The Detective's Garden (27 page)

“I think so,” King said.

“There’s a lot of snow up there this time of year.”

“There is?” said King. The waitress put her hand on King’s
arm. Her fingers felt cool and soft.

“Sure is,” the waitress said. “My son’s little girl, we call her
Brit, she loves the snow. You like the snow, too?”

“I do. I love the snow.”

“What’s your name?”

“My name is King.”

“Isn’t that an unusual one,” the waitress said. Gently, she
turned King’s arm so that the palm of her hand faced up and
the veins rose like a blueprint beneath pale skin.

The Sawyers left Leavenworth behind. Driving westward,
they began the ascent into the Cascade Mountains and the
brown landscape gave way to green. Deciduous to evergreen.
The engine revved to a great cry. Enormous rocks rose to either
side. As they drove, they studied a map and saw how short
ly they’d hit the ocean. A westward stopping point. No more
space to run.

The pines in the mountains were as gnarled as ancient men.
They drove into snow that seemed to multiply upon itself un
til great heaps ran alongside the road. The cement had dried
white with salt. Snowy peaks reared to their sides and they took
comfort in their own diminishment, the sense that they could
disappear all at once into the great obliterating whiteness.

After the mountain pass, they descended into deep fog. The
car poked forward until guardrails loomed just in front of them
and a great broken pine seemed to point left with one trailing
limb. The nose of the station wagon tilted down and their bod
ies felt as though they were falling against their safety belts.
When they began to drop out of the clouds that sat atop the
mountains, the landscape stretched out fearfully before them.
Steep hills slowly descended in hundreds of shades of green.
Rock faces were still fogged over and murky at the edges as
though the border between one thing and the next had begun
to decay.

THE PHONE CALL
from the waitress, Glenda, was
routed slowly. She made the call from a pay phone in front of
the diner. The air was still. Blue-painted letters swirled on the
windows. The clouds clotted into stiff shapes and broke open
and the light fractured into beams. The waitress spoke impa
tiently into the phone. No, she couldn’t be put on hold again.
She was tired of repeating herself.

“This is agent Charlie Basin,” someone finally said into
the line.

“Who’re you?” the waitress asked.

“I’m the agent in charge of this investigation.”

She watched two pigeons scuttle from the roof. “I’m tired of
saying all this,” she said. “My break was over twenty minutes ago.”

“I promise you won’t have to tell it again.”

“Well, I seen them,” she said. “That family. They got a teen
age girl with them.”

“You’re referring to the Sawyers?”

“That’s them,” she said. “The father, he’s grown a beard. The
older boy’s hair is short and reddish brown. That King’s is long
and black and pretty.”

“They say where they were headed?”

“The little girl said they were going over the mountains. But
she wasn’t none too sure.”

The cement beneath the waitress’s feet was littered with
bent cigarette butts. She answered Charlie’s questions in short
sentences. This man on the phone, she thought, had a soft
voice, like a memory from her childhood. The light through
the clouds cast its spectral architecture on a church steeple, a
blue water tower, a peaked slate roof. She watched the light fall
and her mouth hung open.

“Glenda, I’ve got one more question.”

“Shoot,” she said.

“How do they look?”

“I told you already.”

“I mean, do they look tired? Worn? Do they look like people
on the run? Do they look like they’ve been hurt?”

“None of that at all,” she said. “They look good.”

AT NIGHT, WHEN
they all slept in the car, Dominick
sometimes dreamed of his kids and woke and reached out to
touch them. Their skins felt warm and damp and fragile, like
exhalations of breath. He tried not to move too much, not to
wake them. He looked at the way his son leaned against the girl
who leaned against the car door. Her hand lay almost protec
tively across his chest.

Dominick blinked his eyes. His throat felt as though some
one was squeezing it. The night swam, watery and alive. Out
the windows he could see only a few feet before his vision faded
away and he could sense, more than see, the great indecipher
able forms heaving their way through the dark. He turned his
eyes back on his children, then he opened the door to get out
of the car. “Sometimes,” he said so quietly that his lips barely
moved, “I wished the three of us was all there was.”

In the dark, King sat up. Her breathing came hard and her
eyelids were clotted with sleep. They had pulled off on the side
of the road. The air was dark and cold and, as her hand rose to
her eyes, she had a feeling that she’d lived through all this be
fore. She was half inside her sleeping bag in the far back of the
station wagon. Someone was whimpering.

King remembered being woken by a soft whimpering in the
time before her mother had left. That, too, had started quietly.
A mewl. King had thought of a beaten dog. She’d gotten up
and felt the cotton pajamas fall flat and warm against her and
she’d followed the whimpering through the house. She stood at
the front door, listening before she opened it. Over the crested
pines, the moon looked like it had been pared with a knife. The
night sky was brackish. Her mother sat on the front steps. She
had her arms around her knees. Her hair was black, her skin
white. Muscles ran in lines up her back.

In the car, King rose up to her knees. Moonlight filtered
in. Clarke was stretched out alongside Elsie, both asleep in
the backseat. Through the windows, she could see the hulk of
her father among craggy pines. She cracked the door and cold
flooded inside. The frozen ground crunched beneath her feet.
Her dad was sitting on the ground. His face was knotted up.
His eyes were pinched and unfocused and moving. His mouth
opened and closed, making soft noises. King stood behind him
a moment, hesitant. Then she reached out and touched her fa
ther’s shoulder in just the way that she had once put her hand
on her mother.

“What is it, Dad?” King asked. “What is it?”

When had the past and present begun to overlap? Was it
her mother’s voice or her father’s that asked, “What happened
to us?” The words sounded limpid and run together, as though
both of their tongues were partially frozen. “One of us was al
ways going to hurt the other.”

“No, no,” King said. For a second she pulled at both of their
hands. “Come on inside.” She pulled harder. “Out here it’s too
chilly.”

In the morning, not far from their destination, they drove
through tulip fields. Miles of flowers tended in squared lots.
Red barns lumped beneath great firs. Geese in dark V’s were
backlit by the sunset. They passed through a yellow field into a
valley of dark red blossoms. Cresting a long ridge, they turned
into a violet tulip bed bordered by a white fence. The neighbor
ing hill was covered in orange. The moon sat above it as white
as bone.

“Oh, my!” Elsie said. All that beauty felt alien. Clarke and
King pressed their faces to the windows.

“Look at it!” Clarke said. “It’s like it’s here just for us.”

“Jesus,” Dominick said, “I’m glad that we get to see this.”

To get to Benjamin Ward’s house, Dominick turned off
a road onto a long graveled drive that led down to the Pacific
Ocean. Apple and cherry and pear trees flowered in long lines
that rose and fell across hills. Huge ferns swept up from be
neath jagged pines. Behind them Mount Baker and the Twin
Sisters rose from the Cascades. To the south hunched Mount
Rainier, snow-covered and alone and massive.

They drove over a last hill and slowly descended a long
slope, past a knee-high rock wall, through a field of clover
toward a brown house. Beside the main building, a scatter
ing of cabins nestled among trees. Just beyond the property,
the earth gave way sharply, a bluff falling to sand. The ocean
stretched out, jagged with light and dotted with triangular
sails. The green mounds of the San Juan Islands rose up in the
distance.

Though the air was chilly, all the windows were down in the
station wagon. Elsie pointed her face into the outside air. “It’s
the first time I’ve seen the ocean,” she said.

“You like it?” Dominick asked.

“I didn’t think it would be like this.”

As they pulled in, a man as large as their father came out of
the brown house. The doorway behind him was filled with ar
tificial light. He wore a white shirt and a jungle hat. He stood
in gravel and waved them forward until they stood in front
of him. “Goddamn!” he called, his voice overly loud. His fea
tures were oversized, his nose a thick mound, his lips ruddy and
wide, his chin a landmass.

Dominick got out of the car and they put their arms around
each other and waved back and forth like two wrestling giants.
“What happened to you?” Dominick said. “You got old.”

The man lifted their father off his feet, set him down again,
released him, and came to stand by Elsie and the kids. “Who’re
you?” he said to Elsie.

“Elsie,” she said. “Who’re you?”

“I’m Benjamin Ward,” he said. His thighs were round like
Easter hams. He looked at the other two kids. “You’re Clarke
and King,” he said. “Your dad used to tell stories about you.
You know that? I know some about you already. You’re wel
come here. Call me Benny.”

The air smelled of pine needles, of salt and decay, and of the
blue hyacinth that bloomed around the window wells. Elsie
stepped closer to Clarke. Benny pointed at the two of them. “I
see how it is,” Benny said. “This place used to be a resort. You
two want your own cabin?”

CHARLIE ROSE AT
5:00 a.m. in a hotel room that
looked nearly identical to the room he had last been in. He
had an early-morning flight to Spokane, Washington. His body
groaned at being awake. What were the Sawyers doing in Leav
enworth, Washington? Were they still there? What was the
point in running?

His phone rang. Annie Sawyer. He didn’t feel especially
surprised. A paper cup of coffee in one hand, he answered his
phone. “Hello, Annie,” he said.

“Charlie, I’ve got something to get off my chest.”

“Go ahead, then. But listen, I already know that Dominick
was staying in your friend’s trailer.”

There was a pause on the line, not as if she was quiet but as
if the line had gone momentarily dead. “It’s not that,” she said.

Her voice was deep and husky. Charlie could hear a catch in
her breath. He remembered the coffee in his hand and took a
drink. “You okay?” he asked.

“I don’t know. All this is happening to my family.”

“Have I told you that I’ve got a daughter named Charlene?”
Charlie said. “She’s been having some trouble. Neither of us is
sure that we want to talk to each other.”

“Charlene?” Annie said. “You named your daughter after
yourself?”

“It was my wife’s idea.”

Annie Sawyer drew in a breath and held it. Charlie waited
until she let it go. “It was me, Charlie,” she said.

“What was you?” he said.

“I pretended to be her,” Annie said. “I pretended to be Sar
ah.”