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“Well, thanks again for the heads-up. We’ll have a talk with him.”
When they’d hung up, Graham got another beer. He sipped a bit. Went into the kitchen to do the dishes. He found the task comforting. He hated to vacuum, hated to dust. Set him on edge. He couldn’t say why. But he loved doing the dishes. Water, maybe. The life blood of a landscaper.
As he washed and dried he rehearsed a half dozen speeches to Joey about cutting school and dangerous skateboard practices. He kept refining them. But as he put the dishes away he decided the words were stilted, artificial. They were just that-speeches. It seemed to Graham that you needed conversation, not lectures. He knew instinctively that they’d have no effect on a twelve-year-old boy. He tried to imagine the two of them sitting down and speaking seriously. He couldn’t. He gave up crafting a talk.
Hell, he’d let Bry
’Phalting…
Graham dried his hands and went into the family room and sat down on the green couch, near A
“No. The school.”
“Everything okay?”
“Fine.”
“Sorry you missed poker tonight, Graham.”
“No problem.”
Returning to her knitting, A
Occasionally his soft-spoken mother-in-law surprised him by letting go with a steely judgment like this one. He had no idea what the daughter’s crime was but he knew A
He flipped a coin for the cha
THE FRANTIC YOUNG woman was in her midtwenties, face gaunt and eyes red from tears, her stylishly short, pixie-ish hair, dark red, now disheveled and flecked with leaves. Her forehead was scratched and her hands shook uncontrollably, but only partly from the cold.
It had been her panicked footsteps Bry
“You’re their friend,” Bry
She nodded and then gazed out into the deepening dusk as if the men were hot on her trail. “I don’t know what to do,” she said in a manic voice. She seemed childlike. Her fear was heartrending.
“We stay here for the time being,” Bry
Times to fight and times to run…
Times to hide too.
Bry
Sca
As if awakening, the young woman suddenly focused on Bry
“No. I’m alone.”
She took this news without emotion and then looked at Bry
Bry
“It’s back there. In the house.”
Bry
Bry
“That house.” The young woman nodded toward 2 Lake View. “I was going to call for help. Let’s go there, let’s call the police. We can get warm. I’m so damn cold.”
“Don’t want to yet,” Bry
The young woman winced.
“You hurt?” Bry
“My ankle. I fell.”
Bry
The young woman stared toward the Feldmans’ house. Chewing her lip.
“What’s your name?”
“Michelle.”
“I’m Bry
“Bry
A nod. She usually didn’t explain its derivation. “I’m a deputy with the county sheriff’s office.” She explained about the 911 call. “You know who they are, those men?”
“No.”
Bry
“I met Emma after work and we picked up Steve and all drove up together. Got here about five, five-thirty. I went upstairs-I was going to take a shower-and I heard these bangs. I thought the stove exploded or something. Or somebody dropped something. I didn’t know. I ran downstairs and saw two men. They didn’t see me. One of them’d put down his gun. It was on the table near the stairs. I just picked it up. They were in the kitchen, standing over the…over the bodies, talking. Just looking down and they had this expression on their faces.” She shut her eyes. Whispered, “I can’t even describe it. They were, like, ‘We shot them. Okay, no big deal. What’s next?’” Her voice cracked. “One of them, he was going through the refrigerator.”
As Bry
“No,” Bry
“Hurt bad?” she asked.
“His arm.”
“I should’ve…I should’ve told them to stop, or put their hands up. I don’t know. They started shooting at me. And I panicked. I just lost it completely. I ran outside. I didn’t have the car keys.” A disgusted look on her face. “I did something so stupid… I was afraid they’d come after me so I shot out the tires. They would’ve just left if I hadn’t done that. Got in the car and left… I was so stupid!”
“That’s all right. You did fine. Nobody’d think straight at a time like that. You have the gun still?”
Please, Bry
But the woman shook her head. “I used up all the bullets. I threw it into a creek by the house so they couldn’t find it. And I ran.” She squinted. “You’re a deputy. Do you have a gun?”
“I did. But lost it in the lake.”
Suddenly Michelle became animated. Almost giddy. “You know, like, I saw this show one time, it was on A &E or Discovery, and somebody’d been in a car wreck, a bad one, and they lost a lot of blood and they were in the wilderness for days. They should’ve died. But something happened, like the body stopped the bleeding itself. The doctors saved them and…”