to do with this, Rainer says. You know that just as much as I do.
Travis looks into the old man’s rheumy eyes. What about this girl that Eddy’s with?
I couldn’t say. I don’t know where she come from. She worked for Henderson over at the inn. That’s where they met. The boy was pretty taken with her. Anyhow, they took off together. I guess she was in some kind of hurry.
On the drive home, after dropping Wiley off, he stops by at the inn, but Henderson’s off somewhere in Mexico. One of the stable hands shows him the girl’s room. There’s not much to look at, just a cot and a rolled-up mattress. The young man doesn’t speak much English. Ella regresó a la escuela en California.
It’s a big state, Travis says. Where’bouts in California?
UCLA, creo.
According to Clare’s secretary, on the morning of February 23 he’d shown up as usual at seven-thirty and left around half past four. No, he didn’t seem any different. He was just his usual self, she tells him. Had he ever raised his voice to her? No, he had not. She shows him into Clare’s office and explains that it had been Floyd DeBeers’s office before his death and that he’d been the real chair of the department, not George. He’s just a stand-in, she says with a twinge of relish, until they decide on someone else. She leaves Travis alone for a minute and he sits in the swivel chair and takes in the room, the river view, the exceptionally orderly desk, the surface of which gleams as though it were freshly polished.
—
EVEN CLARE’S ALIBI doesn’t convince Travis of his innocence. In domestic cases, nine times out of ten it’s the spouse. And that’s a percentage Travis never ignores. The coroner’s report could change that, but he doubts it.
He starts toward home through town but then cuts out onto Route 17, where the empty road might help him collect his thoughts. He pulls over at Winterberry Farm and gets out to look at the horses, a whole cavalry standing in the field as if awaiting instructions. He has to work at forgetting all the times he brought Alice out here to see them, how she’d climb up on the fence and reach out her little hand to pet one. It all just goes so fast, doesn’t it? Well, it sure does, goddamn it. Neither he nor Mary had succeeded in keeping her safe, and that’s what hurts more than anything.
This sets him to thinking about the little girl being alone in that house all day with her dead mother. That’s the part that’s hardest to digest. As much as he distrusts Clare, it’s hard to believe he’d contrive a plan to murder his wife and deliberately leave his daughter behind with her corpse. If that’s true, it puts him into a whole other category of criminal, because it means he figured his daughter into his plan and was willing to endanger her to save his own ass. Maybe Clare was banking that reasonable people would assume an upstanding family man like him could never do something like that.
Time of death is what they’re waiting on, but even the coroner’s report will only be able to narrow it down to within a few hours, and here the margin of error really works against them. George would have you believe that his wife was killed in her sleep after he left for work, but Travis doubts this account for at least two practical reasons.
She was pretty stiff when they found her, suggesting she’d been killed a good twelve hours earlier, around 5:00 a.m., before he’d left for work. Someone had left the window cracked and the thermostat turned down—the temperature in the room was fifty-six degrees. This would have slowed rigor mortis, feasibly confusing the time of death and supporting what Clare had said in his interview.
But a young woman like Catherine, with a small child across the hall, would be attuned to the sounds of the house. In Travis’s mind, it’s likely that her husband’s alarm clock would have woken her up. Even if she fell back asleep, it’s likely the child would come in shortly to wake her. This didn’t leave a random psychopath much time to get in there with his ax.
So, too, is Travis confident in his assumption that a woman of her age would’ve woken up when someone came up those creaky old stairs. Further, if she had woken she might have looked up and seen the assailant’s face as he lifted the ax. If that’s what happened, the blade would have come in at a slightly different angle and possibly made a wider wedge in her skull. There would have been much more blood. As it was, her blood had congealed at the base of her head in a neat puddle on the pillow, and there wasn’t the splattering you’d expect.
Travis concludes that when the intruder entered her room the victim was in fact in a sleeping state, as George had suggested, but she sure as hell wasn’t dreaming. Because when the ax went into her skull she was already dead.
An ax killing is no ordinary homicide. It’s a crime of the spectacular, a performance. Staged, deliberate. Whoever killed Catherine Clare wanted to give the impression that the crime was an aberration committed by some roving psychotic, a fluke tragedy that defies understanding. But here this scenario is unlikely. In cases like these, the blood, the spect
acle, is always a terrifying distraction. Whoever did this had a strategy that was anything but random; every single move had been carefully planned and enacted.
—
BURKE RAPS on the office door, then comes in and sits down heavily in the chair. So far it’s looking like a robbery. We found a hatchet in the yard used to break the window.
A hatchet? What the hell would anybody need that for? You don’t need a hatchet to break that old glass. You could do that with your knuckles.
Yup.
Any footprints outside?
Ground was too hard. Plus, it snowed. Nothing on the floors, either.
What got taken?
Nothing.
Then it wasn’t a robbery. Travis watches a plow clear the street. Any prints on the ax?
’Course not. Not a single print in the entire house, either. Not on the walls, doors, doorknobs. Like no one even lived there.
That’s more than a little strange.
Yeah, it is.
I’ll tell you what, Travis says. In all my years, that’s the cleanest goddamn crime scene I’ve ever seen.
We need someone to interview the kid. She could’ve seen something.
We’ll need his consent first.
Yeah. Good luck with that.
You’d think he’d want to know.
He’s worried she’ll get traumatized.
Well, that’s a very good reason, isn’t it? But I got a hunch she’s not the one he’s protecting.
Wiley nods. I’ll start building a life history, he says as he leaves.
Travis sits there listening to the phones ringing outside his office. Everybody calling with questions, concerns, fears. No tips yet. They’ve already taken hundreds of calls, but not a single one from any member of the family—on either side. He understands they’re grieving. Plans need to be made, the funeral parlor, the church, the graveyard. But where in hell are her parents, or sister? And his people, where are they? With the tables turned, if it were his wife, he’d be camped out here, demanding answers.
Travis’s secretary pokes her head in. You got fans. She jerks her chin at the window, the local-news trucks parked along the curb. Reporters standing around in heavy coats, smoking, drinking coffee out of paper cups.