You Will Know Me(68)

“I’m sorry about your son, Mrs. Knox,” Renton said. “But don’t worry about us. We’re strong like bulls.” He tried to smile, or do something with his face.

“This won’t take long,” said the young one, Furey, with the freshly shaved neck, pink and angry. But his voice was gentle. “We just have a few follow-up questions.”

“Questions?”

“How’s your daughter doing?”

The hover of relief in her throat made it hard to talk. The locker-room fight, of course. “She’s fine,” Katie said, folding her hands, resting them on her thighs, the slippery spandex of Devon’s capris a half a foot too short for her. “As fine as can be expected.”

“That’s good news,” said Furey, very earnest. He was just a boy, really. The Adam’s apple, the razor marks on his neck. Officer Furey, Boy Detective

“I’m sure you heard,” Detective Renton said. “Miss Belfour has been under twenty-four-hour psychiatric care since the incident.”

“Yes. We were very glad.”

“Well, it looks like she’s going home today,” he said, and then paused.

“Really?” she said. They both seemed to be watching her so closely, even leaning forward. Scrutinizing. Were there paint chips under her fingernails, maybe a ribbon of half-shredded evidence stuck to her foot bottom, pink slivers of the repair receipt clinging to her ankles? You could never hide it all.

“So we’ll be talking to Miss Belfour again about what happened,” Renton continued, watery eyes on her. “After the incident, she wasn’t too coherent, and after her attorney arrived, well, she wasn’t talking anymore.”

“Wait,” Katie said, her voice squeaking like the uneven bars, like Devon’s hands gripping the fiberglass, body swinging, chalk spraying. “Wait. I don’t understand. She’s a criminal. She attacked my little girl. You’re charging her, right?”

They both looked at her.

“There haven’t been any charges yet,” Renton said, voice even. “Before we submit our report to the DA, we need to follow up on a few things we’ve learned.”

“What things?” Katie said. Why had they come here, anyway, instead of calling her to the station? And wasn’t it odd that they’d just stopped by, unannounced? Renton with his gravelly voice and his worn skin like an old potato, right alongside Furey with his delicate boy face, and was one the good cop and one the bad?

The thought came to her. “What happened to Officer Crandall? He’s the one we spoke to after my daughter was attacked. Wasn’t this his case?”

The two men looked at her, Furey’s forehead crinkling gently.

Then: the squawk of her phone upstairs, those stroking first beats of “Assassin’s Tango.”

“Excuse me.” She leaped to her feet, moving quickly to the stairs.

“If that’s your husband, Mrs. Knox,” Renton called out, “we’d like to speak to him too. He works out of that studio over on Merricat Road, right?”



“Gwen,” she whispered, shutting the upstairs bathroom door behind her, making sure no one could hear. “I can’t talk now.”

She never would have answered if it weren’t for the detectives, their starchy blue shirts and thick-soled shoes. The squinting of their eyes and the leaning closer. She needed some space, some time. To think.

“Katie,” Gwen was saying, already mid-harangue, “I’d like you to reconsider your position here. Even if you want Devon home that doesn’t mean she can’t continue her sessions at EmPower—”

“That’s not going to happen. And I can’t talk.”

“—because in a month, your daughter will step out onto that competition floor and have what could be her last chance at qualifying for Elite after the catastrophe of two years ago.”

“I’m not discussing this with you,” Katie said, her hands on the sink, sticky from something—soap, last night’s noxious whiskey. “This has nothing to do with you.”

“Well, that’s just false. I’m the treasurer of this entire operation. Devon’s success or failure will have a major impact on the finances of this gym.”

“I don’t care about the gym’s goddamn finances.” Trying to keep her voice low. The silence from downstairs—those detectives, could they hear?

“The boosters have invested a great deal in Devon,” Gwen continued. “And her fate affects our daughters too. Do you see what I’m saying?”

Leaning against the peeling vanity, Katie turned on the water so they couldn’t hear. The old mold-thick vents might just muffle the telltale heart. Those detectives down there, surely Hailey had told them about Devon and Ryan? And if she hadn’t told before, what would stop her from telling now? And then they would talk to Eric. And want to see Eric’s car. And—

“Katie, do you see? Are you there? I can hear your anxious little breaths.”

“I’m hanging up.”

“Katie, were you an athlete?”

“No,” she said, wanting to scream at Gwen and fearing the detectives could hear, imagining them both leaning forward, craning necks. Who is she talking to? Is it her daughter? Her husband?

“Of course you weren’t. I don’t know what you wanted at Devon’s age, Katie, but I’d bet my daughter’s college fund you couldn’t name it then or now. But Devon is different. She knows what she wants. She’s not like the rest of us, Katie.”