But I couldn’t picture Runner getting away with it, he wasn’t smart enough, and definitely not ambitious enough. He couldn’t even be a dad to his lone surviving child. He’d slunk around Kinnakee for a few years after the murders, sneaking away for months at a time, sending me duct-taped boxes from Idaho or Alabama or Winner, South Dakota: inside would be truck-stop figurines of little girls with big eyes holding umbrellas or kittens that were always broken by the time they reached me. I’d know he was back in town not because he came to visit me but because he’d light that stinky fire in the cabin up on the ridge. Diane would sing “Poor Judd Is Dead” when she saw him in town, face smudged with smoke. There was something both pitiful and frightening about him.
It was probably a blessing he chose to avoid me. When he’d come back to live with my mom and us, that last summer before the end, all he did was tease me. At first it was leering, got your nose sort of stuff—and then it was just mean. He came home from fishing one day, clomping through the house with his big wet waders, banging on the door to the bathroom when I was in the tub, just screwing with me. Come on, open up, I gotta surprise for you! He finally flung the door wide, his beer odor busting in with him. He had something bundled in his arms, and then he flung them wide, threw a live, two-foot catfish in the water with me. It was the pointlessness that frightened me. I tried to scrabble out of the tub, the fish’s slimy skin sliding over my flesh, its whiskered mouth gaping, prehistoric. I could have put my foot in that mouth and the fish would have slid all the way up, tight like a boot.
I flopped over the side of the tub, panting on the rug, Runner screaming at me to stop my damnbaby crying. Every single one of my kids is a scared-ass dumbshit.
We couldn’t clean ourselves for three days because Runner was too tired to kill the thing. I guess I get my laziness from him.
“I never know where Runner’s at. Last I heard, he was somewhere in Arkansas. But that was a year ago. At least.”
“Well, it might be a good idea to try to track him down. Some people would definitely want you to talk to him. Although I don’t think Runner did it,” Lyle said. “It maybe makes the most sense— debts, history of violence.”
“Craziness.”
“Craziness.” Lyle smiled pertly. “But, he doesn’t seem smart enough to pull that off. No offense.”
“None taken. So, then, what’s your theory?”
“I’m not quite ready to share that yet.” He patted a stack of file folders next to him. “I’ll let you read through the pertinent facts of the case first.”
“Oh for the love of Pete,” I said. Realizing, as my lips were pressed into the P, that it was my mother’s phrase. For the love of Pete, let’s skeedaddle, where are my ding dang keys?
“So if Ben’s really innocent, why doesn’t he try to get out?” I asked. My voice went high, urgent on this last part, a child’s whinny: but why can’t I have dessert? I realized I was stealthily hoping Ben was innocent, that he’d be returned to me, the Ben I knew, before I was afraid of him. I had allowed myself a dangerous glimpse of him out of prison, striding up to my house, hands in his pockets (another memory that came back, once I let myself start thinking again: Ben with his hands always burrowed deep in his pockets, perpetually abashed). Ben sitting at my dinner table, if I had a dinner table, happy, forgiving, no harm done. If he was innocent.
If ifs and buts were candies and nuts we’d all have a very Merry Christmas, I heard my aunt Diane boom in my head. Those words had been the bane of my childhood, a constant reminder that nothing turned out right, not just for me but for anyone, and that’s why someone had invented a saying like that. So we’d all know that we’d never have what we needed.
Because—remember, remember, remember, Baby Day—Ben was home that night. When I got out of bed to go to my mom’s room, I saw his closed door with the light under it. Murmuring from inside. He was there.
“Maybe you could go ask him, make that your first stop, go see Ben.”
Ben in prison. I’d spent the last twenty-odd years refusing to imagine the place. Now I pictured my brother in there, behind the wire, behind the concrete, down a gray slate hall, inside a cell. Did he have photos of the family anywhere? Would he even be allowed such a thing? I realized again I knew nothing about Ben’s life. I didn’t even know what a cell looked like aside from what I’d seen in the movies.
“No, not Ben. Not yet.”
“Is it a money thing? We’d pay you for that.”