The Narrows(95)

In the room, they carried the bundle to the nearest desk. Haggis swiped a hand across its surface, throwing the ink blotter and a few pens to the floor. They set the bundle down and Shirley saw, with mounting sadness, that the figure beneath the blanket still retained the shape of a small boy.

“Where’s Ben?” she asked.

“He went to see the kid’s mother,” Platt said, hiking up his gun belt. His eyes remained on the boy beneath the blanket. He looked defeated.

“What are we supposed to do?” she asked.

“Ben was going to call the sheriff’s department over in Cumberland and have them come out and take over,” Mel Haggis interceded. He looked about as pasty and out of sorts as his partner. “This is beyond us, Shirl.”

“This is horrific,” Shirley told them.

“Christ,” Platt barked, his voice cracking. He was looking across the room at Maggie Quedentock, who still occupied the first cell. “Who’s that?”

Shirley walked around the desk and addressed the woman in what she hoped sounded like a semicheerful voice. “You okay in there, Maggie? You need anything?”

Maggie lifted her head up the slightest bit and addressed Shirley with dark eyes. She gave no reply.

“Why’s she locked up?” Haggis asked, dropping his voice to a whisper.

Shirley shot him a glance that said I’ll fill you in on everything the moment we’re in the next room. Melvin Haggis seemed to comprehend.

Shirley looked back at Maggie. “You want some water or something, dear?”

Again, Maggie said nothing.

“Let’s step out in the hall,” Platt said.



3



Maggie watched them go out into the hallway. Part of her—the part that was still in the police station holding cell—could hear the rain pounding the roof, could feel the cold steel bench beneath her thighs, could hear the muted whispers out in the hallway. Another part of Maggie—arguably the more conscious of the two halves—sat down on the bench seat of her father’s truck. Her father, Aaron Kilpatrick, sat beside her behind the wheel. Daylight glittered against the windshield and the distant sky looked like an impressionistic painting.

They were driving along one of the old logging roads far up in the hills. It was summer—she could tell by the fullness of the trees and the heat against her flesh, magnified as it radiated through the truck’s cracked windshield—and she was eleven years old. Dressed in a pair of pink denim shorts and a loose-fitting white blouse with short, scalloped sleeves, her long brown legs slid into the passenger footwell while her hands fumbled with each other in her lap. She smelled her father’s pungent and medicinal aftershave coupled with the ghostly aroma of pipe tobacco that always seemed to linger in the cab of the truck and on Aaron Kilpatrick’s clothes.

“You know why we’re out here, Margaret?” he asked her, shattering the peaceful silence.

“No, sir.”

“It’s your momma’s idea. You’ve made her very angry. She wanted me to have a talk with you.”

A cold dread gripped her by the hand. Her mouth went dry. A million possible violations shuttled through her head. Had someone seen her smoking? Had one of her friends ratted her out about shoplifting candy and sunglasses from Lomax’s? Sometimes she skipped school with Susan Winterbarger—had her folks found out about that?

“You just gonna sit there, being quiet?”

“No, sir.”

“You have any idea what your momma’s so off the rails about, girl?”

She had to fight off the urge to respond that her mother was always going off the rails about something. She knew damn well that her father knew this, too.

Instead, she said, “I don’t know what it is. I didn’t do anything.”

The truck crested a hill that overlooked Stillwater and, beyond, the serpentine ribbon of glittering diamonds that was the Narrows. Her father whipped the truck around so that the town below was framed perfectly in the windshield. At this hour, she could see the shadow of the mountain sliding in slow increments across the town as the sun sank behind the mountain. Even at such a young age, Maggie Kilpatrick had always felt an imprecise sadness at this time of day, knowing that while the rest of the countryside would enjoy a few more hours of daylight, Stillwater was doomed to a lifetime of premature night. Even now, young Maggie was overcome by despondency.

Her father shifted the truck into Park but kept the engine idling. With his window rolled down, he poked an elbow out as he surveyed the darkening landscape below. Cars twinkled like sapphires along Rapunzel and the lampposts along Hamilton blinked on. Her father dug a pack of Marlboros out of the front pocket of his overalls. He shook a cigarette into his mouth then seemed to reflect on something for a second or two before offering Maggie the pack.

She looked at him with stark confusion.

“I know you smoke,” he said, the Marlboro bouncing between his lips.

She felt like she was being set up. “I don’t want one.”

He shook the pack so that the tip of one cigarette poked out from the cellophane. “Go on.” There was an uncomfortable insistence in his voice that made Maggie’s heart beat faster.

Reluctantly, she plucked the cigarette from the pack then stared at it numbly as if she’d never seen one before. Sure, she had smoked plenty of them behind the schoolhouse or down by the Narrows with her friends, but this was something different. This was like being shoved out onto a stage and told to dance because her life depended on it. Just the thought of smoking the cigarette in front of her father made her ill.