He’s talking about his brother.
“… cells replicate, atoms fire, the brain forms…”
Augie turns to me. “I’m just trying to keep people from dying.”
“What people?” I ask.
“If I die, how will I save them?”
His eyes are darting from side to side, dancing in his head.
“I raped a woman. You should have listened.”
“You didn’t rape anyone,” says Victoria.
“I raped five girls at school.”
“That’s not true.”
He stops and stares at me. “Are you here to kill me?”
“No.”
“You’ll kill me eventually.”
“No, I won’t.”
Victoria looks at me, hoping I can help. But as soon as I speak Augie reacts with instant hatred, almost snarling at me. Victoria steps back, frightened. “Are you taking your medication?”
Augie looks at his hands. “You say I have a chemical imbalance. That I suffer from hallucinations. But you’re wrong. What I hear is real.” His shoulders are hunched and a tiny vein throbs at the side of his neck. “I think I killed her.”
“Who?”
“The woman on the road.”
“What woman?”
He whispers in a little boy voice. “What was she doing there? She was standing in the middle of the road.” He looks from face to face. “I think I ran her over. I must have done. I couldn’t stop in time.”
My eyes meet Victoria’s. She shakes her head.
“What makes you think you hit this person?”
Augie wipes a strand of spit from the corner of his mouth. “I tried to swerve, but I think I heard a sound. That’s why the car went in the ditch. When I got out I looked for her. I called out, but she was gone.”
“Why didn’t you go to the police?”
“My brother told me not to. He said I’d be blamed.”
“For the fire?”
“For running that woman over.”
He presses his chin into his knees. “I looked for her, but then I saw the snowman and I got frightened.”
“The snowman?”
“He came out of the forest covered in snow.”
“You saw him after you saw the woman?”
Augie nods.
“This woman, what did she look like?”
“She was beat up, you know, but it was weird. Her shoes.”
“What about them?”
“She wasn’t wearing any.”
7
Low gray clouds scud across a dirty sky and the dreaming spires are etched against the southern horizon like vague giants marching out of the mist.
The cab driver maneuvers deftly on the icy streets, keeping the needle around 20 mph and rarely touching the brakes unless he has no choice. Victoria Naparstek is no longer with me. The moment I mentioned visiting Drury she grew quiet and began making excuses.
“He has a family,” she said, as though that made a difference.
The cab pulls up outside a two-story house with a gabled roof. A lop-sided snowman is standing inside the front gate dressed in a flowery hat and a Tottenham scarf.
Drury is shoveling snow from his driveway. Working up a sweat, he’s peeled down to baggy chinos and a sweatshirt.
A snowball explodes at my feet. A young girl peers from behind a makeshift fort of rubbish bins and a toboggan.
“You missed,” I say.
She holds up another snowball. “That was a warning shot.”
Drury leans on his shovel. “Hold your fire, Gracie.”
“I think we should arrest him, Daddy, he looks like a bad’n.”
“Let’s see what he has to say first.”
Gracie is wearing a woolen cap with earflaps that make her look like Snoopy in a Peanuts cartoon. Her pale cheeks are dusted with freckles and glasses are perched on the end of her nose. Her younger brother is sitting on the front steps, pushing a toy bulldozer through clumps of ice.
“What are you doing here, Professor?”
“I have a question.”
“It could have waited.”
“I talked to Augie Shaw again.”
“On whose authority?”
“His lawyer and his psychiatrist.”
Drury sets the shovel aside, pulling off his gloves. “What’s your question?”
“Why would a woman go out in the middle of a blizzard without any shoes?”
“You talking about anyone in particular.”
“You have an unidentified female found in a lake.”
“What about her?”
“Augie Shaw said he saw a woman on the road that night. He thinks he might have hit her. That’s why he drove his car into the ditch.”
Drury doesn’t seem surprised at this. I try again.
“You found a woman’s body in a lake. I saw the crime scene from the train. How far is that from the farmhouse?”