sir, he said truthfully. I didn’t see anyone else in the park.
Did any vehicles drive through?
Danny wiped his hands on his jeans. Sutter watching him. There was a loud ticking but he saw no clock in the room and he realized it was Sutter’s watch. He could see the second hand moving with the ticks.
I was pretty deep in the woods, chasing my dog.
That’s not what I asked you, Danny. Did you see any other vehicles in the park while you were there?
No, sir. I didn’t see any other cars. Not while I was there. And that was true too: he’d seen the headlights and he’d heard the motor but he’d never seen the car itself. And it might not have been Jeff’s car at all.
Although he knew that wasn’t true.
He pinched the square of cloth at its corner and it came away clean and he closed the textbook one-handed and set it flat on the shelf, and then he laid the bit of cloth on his open hand. Weight of a feather. Weight of a butterfly. Great square wing of a strange nightmoth. They’d searched his room and they’d searched the books, or at least had pulled them all from the shelves, but the cloth had hung on.
And if it had fallen out when she moved the books, boxing them up and then unboxing them, years ago? Would she have put it back, not recognizing it? Or would she have sat there with it in the palm of her hand, knowing exactly what it was and what it meant. And then put it back anyway?
He stared at the cloth where it lay on his own palm, of such thin stuff it stirred with his breath. Exactly the thing they’d been looking for when they came to the house. The thing that no one else knew was missing but them—and you, and no way for you to have it unless you’d taken it yourself. A memento. A keepsake to press in a book and find again one day, or to be found by someone else and wondered about. Sheer stupid luck that you’d seen it at all that night. Seen it before they did. Stupid luck that the dog got away from you and rolled himself in shit or else you wouldn’t have taken him to the front of the truck where the hose was and would not have been there hosing him down in the light your mother left on for you and would not have glanced at the license plate, you didn’t even know why, and then looked again because there was something there, a bit of white paper or something stuck between the plate frame and the bumper, fluttering in the wind.
Then what happened, Danny?
What do you mean?
What happened next, after you got your dog and got back in your truck?
Danny held the sheriff’s eyes. He knew what was coming next. What the sheriff already knew: the flashing lights in his rearview. The deputy with the bug eyes.
I drove out of the park.
You didn’t see Holly Burke then, on your way out?
No, sir.
You didn’t hit her with your truck—by accident? You were at Smithy’s and you were drinking, Danny. Cruising through the park, feeling that buzz . . . You didn’t come around a bend and there she was but you couldn’t stop in time? An accident, Danny? Sutter opening his hands like a man offering something. Or ready to receive it.
No, sir. I never saw her.
You never saw her—that’s why you hit her?
No, sir, I never saw her and I never hit her either.
And still holding the dog by the collar you set down the hose and tugged this bit of whiteness loose and stood there hunched over and looking at it in the light—a square of thin material, maybe silk, with tiniest threads like spiderwebs where it had been sewed on and it was the pocket of a girl’s top and you knew it, you recognized it immediately, because you had looked. You had looked at it when you’d seen it earlier that night and you could see right through it and you couldn’t help looking—even if it was just the quickest of glances, you’d looked, you’d wanted to see. And now here it was in your hand and you knew what it was and you knew in your gut, in your heart, that it could not be here except that something terrible had happened and maybe you’d been too drunk to know it. Was