up for them. “Well, I don’t know. Bunny is not very good at being slick is all. She’s a very genuine person, she’s not a sales kind of person.”
Just then there was a lot of shouting and then laughter, backslapping. They had found her clothes soaked in gasoline.
Mainly I was worried about Bunny. What was happening to her now? Were they taking her mug shot? Were they taking her fingerprints? Were they being mean to her? On the worst possible day of your life, which is the day you are arrested, you would think people could be a little softer with you, but they aren’t. It’s like you’re not human at all anymore. You got yourself into this and now it’s just fucking funny or it’s just fucking life.
“Was she seeing anyone?” the detective asked me, and I gained control of my facial muscles just a fraction of a second too late. She’d seen me tense up. If I lied now, she would think everything I’d said was a lie. If I told her the truth, she would be more likely to assume the rest was the truth, or at least this was my logjammed logic in the moment. Plus, I wanted to roll on Eric like the wheels on the bus.
“She was seeing someone, but it was a secret. Coach Eric, her volleyball coach. He’s the assistant coach at the high school, but after she was suspended her father had hired him to keep her skill set up, and eventually things turned romantic between them. But as far as I know, this was only in the last couple weeks.”
I suppose I had wanted Detective Kirby to seem surprised, or at least interested, but she just nodded and said, “We’ll talk to him too.”
“Is he going to be in trouble?” I asked.
“She’s eighteen,” Detective Kirby said, and gave me a look like I was crazy. “Is there some reason he should be in trouble that you know about?”
“I guess not,” I said, fiddling with my ear.
“All right, well, let me get your phone number and we may ask you to come down to the station again later on.”
“I’d be happy to,” I said.
I called Ray again and got his voicemail. Where the fuck was he? The search had been going on for two hours now. I had watched them cart item after item from Bunny’s room, her laptop, bags of her clothes, her school notebooks. There were two officers deep into digging through Ray’s office, which perhaps explained why he was staying far away. One of the SWAT guys was smoking out by the pool. And I thought: Isn’t that unsanitary? Isn’t that disrupting the crime scene? I saw Detective Kirby go up to him. “Get the fuck out of here,” she said.
“Let me milk this,” he said, laughing. “I’m on overtime. Give me fifteen more minutes and I can buy my girlfriend a mani-pedi.”
“Manicures cost more than you think,” Kirby said, unsmiling. “Get gone.”
I was darkly interested. I could remember the police from when I was small, coming when the neighbors called the cops because of the fighting, and they never failed to fill my small body with adrenaline. So I was interested to have the chance to examine them now with more adult eyes. They seemed like all right types. The men were loud, performing their masculinity so hard they waddled around, hips stiff as arthritic cowboys. Or maybe they all had injuries from playing high school football. Who knew? But I didn’t hate them. Honestly, they reminded me of Jason.
When they finally left three hours later, there was black fingerprint dust everywhere and I was unclear whether I was even allowed to clean it up. I went outside and smoked a cigarette, then lay down on the couch and somehow fell asleep.
* * *
—
When I awoke, Ray and Swanson were in the kitchen, and from the light coming in through the curtains I guessed it was midafternoon. I was not sure why I had fallen so deeply and thickly asleep; perhaps it was some peculiar reaction to the adrenaline of the morning. When I stood my legs were stiff and I walked awkwardly. Swanson and Ray were sharing a bottle of white wine. I suddenly hated them so much that it seemed impossible to go on.
“I can’t have them look into that building,” Ray was saying. “They’ve got to drop that arson charge.”
“They haven’t charged her yet, we won’t know what they’re going to charge