“I need to talk to your father, kids.”
Lindsey took Buckley back into the kitchen with the promise of cereal. She herself was thinking of what Samuel had shown her; it was a drink called a jellyfish, which involved a maraschino cherry at the bottom of some sugar and gin. Samuel and Lindsey had sucked the cherries up through the sugar and booze until their heads hurt and their lips were stained red.
“Should I get Abigail? Can I make you some coffee or something?”
“Jack,” Len said, “I’m not here with any news – just the opposite. Can we sit?”
I watched my father and Len head into the living room. The living room seemed to be where no living ever actually occurred. Len sat on the edge of a chair and waited for my father to take a seat.
“Listen, Jack,” he said. “It’s about George Harvey.”
My father brightened. “I thought you said you had no news.”
“I don’t. I have something I need to say on behalf of the station and myself.”
“Yes.”
“We need you to stop making calls about George Harvey.”
“But…”
“I need you to stop. There is nothing, no matter how much we stretch it, to connect him to Susie’s death. Howling dogs and bridal tents are not evidence.”
“I know he did it,” my father said.
“He’s odd, I agree, but as far as we know he isn’t a killer.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
Len Fenerman talked, but all my father could hear was Ruana Singh saying what she had to him, and of standing outside Mr. Harvey’s house and feeling the energy radiating out to him, the coldness at the core of the man. Mr. Harvey was at once unknowable and the only person in the world who could have killed me. As Len denied it, my father grew more certain.
“You are stopping your investigation of him,” my father said flatly.
Lindsey was in the doorway, hovering as she’d done on the day Len and the uniformed officer had brought my hat with the jingle bell, the twin of which she owned. That day she had quietly shoved this second hat into a box of old dolls in the back of her closet. She never wanted my mother to hear the sound of those beadlike bells again.
There was our father, the heart we knew held all of us. Held us heavily and desperately, the doors of his heart opening and closing with the rapidity of stops on an instrument, the quiet felt closures, the ghostly fingering, practice and practice and then, incredibly, sound and melody and warmth. Lindsey stepped forward from her place by the door.
“Hello again, Lindsey,” Len said.
“Detective Fenerman.”
“I was just telling your father…”
“That you’re giving up.”
“If there was any good reason to suspect the man…”
“Are you done?” Lindsey asked. She was suddenly the wife to our father, as well as the oldest, most responsible child.
“I just want you all to know that we’ve investigated every lead.”
My father and Lindsey heard her, and I saw her. My mother coming down the stairs. Buckley raced out of the kitchen and charged, propelling his full weight into my father’s legs.
“Len,” my mother said, pulling her terry-cloth robe tighter when she saw him, “has Jack offered you coffee?”
My father looked at his wife and Len Fenerman.
“The cops are punting,” Lindsey said, taking Buckley gently by the shoulders and holding him against her.
“Punting?” Buckley asked. He always rolled a sound around in his mouth like a sourball until he had its taste and feel.
“What?”
“Detective Fenerman is here to tell Dad to stop bugging them.”
“Lindsey,” Len said, “I wouldn’t put it like that.”
“Whatever,” she said. My sister wanted out, now, into a place where gifted camp continued, where Samuel and she, or even Artie, who at the last minute had won the Perfect Murder competition by entering the icicle-as-murder-weapon idea, ruled her world.
“Come on, Dad,” she said. My father was slowly fitting something together. It had nothing to do with George Harvey, nothing to do with me. It was in my mother’s eyes.
That night, as he had more and more often, my father stayed up by himself in his study. He could not believe the world falling down around him – how unexpected it all was after the initial blast of my death. “I feel like I’m standing in the wake of a volcano eruption,” he wrote in his notebook. “Abigail thinks Len Fenerman is right about Harvey.”
