But instead he says, “As you can expect, at eighty-some years old, George and Poppy were asleep,” and I release my withheld breath. The Nilssons didn’t see a thing.
“I don’t understand, Officer,” I say, glancing at the time on the car’s dash, knowing I’ll need to leave soon. “If the Nilssons were asleep, then...what?”
Because clearly if they were asleep, then they saw and heard nothing.
“I also asked the Nilssons if they’d seen anything out of the ordinary over the last few days. Strangers lurking about, unfamiliar cars parked along the street.”
“Yes, yes,” I say, nodding my head quickly because he also asked this question of Will and me. “And?” I ask, trying to hurry things along so that I can get on to work.
“Well, it just so happens that they did see something out of the ordinary. Something they haven’t seen before. Which is saying a lot, seeing as they’ve lived half their lives on that street.” And then he taps away at that tablet screen to find his interview with Mr. and Mrs. Nilsson.
He goes on to describe for me an afternoon just last week. It was Friday, the first of December. It was a clear day, the sky painted blue, not a cloud to be seen. The temperatures were cool, crisp, but nothing a heavy sweater or a light jacket wouldn’t fix. George and Poppy had gone for an afternoon walk, Officer Berg says, and were headed back up the steep incline of our street. Once they reached the top, George stopped to catch his breath, pausing before the Baineses’ home.
Officer Berg goes on to tell me how there Mr. Nilsson rearranged the blanket on Poppy’s lap so that she didn’t catch a draft. As he did, something caught his attention. It was the sound of women hollering at one another, though what they were hollering about he wasn’t sure.
“Oh, how awful,” I say, and he says it was because poor George was really shaken up about it. He’d never heard anything like that before. And that’s saying a lot for a man his age.
“But what does this have to do with me?” I ask, and he reaches again for the tablet.
“George and Poppy stayed there in the street for a moment only, but that’s all it took before the women stepped out from the shade of a tree and into view and George could see for himself who they were.”
“Who?” I ask, slightly breathless, and he waits a beat before he replies.
“It was Mrs. Baines,” he says, “and you.”
And then, from some recording app on his device, he plays for me the testimonial of Mr. Nilsson, which states, “She was fighting with the new doctor lady on the street. The both of them were hooting and hollering, mad as a hornet. Before I could intercede, the doctor lady grabbed a handful of Ms. Morgan’s hair right out of her head and left with it in her fist. Poppy and I turned and walked quickly home. Didn’t want her to think we were snooping or she might do the same thing to us.”
Officer Berg stops it there and turns to me, asking, “Does this sound to you like an altercation between two women who’d never met?”
But I’m speechless.
I can’t reply.
Why would George Nilsson say such an awful thing about me?
Officer Berg doesn’t give me a chance to speak. He goes on without me.
He asks, “Is it often, Dr. Foust, that you swipe handfuls of hair from women you don’t know?”
The answer, of course, is no. Though still I can’t find my voice to speak.
He decides, “I’ll take your silence as a no.”
His hand falls to the door and he pushes it open against the weight of the wind. “I’ll leave you to it,” he says, “so that you can get on with your day.”
“I never spoke to Morgan Baines” is what I manage to say just then before he leaves, though the words that emerge are limp.
He shrugs. “All right, then,” he says, stepping back out into the rain.
He never said if he believed me.
He didn’t need to.
Once upon a time there was a girl named Mouse. It wasn’t her real name, but for as long as the girl could remember, her father had called her that.
The girl didn’t know why her father called her Mouse. She didn’t ask. She worried that if she brought attention to it, he might stop using the nickname, and she didn’t want him to do that. The girl liked that her father called her Mouse, because it was something special between her father and her, even if she didn’t know why.
Mouse spent a lot of time thinking about it. She had ideas about why her father called her by that nickname. For one, she had a soft spot for cheese. Sometimes, when she pulled strands of mozzarella from her string cheese and laid them on her tongue to eat, she thought that maybe that was the reason he called her Mouse, because of how much she liked cheese.
She wondered if her father thought she looked like a mouse. If, maybe, there were whiskers that grew along her upper lip, ones so small even she couldn’t see them, though her father could somehow see them. Mouse would go to the bathroom, climb up on the sink, press in closely to the mirror so she could search for whiskers. She even brought a magnifying glass along with her once, held it between her lip and her reflection, but she didn’t see any whiskers there.
Maybe, she decided, it had nothing to do with whiskers, but something to do with her brown hair, her big ears, her big teeth.
But Mouse wasn’t sure. Sometimes she thought it had to do with the way she looked, and then other times she thought it had nothing to do with the way she looked, but was something else instead, like the Salerno Butter Cookies she and her father ate after dinner sometimes. Maybe it was because of those cookies that he called her Mouse.
Mouse loved her Salerno Butter Cookies more than any other kind of cookie, even more than homemade. She’d stack them up on her pinkie, slide her finger through the center hole, gnaw her way down the side of the stack just like a mouse gnawing its way through wood.
Mouse ate her cookies at the dinner table. But one night, when her father had his back turned, taking the dishes to the sink to wash, she slipped an extra few in her pockets for a late-night snack, in case she or her teddy bear got hungry.
Mouse excused herself from the table, tried sneaking up to her bedroom with the cookies in her pockets, though she knew that crammed there in her pockets, the cookies would quickly turn to crumbs. To Mouse, it didn’t matter. The crumbs would taste just as good as the cookie had.
But her father caught her red-handed trying to make off with the cookies. He didn’t scold her. He hardly ever scolded her. There wasn’t a need for Mouse to be scolded. Instead he teased her for hoarding food, storing it somewhere in that bedroom of hers like mice store food in the walls of people’s homes.
But somehow Mouse didn’t think that was why he called her Mouse.
Because by then, she already was Mouse.
Mouse had a vivid imagination. She loved to make stories up. She never wrote them down on paper, but put them in her head where no one else could see. In her stories, there was a girl named Mouse who could do anything she wanted to, even cartwheels on the moon if that was what