Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Dad, with a look of unmitigated distaste, sat down in the only seat available in the front, next to a fat and faded girl wearing a tinseled halter top, no shoes, her hair so coarsely bleached it resembled Cheetos. I made my way to the man behind the front desk flipping through a magazine and chewing a red coffee stirrer.

“I’d like to speak to your chief investigator, if he or she is available,” I said.

“Huh?”

He had a flat red face, which, discounting his yellowed toothbrush mustache, recalled the bottom of a large foot. He was bald. The topmost part of his head was grease-spattered with fat freckles. The name tag under his police badge read A. BOONE.

“The person who investigated the death of Hannah Schneider,” I said. “The St. Gallway teacher.”

A. Boone continued to chew the coffee stirrer and stared at me. He was what Dad commonly called a “power distender,” a person who seized the moment in which he/she possessed a marginal amount of power and brutally rationed it so it lasted an unreasonable amount of time.

“What’s your business with Sergeant Harper?”

“There’s been a grave error in judgment regarding the case,” I said with authority. It was essentially the same thing Chief Inspector Ranulph Curry announced at the beginning of Chapter 79 in The Way of the Moth (Lavelle, 1911).

A. Boone took my name and told me to have a seat. I sat down in Dad’s chair and Dad stood next to a dying plant. With a look of faux-interest and admiration (raised eyebrow, mouth turned down) he handed me a copy of The Sheriff’s Starr Bulletin , Winter, Vol. 2, Issue 1, which he detached from the bulletin board behind him, along with a small sticker of an American Eagle crying an iridescent tear (America, United We Stand). In the section of the newsletter on p. 2, “Activity Report” (between Famous/Infamous and Bet You Didn’t Know…) I read that Sergeant Detective Fayonette Harper, for the last five months, had made the greatest number of Fall Arrests in the entire department. Detective Harper’s Fall Captures included Rodolpho Debruhl, WANTED for murder; Lamont Grimsell, WANTED for robbery; Kanita Kay Davis, WANTED for welfare fraud, theft and receiving stolen property; and Miguel Rumolo Cruz, WANTED for rape and criminal deviant conduct. (In contrast, Officer Gerard Coxley had the lowest number of Fall Arrests: only Jeremiah Golden, WANTED for unauthorized use of a motor vehicle.)

Additionally, Sergeant Harper was featured in the black-and-white team photo of the Sluder County Sheriff’s Dept. Baseball League on p. 4. She was standing on the right, at the very end, a woman with a sizable crooked nose, and all other features crowded around it as if trying to keep warm on her arctic white face.

Twenty-five, maybe thirty minutes later, I was sitting next to her.

“There’s a mistake with the coroner’s report,” I announced with great conviction, clearing my throat. “The suicide ruling is wrong. You see, I was the person with Hannah Schneider before she walked into the woods. I know she wasn’t going to go kill herself. She told me she was coming back. And she wasn’t lying.”

Sergeant Detective Fayonette Harper narrowed her eyes. With her salt-white skin and bristly lava hair, she was a harsh person to take in at close range; it was a swipe, whack, a kick in the teeth no matter how many times you looked at her. She had broad, doorknobbish shoulders and a way of always moving her torso at the same time as her head, as if she had a stiff neck.

If the Sluder County Sheriff’s Department was the Primates section of any midlevel zoo, Sergeant Harper was obviously the lone monkey who chose to suspend disbelief and work as if her life depended on it. I’d already noticed she narrowed her eyes at everyone and everything, not only at me and A. Boone when he escorted me over to her desk at the back of the room (“All right,” she said with no smile as I sat down, her version of “Hello!”), but she also narrowed her eyes at her TO BE FILED paper tray, the exhausted rubber-and-metal Hand Stress Reliever next to her keyboard, the sign taped above her computer monitor that read, “If you can see, look, and if you can look, observe,” even at the two framed photographs on her desk, one of an elderly woman with cotton-hair and an eyepatch, the other of herself and what I assumed was her husband and daughter; in the photo they bookended her with identical long faces, chestnut hair and obedient teeth.

“And why do you say that,” Sergeant Harper asked. Her voice was dull and low, a combination of rocks and oboe. (And that was how she asked questions, not bothering to hoist up her voice on the end.)

I repeated, for the most part, all that I’d told Officer Coxley in the Sluder County Hospital Emergency Room.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” I said, “or disrespectful to your — your systematized process of upholding the law, which you’ve been doing for years, probably quite effectively, but I don’t think Officer Coxley wrote down the specifics of what I told him. And I’m a very pragmatic person. If I thought there was even the slightest chance of the suicide ruling being true, I’d accept it. But it’s not feasible. First, as I said earlier, someone followed us from the camping ground. I don’t know who it was, but I heard him. We both did. And second, Hannah wasn’t in that kind of mood. She wasn’t depressed — at least, not at that moment. I’ll admit she had her moments of being down. But we all do. And when she left me, she was acting very sane.”

Sergeant Harper hadn’t moved a muscle. I became acutely aware (particularly from the way her eyes gradually drifted away from me before being jerked, by a certain emphatic word of mine, back to my face) she’d seen my type before. Housewives, pharmacists, dental hygienists, banking clerks, undoubtedly they’d all come to plead their cases, too, with their hands clenched, their perfumes rancid, their eyeliner skid-marking their eyes. They sat on the edge of the same uncomfortable red chair I was sitting on (which made woolly nonfigurative prints on the back of one’s bare legs) and they wept, swore on a range of Bibles (Today’s English, King James, Illuminated Family Edition) and graves (Grandma’s, Pa-paw’s, Archie who died young) that, whatever the charges against dear Rodolpho, Lamont, Kanita Kay and Miguel, it was lies, all lies.

“Obviously, I know how I sound,” I tried, attempting to iron the twinges of desperation out of my voice. (I was slowly gathering Sergeant Harper didn’t do twinges of desperation, nor did she do pangs of longing, worries to distraction or hearts broken beyond all possible repair.) “But I’m positive someone killed her. I know it. And I think she deserves for us to find out what really happened.”

Harper thoughtfully scratched the back of her neck (as people do when they vehemently disagree with you), leaned to the left of her desk, pulled open a file cabinet and, narrowing her eyes, removed a green folder an inch thick. The labeled tab, I noted, read #5509–SCHN.

“Well,” she said with a sigh, slapping the file on her lap. “We did account for the person you think you heard.” She flipped through the papers — photocopied, typewritten forms, too small a font for me to make out — until she stopped on one, glancing through it. “Matthew and Mazula Church,” she read slowly, frowning, “George and Julia Varghese, two Yancey County couples, were camping in the area at the same time as you and your peers. They stopped at Sugartop Summit around six, rested for an hour, decided to continue on to Beaver Creek two and a half miles away, arriving around eight-thirty. Matthew Church confirmed he was wandering the area looking for firewood when his flashlight went dead. He managed to make his way back to the site around eleven and they all went to bed.” She looked at me. “Beaver Creek is less than a quarter of a mile from where we found her body.”