Jodi Compton - Sympathy Between Humans

The absent Aidan was still on my mind. But by now I was familiar with Marlinchen’s ready defenses. If I was going to make any more progress on the subject of her brother, I’d have to approach the issue a lot more carefully than I had last time. For now, I was letting it lie.

I did speak to her around ten o’clock one evening, when I’d stayed later than usual, because she was standing alone on the back porch, her slight figure a dispirited silhouette. She was looking out into the darkness of her nearest neighbor’s land. There was absolutely nothing of interest out there, but she seemed troubled.

“Is something wrong?” I asked, slipping through the French doors from the family room out onto the deck.

Marlinchen turned. “No, not really. It’s Snowball,” she said.

“Your cat?”

“She’s never out this late,” Marlinchen said. “She always comes in around eight-thirty or nine. Like clockwork.”

“I wouldn’t assume the worst,” I said. “A friend once told me about a cat she’d owned that liked to ramble. Turns out the cat had a double life. Another family was feeding it and giving it water; they had pictures of the cat in their home.”

Marlinchen smiled but said nothing.

“Snowball might have gone into someone’s home or garage and got locked in,” I went on. “She’ll turn up tomorrow.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” she said.

“Are you really feeling okay?” I said. “You seem a little down.”

“Just tired, I guess,” she said, and a muscle twitched in her cheek as if she were trying to suppress a yawn.

I nodded. “What do you hear about your father?”

A strand of hair slipped loose from her high ponytail, and Marlinchen wiped it away from her face. “He’s in physical therapy,” she said. “He’s walking with a quad cane now. That’s a cane with four little feet on it, for greater stability.”

“Like training wheels that don’t roll?”

“Right,” she said. “After that, he moves on to a regular cane, and then walking on his own.”

“That sounds like good progress,” I said.

“It is,” she said, “physically.”

“Physically?” I asked, thinking that she meant Hugh’s spirits were low.

“His verbal skills aren’t getting much better,” she said. “They think he understands a lot of what’s going on around him- which is good for chances of getting the conservatorship- but he can’t really speak or write. It’s all garbled. He confuses me with you, or he with she, ” Marlinchen explained. She looked over at me as if expecting some kind of response. Then she said, “Aphasia is the worst thing that can happen to a writer.” Hearing her own words, Marlinchen quickly clarified them. “It’s not about the money. We’ll get by, even if he never writes again. But writing is the core of who Dad is,” she said. “If he gets everything else back, but can’t write again… it’s the worst thing the stroke could have taken.”

There wasn’t much that I could say that wouldn’t be false comfort. “Give it time,” I said.

You never geta car back from the crime lab quite how you turned it over. I’d heard this before, but hadn’t understood it until I picked up the Nova at the Hennepin County impound facility, which was where the BCA sent it after testing. A chemical odor clung to the car’s interior. When the early-evening light hit the Nova’s windows, revealing a faint purple-white haze, I realized what it was. Superglue. They’d fumed for prints with it.

Diaz had to know that hoping for fingerprints after more than six months- in a vehicle that had been in use all that time- was an investigator’s version of a Hail Mary pass. But he’d been damned thorough. That faint purple-white haze on the glass never came off.

Sarah, don’t whine. Not even to yourself.

And then I looked down, and saw something that wiped petty concerns about the condition of my car from my mind. A square of carpet had been cut out of the floor.

They’d found blood. To inspect the carpeting was one thing, but to remove some for further testing meant they’d found something they were fairly sure was blood.

While I drove home, I engaged in a mostly pointless exercise, trying to estimate how long it might take the BCA to do the lab work. More often than not, the testing process took weeks. Then again, it was possible that Diaz had some stroke with the BCA, and they’d expedite these tests. I couldn’t count on having all that long.

Even thoughI would have preferred to go straight home, I stopped by the Hennessys’ instead. I arrived to find Liam apparently digging under the willow tree, leaning into his work with a spade. Yet his clothes, a white shirt and gray pants, were clearly what he’d worn to school, not consistent with gardening. There was a sealed plastic trash bag near his feet.

I walked across the grass to Liam’s side. It was warm enough out that I felt the five-degree drop in temperature as the shadow of the willow tree fell across my face, then my body. “What is that?” I asked him. There was something in the trash bag; it was rounded but shapeless, as though it held an unbaked loaf of bread. Color wasn’t discernible through the pellucid green plastic.

Liam stopped working, raised a shoulder diffidently as if trying to decide how to phrase something. “It used to be Snowball,” he said finally.

“Oh, hell,” I said. “What happened?” Now that I knew what I was looking at, I could see that the color the bag masked was red: a murky, greenish red, like blood in a parking-lot oil puddle.

“Something got to her,” Liam said. “We don’t know what. She was ripped up pretty badly.”

“Where did you find her?”

Liam pointed. “Down at the end of the driveway, off to the side.” He leaned into the spade handle again and forced more upturned black soil out of the hole he was making. “I said I’d bury her. I didn’t want Marlinchen looking at it anymore. I thought she was going to be sick this morning.”

I felt a small sting of guilt; it was me who’d glibly told Marlinchen that Snowball would be home safe in the morning.

“It bothers me, too,” Liam said. “I can’t think of any animal around here that would do this.”

He was looking at me as if for comment, and I realized that he was calling on me as an expert in violent death, even that of pets.

“There are some natural predators around here,” I said, thinking. “Coyote, fox, black bear.”

Liam was skeptical. “I never see anything like that. We don’t even see the tracks.”

“Generally, animals like that stay away from humans,” I said. “But as rural areas get more built up, they do come into human settlements to look for food. People have spotted them around here.”

“I suppose,” Liam said.

My next trip to the gymwas more successful. I didn’t run into Diaz, or my unwanted supporter, Jason Stone, either. I bought groceries after and, on the way home, was stopped at a traffic light when something caught my attention. A lone figure was climbing up a concrete staircase that led to a pedestrian-and-bike overpass over the freeway. Except he wasn’t really climbing.

Popular culture writes off drinking to excess as a rite of passage among the young, but there’s something painful to watch about someone who has drunk himself into complete incapacitation. The boy- he looked underage in his hoodie, loose jeans, and running shoes- was literally crawling up the stairs toward the bridge on his hands and knees. At the halfway landing, he stopped and lay down to rest. Or he’d passed out.