You Will Know Me(44)

“No,” Katie said, looking at Devon, who was staring at her sore hand.

“She did,” Devon said.

“What?” Katie said. “When?”

“She was sending me texts. I kept deleting them. They were creepy. Dad told me to block her.”

Katie and Officer Crandall turned to Eric.

“Because of the calling,” Eric said, straightening in his chair, looking at them both. “I told her to block her because of the incessant calling. I didn’t know about the texts.”

“Devon, why didn’t you tell me about the texts?” Katie asked, her head throbbing.

Officer Crandall looked at Katie, then back at Devon, who was still staring at her right hand, the ailing wrist bandaged now, like a fat paw.

“I don’t know,” she said, finally.

“What did the texts say?”

Devon shrugged. “She kept calling me names. I don’t know why.”

The officer looked at her as if waiting for more.

“Are we going to talk about what happened today?” Eric said, squirming in his chair.

“You have no idea why she might have targeted you?” Crandall asked.

There was another brief silence.

“Sometimes,” Katie jumped in, “Devon’s talents make her a target. There’s jealousy, you know. A lot of it.”

Devon nodded, staring at her hands. “Hailey wanted to be a gymnast,” she said. “But she was too big.”

“That’s true,” Katie said, except it didn’t seem precisely right. The way she’d always understood it, Hailey had abandoned serious competition back in high school for swimming, and then coaching. “Can’t you get those texts from Hailey’s phone?”

“We’d need a warrant,” he said. “And we’d have to go through her provider since her phone was in about twenty-five pieces on the locker-room floor.”

Katie remembered the sound of splintering, the skittering of plastic on linoleum. Devon’s foot landing on it like a tomahawk. Hailey’s banshee howl.

“Why do we keep talking about texts?” Eric said, face florid in a way Katie didn’t recognize. “This woman attacked my daughter.”

“And by the way, deleting texts from your phone doesn’t get rid of them,” the officer told Katie calmly. “It just removes them from your phone.”

As he spoke, the officer watched Devon, who was still fixated on her wrist, stretching the grip muscles like Teddy always told her to.

“Officer, what do we do?” Katie asked. “We have no idea what Hailey’s capable of.”

“We know exactly what she’s capable of,” Eric said. “We saw it today. And I can’t be the only one wondering what this has to do with Ryan Beck.”

A loud crack, and the battered water bottle in Eric’s fist completely gave way this time, a sluice of water scattering across all of them.

Katie jumped back, but neither Crandall nor Devon moved. Devon’s eyes blinking as if water had been caught there, her lashes sticky with it.

“Mr. Knox,” Crandall said, looking down at the water spatters on the desk, “let’s just keep focused on what happened to Devon. Okay?”

“Then tell me this: How do we file a restraining order?” Eric said, picking up the splintered water bottle, nearly slamming it into the trash can.

“She’s locked up now, right?” Katie asked the officer, placing her hand on Eric’s arm, pressing hard.

“Miss Belfour is at St. Joe’s now,” Crandall said. “But we’ll be talking to her very soon.”

“She’s at the hospital?” Katie asked.

“Her injuries were more substantial than your daughter’s,” Crandall added.

“Oh.”

“A big hank of her hair got torn out,” he said. “Your daughter knows how to protect herself.”

Katie looked at Devon, whose eyes remained downcast.

“And her scalp opened up where she hit the floor,” Crandall continued. “But mostly they need to be extra careful whenever there’s bite marks. Especially under the eye.” He paused a second before adding, “It was a mean fight.”

*



They found Drew half asleep in his chair, mouth still ringed white and a fresh red rash swarming up his face.

“Come on, honey,” Katie said, arms around him. “Devon’s in the restroom and then we’ll go.”

She felt Eric’s hand on her arm.

“Did you know she was violent?” he said. “Did you know any of this?”

Katie stared at him, the way his hands bulbed into fists. He was looking at her like she had done something. Like she was the one.

“You knew as much as I did,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm. “You’re the one who said practice is how Devon ‘works through feelings.’ Right?”

He looked at her, then down at Drew, the back of his hand touching Drew’s bloomy face.

“We shouldn’t have let Devon out of our sight after that call,” he said. “That’s all I meant. Sorry. Sorry.”

She nodded, and stared at the ladies’ room door, waiting for Devon.

That’s when it came to her, the last time she’d talked to a police detective, more than a dozen years ago. They were huddled in the hectic waiting room at Good Samaritan Hospital, Eric’s forearms streaked with three-year-old Devon’s browning blood, the same blood that spattered across his T-shirt like scatter art, and the officer assuring them it was only routine, after any severe injury of a child.