The sheriff looked at me a long time and although I couldn’t read his expression clearly I was afraid that what was there was complete disapproval.
“I mean,” I stumbled on, “she was grown up and all.”
“Grown up? In what ways?”
“I don’t know. Big. An adult. Me, I’m just a kid.”
I said this hoping like crazy that being just a kid would get me off the hook. Whatever the hook was. I didn’t know for sure. What I understood clearly was that I was in way over my head.
“Grown up,” the sheriff repeated sadly. “That she was, Frank.” He rose slowly from the step and settled his hat on his head. “Don’t forget to tell your father to call me, you hear?”
“I won’t,” I said.
“All right, then.”
He descended the stairs and went to his car which was parked in the gravel drive in front of our garage and he backed out and disappeared up Tyler Street and just after that a train came rumbling through and I sat on the steps while the porch boards shook and the engine whistle screamed and I realized I was shaking too and it had nothing to do with the passage of the train.
• • •
I stayed on the porch watching for the Packard and in the late afternoon I spotted it bumping over the tracks. As soon as my father had parked, Jake leaped out the passenger side and sprinted toward the house and ran past me and inside. I heard the hammer of his feet on the stairs then I heard the bathroom door on the second floor slam shut. Jake had a notoriously small bladder. My father came more slowly.
“The sheriff was here,” I told him.
His eyes had been on the old porch steps as he mounted but now he looked up. “What did he want?”
“He didn’t say exactly. He just asked me some questions and then he said you should call him when you got back.”
“What kinds of questions?”
“About Ariel and Karl.”
“Karl?”
“Yeah. He was pretty interested in Karl.”
“Thank you, Frank,” he said and went inside.
I went in too and flopped on the living room sofa and picked up the comic book I’d been reading when the sheriff came. I was near enough the phone stand at the bottom of the stairs that I could hear my father’s end of the conversation.
“It’s Nathan Drum. My son told me you stopped by.”
I heard the toilet flush on the second floor and water ran through the pipe in the wall.
“I see.” My father said this heavily and I could tell it wasn’t good. “I could meet you in my church office in a few minutes, if that’s convenient.”
Upstairs the bathroom door opened and Jake clomped into the hallway.
“Fine. I’ll be waiting for you.”
My father put the receiver down.
I asked, “What did he want?”
The room was dark. Even though my mother hadn’t been home all day I’d left the drapes pulled shut. My father stood outlined in the rectangle of sunlight in the front doorway. His back was to me and I couldn’t see his face.
“The autopsy’s finished, Frank. He wants to talk to me about it.”
“Is it bad?”
“I don’t know. Your mother, have you seen her?”
“No, sir.”
“I’ll be across the street if she calls.”
He left the house and I followed to the screen door and watched him walk toward the church. Halfway there he stopped and stood dead still in the middle of the street. He seemed lost and I was afraid that if a car came by he would be hit because he wouldn’t even know it was coming. I pushed open the door thinking I should call to him but he pulled himself together and continued on.
Jake galloped down the stairs and sidled up beside me.
“We got milk shakes,” he said. “Dad and me. At the Dairy Queen in Mankato.”
I knew he was baiting me but I had other things on my mind. I didn’t even bother to reply.
He asked, “Where’s Dad?”
I nodded toward the church and said, “He’s waiting for the sheriff to come back.”
I stepped out onto the porch.
Jake came too, glued to me, and said, “The sheriff was here? What did he want?”
“Mostly to see Dad. But he asked me some questions about Karl and Ariel.”
“What kind of questions?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
I spoke to Jake curtly in a way meant to cut off his probing because something else had captured my attention. In the aftermath of Ariel’s death I often found myself noticing some unusual convergence of natural circumstance that I took as a sign. Not necessarily from God but clearly from forces beyond my own constricted understanding. The night before, I’d observed two shooting stars whose paths crossed in the sky to the east and I knew it meant something extraordinary but what I couldn’t say. And after my father and Jake had left for Mankato as I listened to the Twins game on the radio I’d heard, during a few moments of transmission static, a voice speak from a different broadcast source and I thought I made out two words, though not clearly: The answer. The answer to what? I wondered at the time.
Now as I stood on the porch I saw that the sun was behind the church steeple and the steeple shadow had fallen across the street and was pointing directly at me like a long proscriptive finger.
“Frank, are you okay?”
The sheriff’s car came down Tyler and swung onto Third and pulled into the church lot. The sheriff got out and walked to the front door of the sanctuary and went inside.
Jake tugged on my arm. “Frank!”
I pulled loose from his grip and started quickly down the porch steps.
“Where are you going?”
I said, “Nowhere.”
In an instant he was at my side. I didn’t want to argue so I let him come. I raced to the church’s side door that opened onto the basement stairs. Gus’s motorcycle had been gone all day and as I descended into the cool under the church I knew he wouldn’t be there to stop me. I went to the disconnected furnace duct that ran up to my father’s office and pulled out the rags meant to block the flow of sound. Jake watched and his eyes told me he considered it an enormous transgression.
“Frank,” he whispered.
I shot him a look that shut him up.
There was a knock on my father’s office door and the boards above us squeaked as he crossed to greet his visitor.