Annie opened her mouth to protest, but she had no voice.
“Move out of the way, miss,” said the sergeant in charge, coming closer and looking down at Eddy. “This is your house?”
“Yes.” Shaking, Annie stood up, stumbling over the fallen ladder. One of the uniformed officers took her arm and drew her out of the way, beyond the big littered table. There was something unfamiliar on the table. It was Eddy’s new picture, the one he had given her that morning, saying, I made it for you.
Annie picked it up. It was a portrait of herself. There she was in her denim workshirt with every button glowing like a pearl, and her face—her face—Annie put the picture down and began to cry.
The sergeant stared at the wrecked scaffolding and ignored her. “He’s laying on top of all this mess. Wheels on the apparatus, must’ve rolled. Look; see, the wheels aren’t locked.” He looked up at the painted wall and spoke to Annie. “This is your work?”
Annie mopped her sleeve over her face and looked up too. There, high above the place where Eddy’s body lay on the floor, were the new figures she had painted that morning, Rat and Mole in their boat on the river. Eddy had climbed the ladder to see them, trusting the scaffolding to hold him, but it had not.
The sergeant turned to Bob Gast. “What was the youngster doing here? Why wasn’t he at home?”
“Ask her,” said Gast angrily. “She taught him to climb that shaky ladder and bounce around on those narrow boards.” His voice mounted in fury. “He was always over here. He could come in anytime. She went away and left the door open. She killed him. It’s her fault. She killed my little son.”
Annie pulled herself together and spoke up, her voice sounding shrill in her own ears. “But I locked the door before I left. I did, I swear I did. I always lock the door when I go out. I lock both doors.”
“Then how come it’s open?” Gast was shouting now. He pointed at the door. “You went away and left it open so my innocent little son could come in, and so of course he did, and of course he climbed the ladder, and you hadn’t even locked those goddamn wheels, so the thing rolled right out from under him.” Gast whirled around to the detective sergeant, who was looking at him mournfully. “What do you call it? There’s a legal term for it, ‘attractive nuisance.’ She enticed Eddy over here day after day, and she didn’t do a damn thing to protect him, my poor helpless little boy. She’s no better than a murderer.” He was crying now. He turned back to Annie. “I’ll sue you. I’ll sue you for every cent you’ve got. You murdered my little son.”
“No, no, I didn’t, I didn’t.” Annie was overwhelmed by a nightmare sense of unfairness. Her grief for Eddy turned to anger. She clenched her fists. “It was your fault. You didn’t care what happened to Eddy, you and Roberta, you didn’t care at all.”
“Who else has keys to this place?” said the detective loudly, trying to restore order.
“He has a key,” said Annie, pointing a trembling finger at Bob Gast. “I gave you a key, remember? That weekend I went away? I gave Roberta a key.”
“We gave it back,” shouted Gast.
So they had. It was the key with a tag, “Annie’s house,” lying in a tangle of other keys in a kitchen drawer, along with the pliers and the hammer. “My aunt, Mary Kelly, she has one.”
“Homer Kelly’s wife?” said the police sergeant. “She’s your aunt? Anybody else?”
Annie tried to think. Her mind was a blank. She shook her head.
“Nobody else has a key to this house, just you and your aunt?”
“That’s right.”
They all turned their heads. There was a noise, the small rattle of a key in a lock, the sound of the front door opening and closing. Flimnap walked in from the hall.
“Oh, of course,” said Annie lamely. “I forgot.”
Chapter 32
“Have you not seen Death go by, with my little child?”
Hans Christian Andersen, “The Story of a Mother”
They were finished with Annie, they were finished with the wreckage in her house. A couple of medical technicians carried Eddy’s body outside on a stretcher. Bob Gast, his face streaked with tears, followed them out the front door. Roberta brought up the rear, weeping, holding Charlene by the hand. Charlene’s eyes were dry.
Only the three police officers remained, tall dignified men in blue uniforms with leather holsters attached to their belts, and keys that jingled when they moved. With the departure of the Gasts, they gathered around Flimnap. They were dissatisfied with his refusal to explain where he had been. “Okay, Mr. O’Dougherty, it’s a simple question. We just want to know where you went, and what for?”