The Peacock Emporium(89)

At some point, it had stopped raining, but the pavement still gleamed with neon reflections from the floodlights positioned by the firemen. Two were standing under what had been the door frame, gesturing at the wood, and muttering in lowered voices to the policeman in charge. They stopped talking when the policewoman shepherded Suzanna through. “Stand here,” the policewoman said in her ear. “This is about as close as we can get for now.”

Around her, police and firemen stood in huddles, murmuring into walkie-talkies, taking pictures with flashing cameras, cautioning the few onlookers to move away from the scene, telling them there was nothing to look at here, nothing at all. Suzanna heard the clock in the market square strike ten, and pulled her coat around her, treading carefully on the wet pavement, where her suede-covered notebooks, the hand-embroidered napkins lay sodden, surrounded by shards of glass, price labels smudged with rain. Above her, the sign swung half off, the end of the word “Emporium” apparently carried away with the impact. She moved forward unconsciously, as if to restore it to its place, then halted as she saw several faces glance warily toward her, their expressions telling her it was no longer her shop.

It was evidence.

“We’ve moved as much stock away from the front as we can,” the policewoman was saying, “but obviously until the scaffolders get here we can’t vouch for the safety of the building. I’m afraid I can’t let you go in.”

She was standing, she realized absently, on a photo of herself that Father Lenny had taken when she wasn’t looking. She was staring off in the distance, crossly, with Jessie laughing in the background. Jessie had thought it so funny, she had begged to put it up by the register. She bent down and picked it up, wiping her own wet footprint from it with her hand.

“If the rain still holds off, though, you shouldn’t lose too much. I take it you’re insured.”

“She shouldn’t have been here tonight,” Suzanna said. “She only offered to stay because I had to take my grandmother to the hospital.”

The policewoman looked at her sympathetically, laid a hand on her upper arm. Her tone was oddly confidential. “This wasn’t your fault. Good people always think they must be responsible in some way.”

Good? thought Suzanna. Then she caught sight of the breakdown truck, which, some thirty feet away, bore the crumpled white van like a precious cargo, its windscreen punched through by some terrible force. Suzanna stepped toward it, tried to read the lettering on the side. “Is that Jason’s van? Her boyfriend’s van?”

The policewoman looked awkward. “I’m really sorry. I don’t know. Even if I did I probably wouldn’t be able to tell you. It’s officially a crime scene.”

Suzanna stared at the photo in her hand, measuring the woman’s words in her head, trying to imbue them with some kind of meaning. What would Jessie say about this? she thought. She pictured her face, alive with the excitement of it all, wide-eyed with the sheer pleasure of something actually happening in her home town.

“Is he alive?” she said suddenly.

“Who?”

“Jason.”

“I’m really sorry, Mrs. Peacock. I can’t tell you anything at the moment. If you ring the station tomorrow, I’m sure you’ll be able to get some more information.”

“I don’t understand what has happened.”

“I don’t think anyone can be entirely sure of what happened yet. But we’ll find out, don’t you worry about that.”

“She’s got a little girl,” Suzanna said. “She’s got a little girl,” she repeated. She stood still as the truck, accompanied by several unidentified shouts and a policeman making wheeling motions with his arm, began to tow its unhappy load slowly up the unnaturally lit lane.

“Is there anything personal in there? Anything vital you’d like us to get out for you?”

Suzanna felt the bite of her words, hearing for the first time the request that now could never be satisfactorily answered. Her eyes were too dry for tears. She turned slowly back to the policewoman, placed the photo carefully on the wall beside the shop. “I’d like to go now, please,” she said.



* * *



—

    The police had rung her mother some time earlier to say that she would probably be at the station for a while. Vivi, having checked anxiously that Suzanna didn’t want her there, that her father couldn’t come and pick her up, had then promised to ring Neil and let him know. They could give her a ride home if she liked, even send someone to sit with her if she was feeling a bit shaky. It was nearly midnight.

“I’ll wait,” she said. And three-quarters of an hour later, when Alejandro emerged, his normally tanned face was gray and aged by grief, and Jessie’s blood was still grotesquely visible on his clothes. She took his bandaged arm gently and said she would accompany him home. There was no one to whom she could face explaining it; no one else she could bear to be with. Not tonight, at least.

They walked the ten-minute journey through the sodium-lit town in silence, their footsteps echoing in the empty streets, the lights of the windows nearly uniformly extinguished, as above them its inhabitants slept, blissfully unaware of the night’s events. The rain had brought forth the sweet, organic smell of grass and rejuvenated blooms, and Suzanna breathed in, her pleasure in it unconscious, until she realized with a jolt that Jessie would not breathe in the verdant smell of that morning. That was how it would feel from now on, the mundane mixed with the surreal: a strange sense of normality, perversely interrupted by great hiccups of horror. Perhaps we are incapable of taking this in, thought Suzanna, wondering how she felt so calm. Perhaps there is only so much to be borne at any one time. She didn’t know, she had nothing to judge it against; no one she knew had ever died.