Howlers

He opened the bag again, looked inside, and stood up. Could be some kind of reaction to the meth lab that had blown up east of town. He went back to his desk and picked up the phone and dialed the sheriff’s office. I was so stupid. I should have checked before. Of course, the meth lab. That was a huge explosion . . . toxic smoke and gases drifted right over town?

        *   *   *

From his second-story cell in the police station, Willis Good watched the Placer county sheriff’s car pull into the parking lot. He knew the sheriff’s car had come to transport him to Sacramento. He watched T.C. McCauley get out of his patrol car and cross the street, heading for the Copper Pe

   Watching the familiar street, the horror of the last twenty-four hours seemed that much more impossible to comprehend. But he knew it was not a dream. What had happened up at his house, two miles outside of town, was real: his wife and children were dead.

Willis closed his eyes. He saw a flash of himself with the ax in his hand. The red splatter on the snow of the driveway. The hatchet sunk into his wife’s chest, going deep—the horrible sound it made splitting her sternum—both his hands on the handle. The blank look in her eyes. The horrible ribbon of spit hanging from her lips. The blow from the ax had only seemed to make her mad. He fought his wife back, trying to get their children in the car and away from their mother. He’d failed to save them.

He opened his eyes.

“That wasn’t my A

Willis gave up trying to explain it. He didn’t know the answer, and he’d always been good at finding answers. Problem solving had gotten him scholarships—first to Yale, then to Cambridge, then to Harvard Law School. But no one had ever given him a problem like this one.

He heard his wife again smashing the windows of the car with her bare hands, punching through the glass, and the terrible howling sound she’d made. It wasn’t like any human sound he’d ever heard.

“Willis, your mother is downstairs in the office.”

Willis turned from the window. He knew he must still look like what he had been, until yesterday afternoon when he’d killed his wife: a successful young attorney. The deputy in front of him was someone he’d grown up with. The two young men looked at each other.

“I got your mom in Quentin’s office. She—well, she’s very upset, Willis.”

Willis nodded.

“Eric, you have to go home and get Gina and the kids and leave Timberline. NOW. Okay? Right away!” Willis said.

“Willis, I can’t just go get my wife and kids and leave town.”

“Eric, listen to me! Please! You don’t understand. Something is terribly wrong here.”

“Willis, look. I know what you’re going to say. I’m your friend. We go all the way back to Ms. Pond’s first-grade class, remember?”

Willis nodded.

“Willis, they say you killed A

Willis walked to the cell door. He put his hands on the bars. He reached out to his friend. He tried to grab Eric’s arm to convince him that it was dangerous—and that what had happened to his family could happen to anyone in town.

“I’m not an animal, Eric, for Christ’s sake. I’m not crazy. Please, listen to me. You have to go home, get Gina and the kids, and get out of town before it’s too late!”

“Willis, I can’t do that.” The deputy picked up a bag of clothes he’d set on the floor. “Your mom brought you some things from your place. Why don’t you change, and then I’ll take you downstairs.” The deputy unlocked the cell door.

The clothes Willis wore were the ones he’d worn the day before, and were bloodstained. His wife’s blood had soaked his shirt and t-shirt. It had dried, and the shirts were stiff and smelly. He’d appeared in court covered in A

“Willis, I’m sorry. I really am,” the deputy said. “Whatever happened up there, at your place, I’m sorry.” He swung open the cell door and handed Willis the bag of fresh clothes.

At 9:00 a.m., T.C. McCauley walked his prisoner out of Timberline’s granite-block sheriff’s station and put him in the back of his patrol car for the trip down the mountain to the state’s facility for the mentally ill in Sacramento. The judge in town had gotten the county prosecutor’s office to agree to a psychological examination before multiple charges of homicide were filed. The old judge, like so many of the town’s people, had known Willis Good his whole life, and felt sorry for him.

The wind started up as they pulled onto Main Street. A few people were making for work, bundled in snowsuits. Shop windows gave off a soft, yellowish glow. As the patrol car passed the front of the town’s brick library, snow began falling lightly again.

From the back of the sheriff’s car, Willis remembered all the winter days just like this one, spent in the town’s library studying. He pictured the small reading room and its green well-waxed linoleum floor, with its ceiling-to-floor shelves of books. He recalled the library’s smells that he loved: books, women’s sweaters, coffee that the librarians kept on a hot plate in the back office. He remembered the old librarian who’d befriended him when his mother, a drunk, first came to town. The ancient-seeming woman had given him a stack of children’s books and let him stay all day. When the other kids were sent home at di

“T.C., something is really wrong here,” Willis said from the back of the car. He said it almost offhandedly. “You’ll see. I told them back there, Quentin and anyone who would listen, but they don’t want to believe me. I figured part of it out this morning while I was with my mom. I’m sure it’s something at Genesoft. You know A

McCauley shot a glance into the rear-view mirror. They pulled out of Timberline and onto one of the loneliest country roads in the Sierra Nevada. The narrow county road co

“Willis, this is the hardest damn thing I’ve ever done,” T.C. said. He hadn’t spoken since he put Willis into the car. Willis looked out the window. T.C. McCauley had known him since they were boys.   Even as a child, T.C. had known about the conspiracy of kindness to keep Willis clothed, feed and nurtured.

“Why’d you do it, Willis? You went away to college back East—what was it, Harvard?”