“Want a push?” I said as I got out of the car. I’m not good with children as a rule, but it seemed an attempt wouldn’t hurt. He looked at me silently for a second, stuck a finger in his mouth. His tank top slipped up as his round belly popped out to greet me. Bobby Jr. looked stupid and cowed. A boy for the Nashes, but a disappointing one.
I stepped toward him. He jumped off the Big Wheel, which remained clamped to him for a few steps, jammed on his body as it was, then clattered off sideways.
“Daddy!” He ran wailing toward the house as if I’d pinched him.
By the time I reached the front door, a man appeared. My eyes focused behind him, at a miniature fountain gurgling in the hallway. It had three tiers shaped like shells, with a statue of a little boy perched on top. Even from the other side of the screen door, the water smelled old.
“Can I help you?”
“Are you Robert Nash?”
He looked suddenly wary. It was probably the first question the police had asked him when they told him his daughter was dead.
“I’m Bob Nash.”
“I’m so sorry to bother you at home. I’m Camille Preaker. I’m from Wind Gap.”
“Mmhmmm.”
“But now I’m with the Daily Post in Chicago. We’re covering the story…. We’re here because of Natalie Keene, and your daughter’s murder.”
I braced for yelling, door slams, curses, a punch. Bob Nash stuffed both hands deep into his front pockets and leaned back on his heels.
“We can talk in the bedroom.”
He held the door open for me, and I began picking my way through the clutter of the living room, laundry baskets spurting over with rumpled sheets and tiny T-shirts. Then past a bathroom whose centerpiece was an empty roll of toilet paper on the floor, and down a hallway spackled with fading photos beneath grimy laminate: little blonde girls crowded dotingly around a baby boy; a young Nash with his arm stiffly circled around his new bride, each of them holding the edge of a cake knife. When I got to the bedroom—matching curtains and bedclothes, a tidy dresser—I realized why Nash had chosen the spot for our interview. It was the one area of the house that held a degree of civilization, like an outpost on the edge of a despairing jungle.
Nash sat on one edge of the bed, I on the other. There were no chairs. We could have been day players in an amateur porn flick. Except we each had a glass of cherry Kool-Aid he’d fetched for us. Nash was a well-kept man: clipped mustache, receding blond hair held down with gel, a glaring green polo tucked into jeans. I assumed he was the one who maintained the order of this room; it had the unadorned neatness of a bachelor trying very hard.
He needed no foreplay for the interview, and I was grateful. It’s like sweet-talking your date when you both know you’re about to get laid.
“Ann’d been riding her bike all last summer,” he started without prompting. “All summer just around and around the block. My wife and me wouldn’t let her go no further. She was only nine. We are very protective parents. But then at the end, right before she started school, my wife said fine. Ann had been whining, so my wife said fine, Ann could ride to her friend Emily’s house. She never got there. It was eight o’clock before we realized.”
“What time had she left?”
“About seven. So somewhere along the way, in those ten blocks, they got her. My wife will never forgive herself. Never.”
“What do you mean, they got her?”
“Them, him, whatever. The bastard. The sick baby killer. While my family and I sleep, while you drive around doing your reporting, there is a person out there looking for babies to kill. Because you and I both know the little Keene girl isn’t just lost.”
He finished the rest of his Kool-Aid in one belt, wiped his mouth. The quotes were good, if overpolished. I find this common, and in direct proportion to the amount of TV a subject watches. Not long ago, I interviewed a woman whose twenty-two-year-old daughter had just been murdered by her boyfriend, and she gave me a line straight from a legal drama I happened to catch the night before: I’d like to say that I pity him, but now I fear I’ll never be able to pity again.
“So Mr. Nash, you have no thoughts of anyone who might have wanted to harm you or your family by hurting Ann?”
“Miss, I sell chairs, ergonomic chairs for a living—over the phone. I work out of an office over in Hayti, with two other fellas. I don’t meet anyone. My wife does part-time office work at the grade school. There’s no drama here. Someone just decided to kill our little girl.” He said the last part beleaguredly, as if he’d given in to the idea.
Bob Nash walked to the sliding glass door off the side of the bedroom. It led onto a tiny deck. He opened the door but stayed inside. “Might be a homo did it,” he said. The word choice was actually a euphemism in these parts.
“Why do you say that?”
“He didn’t rape her. Everyone says that’s unusual in a killing like this. I say it’s the only blessing we got. I’d rather him kill her than rape her.”
“There were no signs of molestation at all?” I asked in a murmur I hoped sounded gentle.
“None. And no bruises, no cuts, no sign of any kind of…torture. Just strangled her. Pried her teeth out. And I didn’t mean what I said before, about her being better killed than raped. That was a stupid thing to say. But you know what I mean.”
I said nothing, let my tape recorder whir on, capturing my breathing, Nash’s ice clinking, the thunks of a volleyball game being played next door in the last of the daylight.
“Daddy?” A pretty blonde girl, hair in a ponytail down to her waist, peeked through the crack of the bedroom door.
“Not now, honey.”
“I’m hungry.”
“You can fix something,” Nash said. “There’s waffles in the freezer. Make sure Bobby eats, too.”
The girl lingered a few seconds longer looking at the carpet in front of her, then quietly shut the door. I wondered where their mother was.
“Were you home when Ann left the house that last time?”
He cocked his head sideways at me, sucked his teeth. “No. I was on my way home from Hayti. It’s an hour drive. I didn’t hurt my daughter.”
“I didn’t mean that,” I lied. “I was just wondering if you got to see her that night.”
“Saw her that morning,” he said. “Don’t remember if we talked or not. Probably not. Four kids in the morning can be a little much, you know?”
Nash twirled his ice, now melted into one solid mass. He ran his fingers underneath his bristly mustache. “No one’s been any help so far,” he said. “Vickery’s in over his head. There’s some big-shot detective assigned here from Kansas City. He’s a kid, smug too. Marking days till he can get out. You want a picture of Ann?” He said picture like pitcher. So do I if I don’t watch it. He took from his wallet a school photo of a girl with a wide, crooked smile, her pale brown hair cut jaggedly above her chin.
“My wife wanted to put her hair in rollers the night before school photos. Ann chopped it off instead. She was a willful thing. A tomboy. I’m actually surprised she’s the one they took. Ashleigh’s always been the pretty one, you know. The one people look at.” He stared at the photo one more time. “Ann must’ve given hell.”