Lee Martin - Late One Night

“My daughter is in that play.” Ronnie’s voice was hoarse with emotion. Laverne could imagine the day he’d had. “Sarah Black. She’s the bridge. I’d forgotten the play was tonight.”

Irene touched him lightly on his arm. “She’s a good girl, your Sarah.”

“Forgetful,” he said. “Good thing her head’s attached.”

“Well,” said Irene. “Most kids her age are a little scatterbrained.” She nodded down the hallway to the open door of her office. “Go on,” she said to Laverne. “Have your talk. I’ll be down in the cafeteria. Just come look for me when you’re done.”

“She’s been working on her part,” Ronnie said, his voice growing louder now. “Sarah. I’ve heard her around the house.”

“I’m sure she’ll do fine,” Irene said. She glanced at Laverne and lifted her eyebrows in concern.

“Yes,” said Laverne, putting her hand on Ronnie’s shoulder as if to nudge him down the hallway. “Sarah will make us all proud.”

“I love her,” Ronnie said, and his lip was trembling now. “I love all my girls. I wouldn’t do a thing to hurt them. Really, Miss Ott, I swear.”

From the crest of the hill, Missy looked down to the bottom of the slope. A gully cut through the floor of the woods, and there at the lip of that gully, where the land gave out and fell away, Shooter Rowe was on his knees. His back was to Missy, and she could see his shoulders convulsing with his sobs.

The goat — it was the old billy goat, Methuselah — was on the ground a few feet from Shooter, looking as if it had lain down for a sleep, but Missy could see the blood on his chest and blood on the snow, and she knew he was dead.

Shooter’s back straightened, and he got to his feet. That’s when Missy saw that he still held the shotgun. He had the butt end resting on the ground, and he used it for a crutch as he pushed himself up. Then, with a cry that came from somewhere deep in his chest, a cry barely human, he threw the shotgun down into the gully.

The wind had suddenly died down, and the crows were back, coming to perch on the bare limbs of the trees. Their calls split the air.

Shooter turned to the goat, and though Missy knew she’d happened upon something so private she should have turned away and left Shooter Rowe to finish what he’d come into the woods to do, she couldn’t. She called out his name. She let him know she was there, watching.

_________

Laverne and Ronnie sat in the chairs in front of Irene Piper’s desk, the chairs students took when teachers sent them to the principal’s office, or parents who came to have a chat about their children. La-verne purposely chose not to sit behind the desk with Ronnie across from her because she didn’t want that space between them. She wanted to put him at ease so she could talk to him about the night of the fire and whether he’d meant to threaten Brandi with that knife. She meant to ask him what dark thoughts might be in his heart, and she wanted him to feel comfortable enough to tell her the truth.

“Ronnie, I’ve known you a good long while. Ever since you were a boy in my class.”

“Yes, ma’am. That’s right.”

He’d always been a polite boy. Always a little bit smaller than the other boys, a little slower with his lessons, just a few ticks behind his whole life. Maybe that’s why he always seemed to be barreling ahead — whether running on the playground, or later driving fast in his Firebird, or walking out on Della for a life with Brandi Tate — like he knew he had to catch up, so intent on getting somewhere that he failed to see that he was about to crash into something.

Now there was this business about the fire and what he might have done, and what more he might be capable of doing. “I understand there’s a matter of this knife,” she said. “Your pocketknife.”

Ronnie sat, bent over with his elbows on his legs and his hands, fingers and thumbs pressed together as if in prayer, pointing down to the floor. It seemed so long ago to Laverne that he was her student and also a member of her Sunday School class, and she taught him how to do “Here’s the church, here’s the steeple” with his fingers. So long, and not so long at the same time. She could tell he was afraid, the way he’d been all those years ago when she’d had to give him a talking to about something or the other. She could see that little boy inside his man’s body, but now she had to ask him these questions.

“I never meant any harm to Brandi.” He lifted his face to look at Laverne Ott, his mouth twisted into a grimace, his eyes narrowed. “I know Angel told you about finding my knife out at the trailer. I know Brandi’s talked to you, too.”

On the wall behind Ronnie was a poster of a quote from Dr. Seuss. Laverne remembered that it came from Horton Hears a Who . White letters on a pale blue background: “A person’s a person, no matter how small.” She had to keep asking Ronnie questions. She had to determine whether he was a threat to his children, whether there was cause to remove them from his care.

“Ronnie, I’m going to ask you straight out. Were you at the trailer the night it burned?”

He answered right away, his voice a whisper. “I’m not denying that.”

“Why were you out there?”

Her tone changed then to the severe voice she’d always used with students when she wanted to make sure they understood that they needed to tell the truth.

“Miss Ott, don’t you know me well enough?”

She wouldn’t answer because it was her job to get the facts straight. Her opinion of what kind of man someone was didn’t matter. One thing she’d learned over the years was that all sorts of people, no matter how upright they seemed, were capable of all sorts of things.

“You walked out on Della and took up with Brandi.” Laverne couldn’t stop herself from saying it even though she knew she shouldn’t. “I never thought you’d do that either.”

“Are you saying you think I started that fire?”

She shook her head. “I’m saying I can’t rule anything out. I’m sorry.” She meant it as she always did when she investigated a case: sorry that circumstances were such that they required her attention, sorry for what people’s lives could come to. “I have to look at everything, Ronnie.” She paused a moment and then asked him again. “Did you put that trailer on fire?”

He wouldn’t answer. He just kept rocking back and forth in his chair. “You just have to trust me,” he finally said.

“Ronnie, I want you to understand something.” Laverne was patient. She explained to him that it was her job to make sure the girls were safe. She let the silence settle around them. Then she said, “If the court thinks your girls are in danger, I’ll have to take them out of your and Brandi’s house and put them in foster care.”

“I don’t want my girls in foster care. I know what that’s like, and you should know too. If you want my girls safe, you won’t do that to them.”

Laverne knew that he’d moved in and out of foster homes after his mother died and his father wouldn’t keep him. She also knew that, hard as Children and Family Services tried, they couldn’t always ensure that each foster home was ideal.

“I’ll do my best by your girls,” she said. “And you should know I’ll get to the truth. I was your teacher, Ronnie.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You can’t hide from the truth. No matter what you choose to say or not say.” Laverne waited for her words to sink in. She hoped that Ronnie would say something, anything that might save him, but when enough time had passed to make it clear he wasn’t going to let her know anything else, she said, “The truth always finds us. I taught you that in Sunday School.” She stood up from her chair, eager to find Irene Piper to tell her she was finished with her office, anxious to get to Brandi’s house to talk to the girls. But first she had a last word for Ronnie. “I’m disappointed that you don’t seem to remember what you learned from me.”