The Narrows(87)

4



The rain was coming down in sheets by the time Ben returned to the Moreland house. Eddie had already left in his own car to bring the shotgun back to the station and to write up the chain-of-custody form he would have to send to the county police, along with the shotgun, in order to have it dusted for prints. It was the most action Eddie had seen in a long time and, to Ben, he seemed both nervous and excited.

Beverly Moreland was in the kitchen preparing dinner when Jed let Ben into the house. Jed looked utterly exhausted. He worked a toothpick around one corner of his mouth as he shook Ben’s hand. “She’s on the back porch,” he told Ben. “Didn’t want to come inside. Said she wanted to keep watch on whatever’s out there.”

“Thanks for keeping an eye on her, Jed.”

“Bev gave her a Valium. It seemed to calm her down. I hope that was okay.”

“That’s fine.”

Jed led him out onto the back porch but didn’t follow him out. Maggie was perched like a bird on the porch steps, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes trained on the downpour that was already filling up craters in the earth. Cornstalks heaved and swelled in the wind like ocean waves.

Ben folded his arms and leaned against the porch railing. He was quiet for quite some time, watching the rainwater sluice down the eaves of the porch’s roof. Eventually, he cleared his throat. “What were you and Evan fighting about, Maggie?”

She looked up at him, her stare as lifeless as a wax dummy’s.

“Maggie?” he said when she didn’t respond.

She turned back and looked out over the cornfield. “He accused me of sleeping around on him.”

“Had you been?”

She didn’t answer.

“Where’d the shotgun come from?”

“It’s Evan’s. He keeps it in the basement.”

“I meant, why was it out in the yard?”

“Evan had it.”

“Did he threaten you with it?”

Silence.

“Maggie? Did Evan threaten you with the gun?”

“I…can’t remember…”

“Think harder.”

“He was yelling at me. He was sitting on the car with the gun in his lap, yelling at me.”

“Did someone fire a shot?”

Again, she said, “I can’t remember.”

“There’s blood on the car, too.” When she didn’t respond to this, he added, “Do you know whose blood it is?”

“I guess it’s Evan’s.”

“Did you shoot Evan?”

“No.”

“Are you sure you don’t—”

“I didn’t shoot him. I didn’t kill my husband.”

“At least one shot was fired from that shotgun, far as I can tell right now. Who did it?”

“It must have gone off when…when he was being attacked…”

“Evan, you mean? Attacked by who?”

She trained her dark, vacuous eyes back on him. “I don’t know,” she said in a barely audible voice.

“Didn’t you see the person?”

“No.” She looked back at the rain.

Ben sighed and leaned on the railing. “Let’s talk some more, but not here, okay?”

Maggie stood up sharply from the stairs. “I don’t want to go back to my house.” There was genuine fear in her eyes.

“We’ll talk down at the station,” Ben said.



5



She was silent for much of the ride from the Morelands’ house to the barracks. The only visible sign of life came when she turned her head to look out the passenger window at the carved roadway that was Full Hill Road trailing up into the wooded hillside. To assuage his discomfort, Ben turned on the radio. R.E.M. came on, singing about the end of the world. He snapped the radio back off.

“Am I under arrest?”

Though there was enough probable cause to lock her up right then, he said, “No, ma’am.”

They got soaked going from the car to the station. Ben pointed to a restroom and told Maggie she could go clean up in there and he’d see if he could locate some towels. In the dispatch office, Shirley Bennice sat at her desk reading an issue of People magazine. She looked up at him as he came into the office and made a tsk tsk sound. “Lord, Ben, you’re soaked.”

“It’s coming down in buckets now. We got any towels?”

“There should be some clean ones in the storage closet. I’ll run and grab some if you want.”

“Sit tight, I’ll get them. Did Eddie come back yet?”

“He’s at his desk.”

In the Batter’s Box, Eddie sat curled over his desk filling out the chain-of-custody paperwork for the shotgun in large block letters. He wrote with the intensity and concentration of a schoolboy, his tongue cocked into one corner of his mouth.

“I brought Maggie Quedentock back, gonna ask her a few more questions,” Ben said, opening the storage closet. There was a stack of clean white towels on the bottom shelf. He bent to pull two out when the cell phone he’d found in the Quedentocks’ backyard fell out of his pocket and clattered to the floor. He had forgotten about it.