Kateri glances down the hall to two open bedrooms, a bathroom, and a locked utility closet. She pulls her sweater up over her nose, breathing through the wool, and steps away from the kitchen, eager for fresh air and anxious to call Hurt.
“What’d you find?” he asks.
“A lot of blood,” she says, “but there’s no body inside the house. Looks like a struggle.”
“How fresh?” Hurt asks.
“Sticky,” she says. “With spatter, but not from a gunshot. Looks like blunt force, possible stabbing.”
* * *
Kateri’s grandmother died quickly, within four months of her diagnosis. She declined treatment, accepted pain management, and stayed home with Kateri in a hospital bed in the living room, where they watched TV together, her grandmother drinking tea, Kateri whiskey.
When it happened, Kateri leaned her head onto her grandmother’s arm, and she said, “Honey, you have to let me go.”
She left the house for two days while a team from hospice removed all the medical items. She had her grandmother cremated at her request. When her friends called for a memorial service, she couldn’t answer them. She turned her phone off, let the battery die, didn’t return messages. She stayed in, closed the blinds, left the TV going and the bottle open.
When the accident happened, right before Christmas, Kateri herself spent three days in a hospital bed, her arm in a cast and her jaw stitched up. After, she went back to the same rooms, the same TV, and tried to live as she had before, minus the whiskey, minus the woman who’d raised her, minus even the husband she’d held on to for a few short years in her youth.
The yellow walls, the plaid furniture, her grandmother’s things, an owl figurine, a sprawling spider plant, told her it was time to go. Time to sell, to let new, different life into the house. She lit a candle, barely believing, but asked her grandmother to send her a sign.
The next day, the sheriff offered her a transfer from Onondaga County out to tiny, rural Hamilton County. They’d had a criminal investigator retire. At best, it was a lateral move.
“I’m not terminating you,” the sheriff said.
It still felt like an ending.
* * *
Kateri asks for backup and a full forensics team, who come in hazmat suits with bright lights and packets of baggies to gather evidence. She looks into each of the rooms, one packed with clutter, clothing, books, candles. There’s a half-blackened sage stick beside the bed and a long cord with brass bells hanging in the window.
In the other bedroom, there’s a twin mattress on the floor, boys’ sneakers and a flannel shirt, a stack of cracked-spined paperback books next to the pillow.
“House belongs to Pearl Jenkins,” Hurt says in the hallway, where they stand side by side in regular clothes while a bevy of suited forensic technicians work around them. “But it was recently transferred to her son, Shannon,” he adds.
“Why?” Kateri asks. She knows that any transfer of property, like any large life insurance policy, is never a great sign. At the least it signals money trouble. The worst, coercion.
“The house was about to be seized for back taxes,” Hurt says. “I’m sure it was a work-around.”
“How old is the son?” She watches Hurt as he watches the quad screen of surveillance.
“Let’s pull footage from this,” he says to a tech. “He’s an adult,” he tells Kateri.
“With a record?” Kateri asks.
“Not the kid; just the dad,” he says. “Park Jenkins was put away for years.”
“For?” she asks.
“Arson,” Hurt says.
Behind him, two techs pull samples from the blood and snap pictures of the spatter on the walls, the cabinet doors, the ceiling. They have pulled all the knives and bagged them. They begin opening drawers, careful not to disturb but looking for more evidence of a weapon. It would have to be a heavy object to cause that trajectory of spray.
“Detective Hurt,” one of them says.
Between the potted herbs, another tech finds a single molar, a tiny bit of dried gum still clinging to the soft curve of exposed root.
“Bag it,” Kateri says. “There’s our ID.”
She watches as they pick up the tooth with tiny surgical tweezers and place it in a bag. Behind them, investigators comb through the bedrooms, bagging clothing, hairs, dusting for fingerprints, shining bright lights into dark corners, revealing mouse turds and cobwebs.
“Ma’am,” a tech calls, her voice sharp and panicked. “Ma’am.”
Kateri thinks, here it is. They’ve found the body, or what’s left of it.
The only female tech on the forensic team stands at the utility closet door, a heavy lock cutter in one hand, the other on the doorknob.
Kateri meets her eye before she pulls the door open, bracing herself for the worst: A dismembered corpse, hacked into pieces. A trash bag filled with parts. More blood.
But what she sees isn’t in pieces, or dead at all.
A small girl sits in a pink beanbag chair. The closet is empty except for her and the cushion. She has her knees bent up under her chin and her hands clamped over her eyes. Her hair is a mess of fire-red curls, her clothes spattered with more blood.
On the wall at the back of the closet is a stick-figure man, the kind a kid draws but out of proportion, his arms and legs too long and creepy, his body in black crayon. His eyes in the middle of his big circle head are bright blue, and his mouth is painted on in dried blood.
Kateri looks over her shoulder at the tech, who has paled and tells her to be quiet, even though she hasn’t made a sound. Then the tech says it again, louder, to everyone else in the house. Kateri sees Hurt look in and hears him mutter an obscenity.
“Get everyone out for a few minutes,” Kateri says to him, and he starts rounding people up, waving his arms, speaking in a harsh whisper. Flashes go off, and Kateri holds up her hand to block the light. The closet has one dim bulb on a pull chain and no window, no outside light.
She hears the team start to shuffle out, and the house settles to an eerie calm, just the tick of the clock, the quick patter of a leaky faucet. Kateri crouches in the closet, close to the child but not touching. She watches as the girl parts her little fingers, peeking out. She has light eyes. Greenish, like seawater.
TWO: SHANNON
AUGUST
Every town has one. A loner. An outlier. A stranger who doesn’t belong, someone who blew into town, disconnected from the people who have been there for generations. Sometimes the stranger stays and learns to fit in, and after years, no one thinks of them as strange anymore. Sometimes you try to keep them, like catching a young deer, still wobbling on his spindly legs. But at some point, you know they have to go. At some point, you stop holding on so tightly, and the deer follows his instincts. He does what he was born to do.
* * *
The last time I saw my father was through safety glass. It took three tries over two days. The first day I walked in there and went through security, I left all my belongings in the car, even the keys, so there wouldn’t be any hitches at all. And the guard said, “No visitors.”
“I’m sorry, what?” I asked him.
“Park Jenkins. No visitors,” he repeated.