She watched him step around the widening circle of blood and stoop over Darnel and dump the powdery dust across his shirt. He stood up and dropped the empty bag near his lifeless hand.
‘What’s that?’
‘A drug,’ he said. ‘An illegal substance.’
‘Why do you have it?’
‘For emergencies,’ he said, ‘occasions like this.’
He stared down at the body, the sweat sheening his face.
‘Daddy,’ she said. ‘Don’t you want to know what happened?’
‘I don’t need to hear it, sweetheart. I can see.’
‘I just wanted to scare him. That’s all.’
‘I know, I know. It’s all right. We’ll fix this. We will.’
‘He killed Pugsy, Dad. He murdered the dog.’
Her father stepped over to Darnel’s dresser and, using the blue bandanna, opened each of the drawers and dumped them onto the floor.
‘But it wasn’t just about Pugsy,’ she said. ‘It was about me.’
Her father drew a long breath and stared at the dead boy.
‘Did he touch you, Alexandra?’ he asked quietly, his eyes hidden from her. ‘Did he hurt you?’
‘Yes.’
Her father tried to say something, but the words failed in his throat and he swallowed hard.
‘Am I going to the electric chair?’
He shook his head and stepped over to her and squatted down to look squarely into her eyes.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not if I have anything to say about it.’
She hugged him and he patted her back as she wept. Finally, he rose and took her by the arm, then drew her away and guided her out of the room, down the hallway and toward the back door.
At the door, she halted.
‘There’s somebody else in the house.’
Her father turned and knelt down to peer into her eyes. His eyes were bruised and misty. She had never seen him look so naked before.
‘I heard a toilet flush,’ she said. ‘There’s someone else here.’
Her father gazed past her, down the hallway, and swallowed hard. Then he rose, walked down the hallway, opened the bathroom door, and went inside. He came back out a few moments later. Next, he went into the Flints’ bedroom, then the girls’ room. When he came back down the hall, he was shaking his head.
‘There’s no one here.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Alexandra, listen to me. Nothing happened here. It’s all going to go away and we’ll forget it and things will be the way they were before. I promise you that. Exactly the way they were. This didn’t happen, Alex. This simply didn’t occur.’
They walked back to their yard and Alexandra sat in the shade of a mango tree, and through the blur of her tears she watched her father finish mowing the grass. Her body felt heavy and old, as if the part of her that had been floating above had stolen all the buoyancy from her flesh.
She watched him, shirtless in the sun, a scattering of gray hairs showing among the dense forest on his chest. He pushed the mower through the tall grass by the canal. And she thought about men, how they could do such terrible things, then go right back to eating ice cream, mowing the grass. She watched her father and tried to picture herself as a grown woman married to a man like him, someone strong and sheltering.
The flesh of her face felt heavy. She couldn’t imagine laughing again, or even smiling. It was the first time in her life she had noticed the dreadful pull of gravity.
A half hour later when the Flints returned home, the twins ran over to Alexandra and began to chatter while they ate their raspberry Popsicles. Alex tried to act natural, listening and nodding. Molly asked her about her reddened eyes, and Alexandra said her allergies were acting up. A few minutes later, Mrs Flint screamed and screamed again, and the girls went flying into their house.
Then the police arrived, and while Darnel’s body was wheeled away, one of the plainclothes detectives spoke with her father on the sidewalk. Alexandra watched from the living room window.
‘Are you all right, sweet pea?’ Her mother put an arm over her shoulder and tried to turn her away from the activity in the street. But Alexandra told her she wanted to watch. She didn’t say it, but she was afraid this would be the last moment she would see her father outside of a jail cell.
A short while later, the police left. Her father spent the rest of the afternoon clipping the hedges, and Alexandra lay in her bed and watched the curtains swell and fall and listened to the snip of her father’s blade.
That evening, Mrs Flint wailed on her back porch and she broke glass after glass against the cement floor. It was that noise Alexandra would hear forever, the crash and clatter whenever she began to drift off to sleep. The beginning of a lifetime of insomnia.
By Christmas, the Flints had moved away. Alex decided that the flushing toilet had been in her imagination, a product of her panic, or maybe just some peculiarity of the Flints’ plumbing, something she didn’t understand.
Her father never spoke of the event again, and though once or twice in the weeks that followed Alexandra was on the verge of confessing to her mother, she never found a way to begin. Apparently, her mother didn’t know. She continued to refer to Darnel’s death as ‘a drug deal gone bad,’ saying it was a lesson about the effects of heavy-metal music and shiftlessness.
Alexandra began shooting at fifty yards. She worked slowly toward the four-story building, taking several wide-angle shots of the whole structure. A stucco apartment building with red tile roof and dark green stairways and landings, here and there a coral rock facade. In that part of Coconut Grove, two bedrooms started at eight hundred a month. Sporty compacts filled the parking lot, owned by the young lawyers and stockbrokers who populated these buildings, twenty-something singles with more expendable income than Alexandra had take-home pay.
She got a wide-angle shot of the cars. You never knew when a perp might leave his vehicle behind. Car trouble, panic, even arrogance. A year earlier, after studying hundreds of photos of two different murder scenes, Alexandra had spotted the same car parked at both, a fact that broke the case.
It took her four shots to get all the cars near the apartment. The Minolta 700 SI she was using was motor-driven, had an autofocus, auto everything. Nearly impossible to make a mistake.
Alexandra Rafferty was an ID tech with the Miami PD, photographic specialist. Not being a sworn police officer meant, among other things, that she wasn’t authorized to carry a gun. Which was fine by her. She’d had more than enough of guns. Her only weapon was the telescoping baton she carried on her belt. Her counterparts with Metro-Dade, the county ID techs, were sworn officers, and they were paid even more than the detectives. They carried the latest Glocks, ran the crime scene, bossed the homicide guys around. But not the City of Miami PD. Exactly the same job, only Alexandra and her colleagues were considered technicians, bottom of the totem.
Night after night, she ghosted through rooms, took her shots, and when she was finished, she moved on to the next scene. Hardly noticed. Which was fine. She had no aspiration to run things. That wasn’t her. She had her attitude, her opinion. Had no problem speaking up if one of the homicide guys missed something or asked for her view. But she didn’t aspire to run the show or get involved with the daily dick measuring that went on all around her. She took