“No, wait, sit back down a minute,” Ralph said. “You told me one, now I’m going to tell you one. Not out of a psychic magazine, though. This is personal experience. Every word true.”
Samuels lowered himself back to the bench.
“When I was a kid,” Ralph said, “ten or eleven—around Frank Peterson’s age—my mother sometimes used to bring home cantaloupes from the farmers’ market, if they were in season. Back then I loved cantaloupe. They’ve got this sweet, dense flavor watermelon can’t get close to. So one day she brought home three or four in a net bag, and I asked her if I could have a piece. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Just remember to scrape the seeds into the sink.’ She didn’t really have to tell me that, because I’d opened up my share of cantaloupes by then. You with me so far?”
“Uh-huh. I suppose you cut yourself, right?”
“No, but my mother thought I did, because I let out a screech they probably heard next door. She came on the run, and I just pointed at the cantaloupe, laying there on the counter, split in two. It was full of maggots and flies. I mean those bugs were squirming all over each other. My mother got the Raid and sprayed the ones on the counter. Then she got a dish towel, wrapped the pieces in it, and threw them in the swill bucket out back. Since that day I can’t bear to look at a slice of cantaloupe, let alone eat one. That’s my Terry Maitland metaphor, Bill. The cantaloupe looked fine. It wasn’t spongy. The skin was whole. There was no way those bugs could have gotten inside, but somehow they did.”
“Fuck your cantaloupe,” Samuels said, “and fuck your metaphor. I’m going home. Think before you quit the job, Ralph, okay? Your wife said I was getting out before Johnny Q. Public fired me, and she’s probably right, but you don’t have to face the voters. Just three retired cops that are this city’s excuse for Internal Affairs, and a shrink collecting some municipal shekels to supplement a private practice on life support. And there’s something else. If you quit, people will be even more sure that we screwed this thing up.”
Ralph stared at him, then began laughing. It was hearty, a series of guffaws that came all the way up from the belly. “But we did! Don’t you know that yet, Bill? We did. Royally. We bought a cantaloupe because it looked like a good cantaloupe, but when we cut it open in front of the whole town, it was full of maggots. No way for them to get in, but there they were.”
Samuels trudged toward the kitchen door. He opened the screen, then whirled around, his cowlick springing jauntily back and forth. He pointed at the hackberry tree. “That was a sparrow, goddammit!”
3
Shortly after midnight (around the time the last remaining member of the Peterson family was learning how to make a hangman’s noose, courtesy of Wikipedia), Marcy Maitland awoke to the sound of screams from her elder daughter’s bedroom. It was Grace at first—a mother always knows—but then Sarah joined her, creating a terrible two-part harmony. It was the girls’ first night out of the bedroom Marcy had shared with Terry, but of course the kids were still bunking together, and she thought they might do that for some time to come. Which was fine.
What wasn’t fine were those screams.
Marcy didn’t remember running down the hall to Sarah’s bedroom. All she remembered was getting out of bed and then standing inside the open door of Sarah’s room and beholding her daughters, sitting bolt upright in bed and clutching each other in the light of the full July moon that came flooding through the window.
“What?” Marcy asked, looking around for an intruder. At first she thought he (surely it was a he) was crouched in the corner, but that was only a pile of cast-off jumpers, tee-shirts, and sneakers.
“It was her!” Sarah cried. “It was G! She said there was a man! God, Mom, she scared me so bad!”
Marcy sat on the bed and pried her younger daughter from Sarah’s arms and took Grace in her own. She was still looking around. Was he in the closet? He might be, the accordion doors were closed. He could have done that when he heard her coming. Or under the bed? Every childhood fear flooded back while she waited for a hand to close around her ankle. In the other would be a knife.
“Grace? Gracie? Who did you see? Where was he?”
Grace was crying too hard to answer, but she pointed at the window.
Marcy went there, her knees threatening to come unhinged at every step. Were the police still watching the house? Howie said they would be making regular passes for awhile, but that didn’t mean they were there all the time, and besides, Sarah’s bedroom window—all of their bedroom windows—looked out on either the backyard or the side yard, between their house and the Gundersons’. And the Gundersons were away on vacation.
The window was locked. The yard—every single blade of grass seeming to cast a shadow in the moonlight—was empty.
She came back to the bed, sat, and stroked Grace’s hair, which was clumped and sweaty. “Sarah? Did you see anything?”
“I . . .” Sarah considered. She was still holding Grace, who was sobbing against her big sister’s shoulder. “No. I might have thought I did, just for a second, but that was because she was screaming, ‘The man, the man.’ There was no one there.” And, to Gracie, “No one, G. Really.”
“You had a bad dream, honey,” Marcy said. Thinking, Probably the first of many.
“He was there,” Gracie whispered.
“He must have been floating, then,” Sarah said, speaking with admirable reasonableness for someone who had been scared out of sleep only minutes before. “Because we’re on the second floor, y’know.”
“I don’t care. I saw him. His hair was short and black and standing up. His face was lumpy, like Play-Doh. He had straws for eyes.”
“Nightmare,” Sarah said matter-of-factly, as if this closed the subject.
“Come on, you two,” Marcy said, striving for that same matter-of-fact tone. “You’re with me for the rest of the night.”
They came without protest, and five minutes after she had them settled in, one on each side of her, ten-year-old Gracie had fallen asleep again.
“Mom?” Sarah whispered.
“What, honey?”
“I’m scared of Daddy’s funeral.”
“So am I.”
“I don’t want to go, and neither does G.”
“That makes three of us, sweetheart. But we’ll do it. We’ll be brave. It’s what your dad would have wanted.”
“I miss him so much I can’t think of anything else.”
Marcy kissed the gently beating hollow of Sarah’s temple. “Go to sleep, honey.”
Sarah eventually did. Marcy lay awake between her daughters, looking up at the ceiling and thinking of Grace turning to the window in a dream so real she thought she was awake.
He had straws for eyes.
4
Shortly after three AM (around the time Fred Peterson was trudging out into his backyard with a footstool from the living room in his left hand and his hangrope over his right shoulder), Jeanette Anderson awoke, needing to pee. The other side of the bed was empty. After doing her little bit of business, she went downstairs and found Ralph sitting in his Papa Bear easy chair, staring at the blank screen of the TV set. She observed him with a wifely eye and noted that he had dropped weight since the discovery of Frank Peterson’s body.