Everything You Want Me to Be(25)

I advanced on her, jabbing the book in the direction of the barns outside the window. “What do you think I was doing this morning? You think I was collecting eggs and hauling straw bales for fun?”

“No, I know you hated every second of it. You couldn’t have made it more obvious if you tried.”

I barked out a laugh. “Oh, trust me, I could have made it a lot more obvious.”

“I didn’t think it was going to be like this.” She blinked back tears. “I knew it would take some adjustment to move here, but it’s like you’re not even trying.”

Shaking my head, I turned back to the window. If she thought “some adjustment” would turn me into a butcher, there was nothing else I could say to her.

She lingered and drew a breath, as though on the verge of saying something else, then I heard the creak of the floorboards in the hallway and her slow descent down the stairs.

I sunk into a chair and dropped my head to the book in my hand, drilling the imprint of the spine into my forehead. The truth was, I did want to be part of this family. What wouldn’t I give to relax and joke away the evening with Mary, or the Mary of before? To unlearn what I knew about her?

Aggravated, I sat up and tossed the book on the desk and that’s when I noticed the title for the first time. Shakespeare’s Complete Tragedies.

Nothing suicidal, the principal had said, sitting jovially in front of his glass cabinet full of model tractors, each green body carefully polished to catch the light. I don’t like putting suicide out in front of teenagers. Don’t want to give the misguided ones any ideas. He didn’t want to disturb teenagers who were learning to behead chickens on their fathers’ farms, who were guiding cows and pigs into trailers and driving them to their deaths.

I paged through until I landed on Macbeth.

Macbeth—arguably the most violent play Shakespeare ever wrote. I could pour buckets of red corn syrup all over the stage, let them kill and feast on each other’s blood. No romantic suicides here; Macbeth was pure carnage fueled by greed and madness and revenge. The Bard always reveals our natures and in this play he’d said that in the right situation, with the right motive, all of us are murdering monsters.

I marked the page and pushed the book to the far side of my desk, away from everything else, as if afraid of what was inside.





DEL / Monday, April 14, 2008


BY SEVEN o’clock Monday morning I had Jake digging into Hattie’s laptop and was knocking on the Kinakises’ door. Mrs. Kinakis was none too pleased to see me again, especially when I explained that I needed Tommy to give DNA samples that morning. Both parents were royally ticked off that Tommy’d landed on the suspect list, but Tommy himself didn’t have anything to say about it. He was as quiet as yesterday, sitting at his mom’s kitchen table and poking at a bowl of oatmeal turning to concrete in front of him.

“I’ll do it.” He finally spoke up, killing his parents’ arguments mid-word. He put his varsity letterman’s jacket on without a backward glance at either of them and we were on our way to Rochester.

Tommy stared out the passenger side window the whole ride, wiping his eyes every once in a while. He’d asked if he had to sit in the back before we got in and that was the last he’d spoken.

When we were almost into the city, I told him he was doing a good thing. “I could’ve easily gotten a warrant, you know. You saved me the trouble.”

He nodded and a minute later asked, “Will the blood clear me?”

“Semen.”

“Semen?”

“Found some on her body. You sure it wasn’t yours?” I wanted to ask him without his parents staring him down.

“No.” He was mighty quick to answer. “I already told you, she wouldn’t let me.”

Another pause, while the fact of it must have sunk in. “Someone . . . raped her?”

He seemed to have trouble with the word.

“Can’t say.”

“So my . . . stuff . . . won’t match and then you’ll clear me, right? That’ll take me off your list?”

“We’ll see.” I didn’t tell him that, apart from Gerald Jones, he was the list.

He was quiet for the rest of the morning, letting nurses lead him around like some overgrown pup. After dropping the kid off back home, I swung by the Erickson place again. Winifred’s Buick was in the garage and a Chevy pickup was parked out front. I banged on the screen door for what felt like ten minutes with no answer and then headed around to the outbuildings. Winifred leased most of her land to one of the big farming cooperatives and I’d never seen her set foot in the fields since the day she shot Lars, but she had to be here somewhere.

I poked around until I heard voices coming from the machinery shed.

“—don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“You’re not going to say a word, that’s what.” Came the reply. The first person was kind of muffled, but Winifred’s old, crackly voice carried clear as day.

“Can’t keep it a secret forever.”

“Can’t say nothing till you decide what you’re going to do.”

“We’re not talking about this.”

“You have to talk to someone and I know exactly what you’re feeling.”

“It’s murder.”