Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

“You told us this morning you stopped, but the jackal was already dead. Is that right?” Hunter asked.

“No,” I said.

Segura looked up. Hunter touched his hand casually to his pocket and then brought it back to his knee, turning on the taper.

“I didn’t stop for about a mile. Then I backed up and looked at it, but it was dead. There was blood coming out of its mouth.”

Hunter didn’t say anything. He kept his hands on his knees and waited—an old journalist’s trick, if you wait long enough, they’ll say something they didn’t intend to, just to fill the silence.

“The jackal’s body was at a peculiar angle,” I said, right on cue. “The way it was lying, it didn’t look like a jackal. I thought it was a dog.”

I waited till the silence got uncomfortable again. “It brought back a lot of terrible memories,” I said. “I wasn’t even thinking. I just wanted to get away from it. After a few minutes I realized I should have called the Society, and I stopped at the 7-Eleven.”

I waited again, till Segura began to shoot uncomfortable glances at Hunter, and then started in again. “I thought I’d be okay, that I could go ahead and work, but after I got to my first shoot, I knew I wasn’t going to make it, so I came home.” Candor. Openness. If the Amblers can do it, so can you. “I guess I was still in shock or something. I didn’t even call my boss and have her get somebody to cover the governor’s conference. All I could think about was—”

I stopped and rubbed my hand across my face. “I needed to talk to somebody. I had the paper look up an old friend of mine, Katherine Powell.”

I stopped, I hoped this time for good. I had admitted lying to them and confessed to two crimes: leaving the scene of the accident and using press access to get a lifeline for personal use, and maybe that would be enough to satisfy them. I didn’t want to say anything about going out to see Katie. They would know she would have told me about their visit and decide this confession was an attempt to get her off, and maybe they’d been watching the house and knew it anyway, and this was all wasted effort.

The silence dragged on. Hunter’s hands tapped his knees twice and then subsided. The story didn’t explain why I’d picked Katie, who I hadn’t seen in fifteen years, who I knew in Colorado, to go see, but maybe, maybe they wouldn’t make the connection.

“This Katherine Powell,” Hunter said, “you knew her in Colorado, is that right?”

“We lived in the same little town.”

We waited.

“Isn’t that when your dog died?” Segura said suddenly. Hunter shot him a glance of pure rage, and I thought, It isn’t a taper he’s got in that shirt pocket. It’s the vet’s records, and Katie’s name is on them.

“Yes,” I said. “He died in September of ninety-three.”

Segura opened his mouth.

“In the third wave?” Hunter asked before he could say anything.

“No,” I said. “He was hit by a car.”

They both looked genuinely shocked. The Amblers could have taken lessons from them. “Who hit it?” Segura asked, and Hunter leaned forward, his hand moving reflexively toward his pocket.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It was a hit and run. Whoever it was just left him lying there in the road. That’s why when I saw the jackal, it… That was how I met Katherine Powell. She stopped and helped me. She helped me get him into her car, and we took him to the vet’s, but it was too late.”

Hunter’s public face was pretty indestructible, but Segura’s wasn’t. He looked surprised and enlightened and disappointed all at once.

“That’s why I wanted to see her,” I added unnecessarily.

“Your dog was hit on what day?” Hunter asked.

“September thirtieth.”

“What was the vet’s name?”

He hadn’t changed his way of asking the questions, but he no longer cared what the answers were. He had thought he’d found a connection, a cover-up, but here we were, a couple of dog lovers, a couple of good Samaritans, and his theory had collapsed. He was done with the interview, he was just finishing up, and all I had to do was be careful not to relax too soon.

I frowned. “I don’t remember his name. Cooper, I think.”

“What kind of car did you say hit your dog?”

“I don’t know,” I said, thinking, not a jeep. Make it something besides a jeep. “I didn’t see him get hit. The vet said it was something big, a pickup maybe. Or a Winnebago.”

And I knew who had hit the jackal. It had all been right there in front of me—the old man using up their forty-gallon water supply to wash the bumper, the lies about their coming in from Globe—only I had been too intent on keeping them from finding out about Katie, on getting the picture of Aberfan, to see it. It was like the damned parvovirus. When you had it licked in one place, it broke out somewhere else.

“Were there any identifying tire tracks?” Hunter said.

“What?” I said. “No. It was snowing that day.”

It had to show in my face, and he hadn’t missed anything yet. I passed my hand over my eyes. “I’m sorry. These questions are bringing it all back.”

“Sorry,” Hunter said.

“Can’t we get this stuff from the police report?” Segura asked.

“There wasn’t a police report,” I said. “It wasn’t a crime to kill a dog when Aberfan died.”

It was the right thing to say. The look of shock on their faces was the real thing this time, and they looked at each other in disbelief instead of at me. They asked a few more questions and then stood up to leave. I walked them to the door.

“Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. McCombe,” Hunter said. “We appreciate what a difficult experience this has been for you.”

I shut the screen door between us. The Amblers would have been going too fast, trying to beat the cameras because they weren’t even supposed to be on Van Buren. It was almost rush hour, and they were in the tanker lane, and they hadn’t even seen the jackal till they hit it, and then it was too late. They had to know the penalty for hitting an animal was jail and confiscation of the vehicle, and there wasn’t anybody else on the road.

“Oh, one more question,” Hunter said from halfway down the walk. “You said you went to your first assignment this morning. What was it?”

Candid. Open. “It was out at the old zoo. A sideshow kind of thing.”

I watched them all the way out to their car and down the street. Then I latched the screen, pulled the inside door shut, and locked it, too. It had been right there in front of me—the ferret sniffing the wheel, the bumper, Jake anxiously watching the road.

I had thought he was looking for customers, but he wasn’t. He was expecting to see the Society drive up. “He’s not interested in that,” he had said when Mrs. Ambler said she had been telling me about Taco.

He had listened to our whole conversation, standing under the back window with his guilty bucket, ready to come back in and cut her off if she said too much, and I hadn’t tumbled to any of it. I had been so intent on Aberfan I hadn’t even seen it when I looked right through the lens at it.

And what kind of an excuse was that? Katie hadn’t even tried to use it, and she was learning to drive.

I went and got the Nikon and pulled the film out of it. It was too late to do anything about the eisenstadt pictures or the vidcam footage, but I didn’t think there was anything in them. Jake had already washed the bumper by the time I’d taken those pictures.

I fed the longshot film into the developer. “Positives, one two three order, fifteen seconds,” I said, and waited for the image to come on the screen.

I wondered who had been driving. Jake, probably. “He never liked Taco,” she had said, and there was no mistaking the bitterness in her voice. “I didn’t want to buy the Winnebago.”