A Good Killing (5 page)

“Essentially, the police are gutting your house.” Anna met her sister’s eyes. “What are they looking for, Jo?”

“Honestly, I have no idea.”

Anna didn’t like when people used the word
honestly
like that. It suggested that everything else they’d said had been dishonest, and they were just making an exception now.

“They think the coach was murdered,” Anna said. “They think they’ll find evidence of that in your house. Any idea why that might be?”

“Oh my God. No. I guess it’s just because I told them we were together.”

“Did anything else happen last night, Jody? Anything you haven’t told me yet?”

“I did eat some Doritos. I brushed and flossed and gargled. Is that what you mean?”

Anna sighed. They watched a police officer come out of Jody’s home carrying a box full of her sports trophies.

“So what are the police doing?” Jody asked.

“Taking out your pipes, sinks, and toilets. Cutting out sections of your walls and carpeting. Taking anything that looks like you could club a man to death with it.”

“Christ.” Jody sat back in her seat. Four officers carried her washing machine through the front door and put it into a white police van. “This is what you do for a living? Destroy innocent people’s homes?”

“We don’t think they’re innocent,” Anna said.

“You think I did something to Owen?” Jody’s voice was hurt.

“No. The police do. I’m well aware that the police can get things wrong.”

“Will they replace my stuff?”

“No. You might get some of it back, months from now.”

“This is awful! It’s a total invasion. I don’t have money to buy new carpeting and drywall and a washing machine. What happened to innocent until proven guilty? How can you do this as a career?”

Now it was Anna’s turn to feel hurt. As a prosecutor, she thought of herself as the good guy. She earned a fraction of what her law-firm colleagues did but loved having a job where her goal every day was to do the right thing. That was a luxury most lawyers didn’t have.

“When I apply for a search warrant,” Anna said, “I’m not thinking about the cost of the drywall. I’m thinking about how to get a predator off the street. I’m trying to catch a bad guy.”

“And I’m the bad guy here.” Jody shook her head.

They sat in silence. Eventually, Anna called Kathy and told her what was going on. “I found Jody,” she said. “She’s fine, although the police are searching her house.”

“Oh my God,” Kathy said. “Can I talk to her?”

Anna handed the phone to Jody, who updated Kathy on her morning and thanked her for calling Anna. As she hung up, two police officers were carrying Jody’s toilet out.

Jody said, “We’re gonna need to pee at some point.”

“Cooper says we can stay at his place.”

“Oh, man.” Jody slumped back into her seat. “That’s nice of him, but, if there’s one place worse than Holly Grove, it’s Detroit.”

9

A
fter the Homecoming dance, Wendy stopped showing up at school functions.
Finally!
I thought. The woman realized she had to get a life of her own. Maybe she was aiming for some grown-up dignity?

Nope.

The rumors started swirling around school one chilly day in November. I was dissecting a frog when my lab partner whispered that Wendy Weiscowicz was getting married. Well, that was fine. That proved that the world was unfolding exactly as it should. Community college had clearly been a holding pattern for Wendy until she got her MRS degree. I said something to that effect and went back to unraveling an amphibious intestine. My main thought was, hopefully she’d be so preoccupied with married life that she’d stop hanging out at school and pretending she was still a student.

When I got to my locker, more details filtered in. Ben told me that Wendy was marrying an older man.
Okay
, I thought.
She’s into wrinkles and Viagra, good luck with that.
But then Ben added: she was marrying a
rich
older man. That was more annoying, because that meant
she
was going to be rich, and back then, I still thought that “rich” automatically meant “happy.” I didn’t think she deserved to be happy.

But, all in all, it didn’t affect me. I could take my classes and moon over the coach and dream of getting a college scholarship, and she could look after her geezer and his moneybags, and we’d never have to deal with each other again. Then I heard the next—and totally unbelievable—twist to this rumor.

I was sitting at my usual spot at the lunchroom, at the table in the back corner so my left cheek was next to the wall, hiding my scar. My
friends were sitting in their usual spots, when Susan Mindell rushed over holding a lunch tray. Her eyes gleamed with the bright urgency of a girl bearing news.

“Did you guys hear?” she said, sitting down.

“Wendy’s getting married,” Jenny said with a yawn. I nodded and took a nonchalant bite of my baloney sandwich, to telegraph that this was old news to me, too.

But Susan shook her head. “She’s marrying Coach Fowler. This Friday.”

The bread became cement in my mouth. “No.”

Susan leaned forward excitedly. “My mom is a clerk at the courthouse. They scheduled a civil ceremony.”

I swallowed the bite with effort. “There must be some mistake. He’s probably just helping the family—he mentors a lot of kids—and his name got put in the reservation.”

“He’s listed as ‘groom’ in the paperwork.”

I stared at Susan’s lunch tray, but barely saw the cafeteria’s gray meatloaf and soggy fruit cup. What I saw was Wendy reaching out to straighten Coach’s tie at the Homecoming dance.

Was that the sort of girl he liked? Someone dumb and shallow, whose only redeeming quality was her dimples? Was he that superficial? I hated him for choosing her. I hated her even more for being chosen.

The engagement was all that kids could talk about the rest of the day. Everyone kept saying I looked pale and asking me if I felt all right. I didn’t.

That afternoon, I was in a line filing out the side door to get on the school bus, when I saw Wendy driving into the school parking lot. She was at the wheel of the coach’s 1967 Corvette. Everyone knew that car; it was painted the Bulldogs’ signature robin’s-egg blue. The fact that she was driving it meant the rumors were true. She bounced out, flipped her strawberry-blond hair over her shoulder, and sashayed toward the school.

She saw me waiting on line for the bus and waved. “Hi, Jody!” The keys to the Corvette jangled triumphantly in her hands. I wanted to stuff them down her throat.

10

A
nna steered the Yukon through Detroit’s desolate streets, past abandoned skyscrapers with plywood windows, burned-out shells of houses, and a vast patchwork of vacant lots filled with biohazardous trash. The late-afternoon sun painted the empty asphalt gold and gray, the shadows creeping longer every minute. The streets were spookily empty; she didn’t see a single person. There weren’t even pigeons—she supposed urban pigeons needed people, leaving trash and crumbs, in order to survive.

“When filmmakers need a postapocalyptic scene, they come to Detroit,” Jody said. “The city’s ugliness is its biggest asset.”

Anna nodded. Once home to 1.7 million, Detroit’s most recent census put the population at 700,000. But it was larger in square miles than Manhattan, San Francisco, and Boston combined. The vacant land alone could hold the entire city of Paris. With so much land and so few people living in it, many of the lots had gone back to nature. As Anna pulled onto Alfred Street, a wild pheasant flew out of a weedy lot, and she had to swerve to avoid hitting it.

“What the . . . ?” she muttered.

“Welcome to America’s last frontier,” Jody said.

Cooper pulled his motorcycle onto a street that had only two buildings: a burned-out house on one side, and, a bit farther along, a shabby but still functional mansion on the other. If other houses once existed on the surrounding lots, they were long gone. Anna followed his bike onto the circular driveway of the mansion. She stared at the structure. It was a crumbling redbrick frivolity with an arched stone entranceway, multiple turrets, and a slate roof. She looked at the surrounding yards. Instead of the tall
grass and trash that filled most of the vacant land, the lots around Cooper’s house were planted with neat rows of cherry and apple trees, dotted with red fruit. It was surreal: a leafy green oasis in the middle of a shattered cement desert. The orchard ended at an abandoned warehouse whose windows were as broken and empty as if it had survived a bombing. Beyond the warehouse, Anna could make out the shimmering silhouette of the Renaissance Center’s skyscrapers—Detroit’s failed attempt at revitalization in the 1970s—less than a mile away.

The two sisters got out of the car and met Cooper on the driveway. Anna said, “What is this?”

“My farm,” Cooper said, taking off his helmet. “The house was built by a lumber baron in 1892. Now it’s what you’d call a bit of a fixer-upper.”

She’d been out to his family’s farm countless times when she was in high school. That was five hundred acres in a rural corner of Holly Grove County, where the most threatening creatures were the deer that might carry Lyme disease. This was a new kind of farm.

Cooper climbed the front steps—surprisingly agile on his prosthetic leg—and opened the door. He threw his leather jacket and helmet inside. Underneath he wore a faded black
THE NATIONAL
T-shirt and jeans. A giant white dog came out onto the porch, sat in front of Cooper, and grinned up at him, a happy pink tongue lolling out of its mouth. Cooper scratched under its chin. “Come on, Sparky,” he said. “Let’s show the ladies around.”

Sparky trotted down the steps, sniffed Jody’s hand, and licked it. He did the same to Anna. She scratched under his chin, like Cooper had, and the dog sat on her feet.

“He looks like a big German shepherd, except all white,” she said.

“That’s what he is,” Cooper said. “A white shepherd. He likes you. He only sits on the feet of the people he likes.”

“I’m honored.”

Cooper led them to the back of the house. The backyard was
a square of grass surrounded by the rows of cherry trees. A few free-range chickens pecked around the dirt, ignoring Sparky, who did the same to them. A dirt patio off the back of the house had a makeshift stone fire pit flanked by a few plastic chairs. A pile of firewood was neatly stacked against the house’s brick wall, near a tree stump with an ax in it. A small pond, maybe three feet wide, was dug to one side, lined with a black tarp and more stones. It was filled with monstrously large goldfish.

“I always wondered, as a kid—and it’s true,” Cooper said, pointing to the fish. “They do grow as big as their bowl.”

On a back corner of the orchard stood a big red shed with white trim. It was the perkiest building for miles. Cooper pointed at it.

“That’s where I keep my equipment and store the fruit. I also dry some of the fruit and make my own granola. I’m branching into cider, too. That way I’ll have stuff to sell at the farmers’ markets all year long.” They walked toward the barn, Sparky trotting by Cooper’s side.

Anna asked, “Why urban farming, Cooper? Why not just take over your family farm? You’re so far away from where you grew up.”

“So are you,” he said with a smile. “My brother’s taking care of the family farm. You know what I liked about Afghanistan? Not the fighting. I liked helping people. Digging wells, bringing water to a village, that sort of thing. Once I lost my leg, that was over. But there are a lot of people here that need stuff as badly as they need it in Afghanistan or Iraq.”

“What do your mom and dad think? Are they worried about you, out here all by yourself?”

“Sure. But my mom was worried before I moved out here. After I came home from Afghanistan, she was always hovering, doing everything for me, trying to help me around. I had to get out and show I could take care of myself.”

“If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere,” Jody said.

He smiled. “People like to use this city as a punchline. But De
troit today is home to one of the greatest urban experiments in the world. After everything is lost, there’s freedom, a space to try new things. Today we’ve got musicians and artists, hipsters and farmers, city planners and community activists, all sorts of creative thinkers figuring out how to find beauty and meaning in the ruins.”

“That’s a very optimistic way to think of a city that’s declared bankruptcy and can’t reliably pick up the trash,” Jody said.

At the edge of the orchard, Cooper stopped talking and stood strangely still. His eyes narrowed as they scanned the orchard, and his hand went to his waist. As he pulled up his shirt, Anna saw that he had a gun holstered there.

A moment later, two kids emerged from the trees. They looked to be about sixteen, both wearing black skullcaps and baggy pants that displayed several inches of underwear. The bigger one had a menacing silver grille covering his front teeth. Anna tensed up.

“Yo, Coop!” said the kid with the grille.

“De’Andre, Lamar, hey!” Cooper took his hand off his gun. “I wasn’t expecting you guys so early.”

“It’s six o’clock. We’re right on time.”

Cooper glanced at his watch. “So you are. It’s been a busy day.”

“I see,” said the kid, grinning appreciatively at Anna and Jody. “You gonna introduce us to these lovely ladies?”

Cooper did. The kid with the grille was De’Andre; the shyer one was Lamar. Lamar smiled at Anna, then studied her shoes. Cooper explained that they were students at Cass Tech, a nearby high school, and were working on his farm for minimum wage and internship credits. They were here to pick up some produce for a farmers’ market the next day. They went into the shed, where crates of fruits and vegetables were stacked. Anna helped the guys load the crates onto an old red Ford pickup truck. The doors sported a circular logo: a cartoon cherry tree in front of a cartoon Renaissance Center. “Bolden Farms” was written in cherries on the tree.

When it was all loaded up, De’Andre got behind the wheel of the pickup and Lamar sat in the passenger seat. De’Andre called out the window, “Ladies, if he don’t treat you right, call me!”