Little Deaths(15)

The other photo showed the same two children on a sofa with a woman between them. Her arm was around the girl and the little boy leaned into her. All three were laughing into the camera. They had the same wide mouths, the same high foreheads, but where the kids were all innocence and open grins, the woman’s glossy smile didn’t quite reach her eyes.

Mrs. Bonelli touched the photo gently. “That’s them. Frankie and Cindy. And their mom. That’s Ruth.”

Then she said, “I saw her, you know. This morning. I can’t believe it was just this morning.”

“You saw Mrs. Malone? Where?”

“She was over there”—she pointed toward the corner of the street. “She was looking for the children. She told me they were missing.”

“What did you do?”

“I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t even know if what she was saying was real. God forgive me, I thought”—tears came into her eyes—“I thought she might be drunk.”

She sniffed. “I’ll never forgive myself for that.”

Pete tried to think of something to say. Could only come up with, “Mrs. Bonelli, I’m sure . . . well, let’s just wait for some news.”

She nodded. Wiped her eyes on her apron. Took the plate and glass and went back inside.

Pete glanced around and slid the photos into his notebook, quickly closed the album, and left it on the stoop. He got back in the car. There wasn’t much else he could do here: he had the names, the background details. From what he had seen and overheard, the cops seemed to know as little as he did.

He turned the engine over and decided to find a phone to call the office, head back, and type up his notes.

Then the door to the apartment building opened and a murmur passed through the small crowd like a breeze in a cornfield.

A cop in uniform emerged from the doorway. Blushing at the eyes on him, he hurried to a police car parked at the end of the path, got into the driver’s seat.

A second guy appeared in the doorway, squinting against the afternoon sun. He was big, broad-shouldered, with slicked-back hair and a square sallow face.

Although he wore a suit, he was a cop too. He walked like a cop, and the uniforms stood to attention as he came out.

Pete raised his camera and clicked the shutter.

Click.

He held the door, and a woman appeared behind him.

She wasn’t what he’d expected. And as soon as he became aware of that, he asked himself what he had expected; what the women had led him to expect. Someone wild, he thought. Tangled hair, disordered clothes. Hysterics.

Instead, she was easily recognizable as the glossy woman in the photograph. Her outline was as neat as a doll’s. She was slim, wearing pale pants that came halfway down her calves, a tight shirt. And she was tiny, or seemed so, dwarfed as she was by the men around her: the cop ahead of her, a guy behind her holding a cigarette. Her hair was short, dark in the doorway, bursting into a red-gold flame as she came into the sunlight.

Click.

She lifted her head and looked first at the women, then at the cops. Her mouth formed a surprised O. But before he could figure out what she was looking at, she turned away and followed the cop in the suit to the waiting car.

Pete looked again at the doorway and saw the third man emerge. He was still holding the cigarette, but loosely, as though he’d forgotten about it. He was big, like the plainclothes cop, but where the cop was all business and purpose, this one seemed lost. His shirt was wrinkled, his jaw blue where he hadn’t shaved. He stared toward Mrs. Malone as she got into the car and as he watched her, his face changed. From the dazed look of a man who’d just woken up, his expression set into something like fear.

Click.

The car started up and moved away. Pete started his own engine, and followed as closely as he could.


Ruth sat in the back of the car, still, silent, holding her breath for long, tense moments. Devlin was in front, in the passenger seat. She couldn’t look at him, but felt his eyes on her in the mirror now and again, the weight of his stare, the relief as he slid his gaze away.

She wanted to ask again where they were going but she knew they wouldn’t answer. She forced herself to be silent. To wait. They must be taking her to the kids. She should focus on that. On Frankie and Cindy.

The hot leather seat stuck to her legs through her cotton pants: her palms were damp. The siren was blaring and as they sped through lunchtime traffic, Ruth felt a thin current of warm air from the front windows drift back to her as she sat, stifled, trapped. The driver muttered something at an old station wagon that was slow to get out of his way.

She watched his impatience as though from a distance. Stared at the pink freckled skin emerging from his stiff collar, at the freshly cut hair, shaved too short at the back. She realized that it was the cop from the apartment. The one called Quinn. She remembered her anger at the sight of him on his knees by her bed and felt it fade, replaced by an unexpected dart of tenderness, by a desire to protect him. He was too young for all of this: to have a boss like Devlin, to be a cop in the first place.

She leaned back against the ripped headrest and closed her eyes. Wished she was somewhere cool. Somewhere with space and silence. Then came an unexpected memory of summers at her uncle’s farm in Nebraska, and an intense longing for the rippling shadows of the prairie grass in the evening, and the wide skies bleached by the fading light. She remembered the uneven creak of her Aunt Shauna’s rocking chair, the ice cracking in her glass of lemonade, wheat chaff dusting her skinny, tanned legs, and she wished herself there now: rocking gently on the porch, looking out over the darkening stretch of land, listening to the whispering breeze and the crickets and the hush of night in a town that was a thousand miles from New York in July.