Forever

“What we’re gonna do,” he said, “is we’re gonna ask you a few questions and you just answer them the best you can, all right?” His voice had a joviality that didn’t make it to his eyes.

I nodded.

“Where’s your daddy at these days, Sam? We haven’t seen Geoffrey Beck around for a long while,” Heifort asked.

I said, “He’s been sick.” It was easier to say a lie that I’d used before.

“That’s too bad,” Heifort said. “Sick how?”

“Cancer,” I said. I looked at the table and mumbled, “He’s getting treatment in Minneapolis.”

Heifort wrote this down. I wished he hadn’t.

“What’s the address of the center, do you know?” he asked.

I shrugged. I tried to invest the shrug with sadness.

Koenig said, “I’ll help track it down later.”

Heifort wrote that down, too.

I said, “What am I being questioned about?” I suspected that this was not really about Beck, but about Grace, and some essential part of me resisted the idea of being taken into custody for the disappearance of someone I had been holding in my arms the night before.

“Well, since you asked,” Heifort said, and slid the folder out from under the notepad. He removed a photo and put it in front of me.

It was a close-up of a foot. A girl’s foot, slender and long. Both foot and what I could see of the bare leg rested among leaves. There was blood between the toes.

There was a long pause between my breath and the next one.

Heifort placed another photograph on top of that one.

I winced and looked away, both relieved and horrified.

“Does that mean anything to you?”

It was an over-flashed photograph of a na**d girl, pale as snow, thin as a whisper, sprawled in the leaves. Her face and neck were a disaster zone. And I knew her. The last time I’d seen that girl she’d had a tan and a smile and a pulse.

Oh, Olivia. I’m so sorry.

“Why are you showing me that?” I asked. I couldn’t look at the photo. Olivia hadn’t deserved to be killed by wolves. No one deserved to die like that.

“We were hoping you might tell us,” Heifort said. As he spoke, he laid out more photos in front of me, each a different vantage point of the dead girl. I wanted him to stop. Needed him to stop. “Seeing as she was found a few yards from Geoffrey Beck’s property line. Naked. After being missing for quite a long time.”

A bare shoulder smeared with blood. Skin written with dirt. Palm to the sky. I closed my eyes, but I couldn’t stop seeing the images from the photos. I could feel them burrowing into me, living inside me, becoming something to populate my nightmares.

“I didn’t kill anyone,” I said. It sounded false when I said it. Like it was in a language I didn’t speak, and I said it with inflection so wrong that the words didn’t even make sense together.

“Oh, this was the work of wolves,” Heifort said. “They killed her. But I don’t think they put her on that property naked.”

I opened my eyes, but I didn’t look at the photographs. There was a bulletin board on the wall, and there was a piece of paper tacked there that said PLEASE CLEAN THE MICROWAVE IF YOUR LUNCH EXPLODES IN THERE. THNX, MANAGEMENT.

“I swear I had nothing to do with it. I didn’t know where she was. This wasn’t me.” I had this heavy, heavy feeling inside me that I knew who it was, though. I added, “Why would I possibly do that?”

“Honestly, son, I have no idea,” Heifort said. I wasn’t sure why he said son, as the rest of his tone was entirely at odds with it. “Some sick son of a bitch did this, and it’s hard for me to get in that mindset. What I do know is this: Two young girls who knew you have disappeared in the last year. You were the last person to see one of them. Your foster father hasn’t been heard from in months and you’re the only one who seems to know where he is. Now there’s a body near your residence, na**d and half-near starved, and it seems like the sort of thing only a really troubled SOB would do. And I have right now in front of me a guy who was abused by his parents and they tell me that screws you up pretty well. Would you care to comment on that?”

His voice was slow and genial the entire time he spoke. Koenig was studying a print of a ship that had never been anywhere near Minnesota.

When Heifort had first started speaking, a tiny fleck of anger had scratched and twisted inside me, and every moment he kept on, that fleck grew and grew. After everything I’d lived through, I was not going to be reduced to a one-sentence definition. I lifted my gaze to Heifort’s and held it. I saw his eyes tighten a bit and knew that, as always, the yellow of mine was disconcerting. I felt suddenly, utterly calm, and somewhere in my voice, I heard echoes of Beck. “Is there a question in there, Officer? I thought you wanted me to account for my time or describe my attachment to my father or tell you I would do anything for Grace. But it sounds an awful lot like really what you want me to do is defend my mental health. I can’t tell what it is you think I’ve done. Are you accusing me of kidnapping girls? Or killing my father? Or do you just think I’m screwed up?”

“Hey now,” Heifort said. “I didn’t accuse you of anything, Mr. Roth. You just slow that teen rage right down now, because no one is accusing you of anything.”

I didn’t feel bad for lying to him earlier, if he was going to lie to me now. Like hell he wasn’t accusing me.

“What do you want me to say?” I shoved all the photos of the girl — Olivia — at him. “That’s horrible. But I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

Heifort left the photos where they were. He turned in his chair to give Koenig a meaningful glance, but Koenig’s expression didn’t change. Then he turned back around to me, his chair groaning and clicking. He rubbed one pouched eye. “I want to know where Geoffrey Beck and Grace Brisbane are, Samuel. I’ve been round the block enough times to know that coincidences don’t just happen. And you know what the common factor is between all these things? You.”

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t the common factor.

“So are you going to cooperate and tell me something about all this, or are you going to make me do it the hard way?” Heifort asked.

“I don’t have anything to tell you,” I said.

Heifort looked at me for a long time, as if he were waiting for my expression to betray something. “I think your daddy didn’t do you any favors training you in lawyer talk,” he said finally. “Is that all you got to say?”