aren’t you.”
She waited.
He shook his head again. “A,” he said, “what would I want with your stupid cap? And B, even if I took it, do you think I’d be dumb enough to keep it?”
She said nothing, watching him. Trying once more to match this face to her memory of hands—of fingers so hard and strong as they snatched the cap from her head. As they jerked the backscratcher from her grip. As they pinned her arm against the wall. As they covered her mouth with a stink and taste that made her want to gag even now.
Radner grinned and opened the stormdoor. “Well, come on in and look for it then,” he said, and she stood looking in at the shabby, dark furnishings. A boxy old TV throwing its light on a patch of stained brown carpeting. The smell coming out of there was just awful, and she turned her face from it. There sat the two-tone truck, and it had the look of him too—dirty, run-down, mean. Like it was just waiting for the chance to do harm.
“Your daddy already searched the truck,” he said. “Him and the real sheriff. But you go ahead. Check it out. It ain’t locked.”
And that voice—she should know that voice, at least. See there, Bud? We’re all gonna be friends here.
But she didn’t. She didn’t. And the more she looked at him, and the more he talked, the less certain she became. Or the less clear her memories became, and she felt once again, as she had when Moran showed her the pictures, that she was in danger of losing her memories altogether—not just of that moment, of his hands on her, but all the moments after too: Caroline with her pepper spray, her fierceness. The pounding of their hearts as they ran for the car. The moment on the riverbank, that pause before the other car came, Caroline’s laugh. The strength of her hand as you dropped toward the ice. Your spinning hearts. The look on her face when you heard that first crack, that deep pop in the floor of the world. The light under the water and Caroline in the light, swimming so hard to come back, swimming so beautifully . . . And the other girls too, Holly Burke and the others, with their hair like seagrass in the current. All this was real. All this had happened and she must protect it at the cost of everything else—at the cost of certainty, even, so Caroline’s parents would see it, so they would know it when they looked in her eyes.
The dogs had not stopped barking and now they seemed inside her head, of her head’s own making, and each bark lingered and replayed over those that followed in a ringing continuum, on and on. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, or tried to say, and began to backstep down the wobbling steps.
“It’s no bother, honey,” he said. He’d seen the change in her, her failure to recognize, to know, and now he stepped out onto the highest step just as she stepped from the lowest. “I wasn’t kidding about coming in. I got some beers in the fridge. How about that? We can just bury the ol’ hatchet, as they say. I figure it’s the least you can do after your old man shot me and got me fired and pretty much ruined my life. What do you say?”
She kept backstepping, toward the car. The gun riding solid and heavy in the pocket at her thigh. Radner looking down on her from the top step. He took a step down and let the stormdoor slap shut behind him.
“I gotta say I like how you come out here by yourself,” he said. “I like your pluck. No partner. No backup. Even though I am not the man you think I am, still—very impressive.”
She had reached the car and she turned and put her hand on the latch. He stepped to the bottom step and stopped there. Standing in his sockfeet with his hands in his jean pockets, watching her. Then he said in a voice she almost didn’t hear over the dogs, “What made you think I wouldn’t just grab you and take you into this house, hey? If I was that man—what made you think I wouldn’t do that?”
“Because you’d figure I didn’t come out here without my father’s gun.”
He looked at the sky and laughed. And looked at her again. “You think I’m afraid of