Ten

We wait for the police to come, and Mr. Verver can’t stop pacing up and down the driveway. He keeps running in the kitchen and calling up the stairs to Mrs. Verver. Sometimes I think she never leaves her bedroom.

Mr. Verver keeps looking at the open chute, but from a distance, from two yards away, like to go any closer might make the things inside disappear.

We wait and it’s only five, seven minutes, but it seems forever.

At first, there is a jumpy thrill to it, that I gave him this thing, that he knows it because of me. He knows Mr. Shaw was here.

But then I think what a messy thing it is for him to know. How much better is it to imagine Evie with Mr. Shaw? If she’s with him then at least she’s not lost to dank depths. Or at least not those kind of dank depths. These are our choices.

And behind it, something else, something we don’t say, which is this: how does knowing Mr. Shaw prowled out here, loved her with such secret longing, help find Evie?

The thought vaulting through me, I have a moment where she feels more lost than ever, sunk down into some earth-deep wormhole.

But Mr. Verver’s mind is moving fast, and suddenly something seems to come to him. He takes my arms in his hands and looks me in the face with fresh terror, saying, “Lizzie, this is very important. When did you hear those sounds coming from the milk chute? Did you hear them last night?”

That’s when I realize my mistake. I’d been so careful. Wiped everything clean. Thought it all through. Except this.

“What?” I say.

“If you heard the sounds last night, or even this week…” and his voice stutters off and I see what he’s thinking: if Mr. Shaw prowled out here last night, if he were here at all in the last week, where was Evie?

Suddenly Dusty appears behind the screen door and I give a silent prayer of thanks, as it gives me time to think, think, a million thoughts and calculations click-clacking in my head.

“Dad,” Dusty is saying through the screen, and it looks funny, the mesh across her face, breaking all that prettiness up into a thousand wiry pieces.

“No,” I blurt. “It wasn’t last night. It was a while ago. A couple weeks maybe. But I forgot about it until last night. With everything happening, I guess I just got scared last night. And I started to think about the chute.”

“Of course,” he says, and the dread that had been grinding through his face slows down.

I put my hand over my chest to stop my heart from rocketing through it.

“I just got spooked,” I say. “And then I remembered about the noise.”

“Of course. And thank God you did. It’s all been very scary. Oh, poor Lizzie,” he says, and I feel him leaning toward me and I think he might hug me, but the screen door screeches at us, and Dusty is saying “Dad” and her voice is like a shiver. It echoes in my head, a million times, Dusty calling from somewhere, anywhere, calling for Dad.

And so he goes to her.

Standing in the driveway, waiting for the police, I see them in the kitchen. Through the screen door, I see Mr. Verver holding Dusty, and she is crying and she is clinging to his shirtfront and she will not let go.

They’re standing in the kitchen and his arms enclose her and I can barely even see Dusty, just the crush of her hair, her bare feet half set upon his shoes, her shoulders curling into him, trembling against his chest.

It reminds me of something way back. That time when Dusty was so sick, so sick she whittled down to ninety pounds. Mr. Verver had to quit coaching our soccer team after only three weeks, someone needed to stay with her, she was wasting away. She was never any good at being sick, we all said. But he was our favorite coach ever and we all loved him. Mrs. Verver worked evenings at the VA and who else but him could stay with Dusty, Dusty with that roiling sickness in her gut that had ravaged her almost overnight. She couldn’t eat anything. And he’d come home, and Dusty, lolled across that sofa, oh, how she clung to him and said she felt like she might die. She looked like she might.

He could fix everything, couldn’t he? His hands like some healer, and soon enough, she was well.

It goes on for some time, with the police. I’m talking with Detective Thernstrom when they find the newspaper clipping. One of them has the cigarette pack pinched in these long blue tweezers and he’s turning it around in his upraised gloved hand when the clipping falls to the ground. He won’t find any prints on it, which is too bad, but I had to wipe myself from the pack and lighter with the satiny edge of my comforter, wipe me, and so Mr. Shaw, away.

Mrs. Verver is finally outside, pale and ghostly, wrapped in a big sweater and her arms wrenched around herself.

I watch her watching them as they look at the clipping, the photo of Evie in her nylon uniform, hair in tight braids.

Mr. Verver is looking at the photo too. He has his hand over his mouth, and there is something awful on his face that feels like it will be in my head forever.

The next few hours whir and there’s never any talk of me going to school and there are so many conversations, and my mother is there, and I can barely look at her because I keep picturing her on our back patio, all flesh and ickiness, tattooed from the slats on the chaise, where I will never sit again. She stays with Mrs. Verver, who is back in her bedroom. She brings her tea and stays with her all afternoon. I wonder what they talk about, hiding up there, burdened women huddled together behind closed doors.

I’m sitting in the kitchen when Dusty comes in, all her tears shaken free, her face scrubbed back to that tight, bright beauty of hers.

“You saved the day again,” she says, tugging open the refrigerator door.

It’s sort of coachlike, the way she says it, but you never know with Dusty, so I just shrug.

She pulls out a jug of juice, shaking it slowly and looking at me.

“It’s kind of weird, though, don’t you think?” she says.

“What?”

“That broken hinge. I mean, it’s been broken forever. I remember when your brother busted it, swung at it with his baseball bat.”

“Yeah,” I say, remembering it too.

“Well, I was thinking about it,” she says, unscrewing the cap. “It must’ve been a real hassle for Mr. Shaw, hiding those cigarettes there. When you open it, you have to hold the door with the other hand, just to stop it from falling off.”

“Right,” I say, keeping my voice as even as I can.

“… when there’s plenty of other perfectly good places to hide things, like his car—”

“He probably didn’t want his wife to know he smoked,” I jump in. “She might have found them if he hid them in his car.”

“How about a flowerpot?” she says, taking a sip from the juice, slanting her head, as if pondering. “One of those big old empty planters your mom has all over the place.”

“I guess it could get wet there. It—”

“It just doesn’t make much sense.” She pauses, then taps the jug against her chest. “To me, at least.”

“No,” I say, my head hot and tingling. “I guess it doesn’t.”

I sit up straighter in my seat. I can shake her off, I can. But the jolt on me, it’s like a coldness on the teeth. It’s no surprise that she knows I’m lying. She reads me here, like on the field, like everywhere. She sees it all.

“I guess none of what he’s done makes sense,” I try.

She nods, but the stare she gives me, I know I’ll feel it all day long.

Later, Mr. Verver pulls me aside to update me on everything. He stops and pulls me aside just to tell me.

“The police showed the lighter to Mrs. Shaw and her son,” he says, “and the son recognized it. He said his dad kept it as a memento, that it’d been his own father’s lighter, and Shaw used it to light the Christmas candles or birthday cakes.”

“What about Mrs. Shaw?”

Mr. Verver shakes his head. “She said she couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t remember anything,” he says. “But, here’s the thing, Lizzie, Mr. Shaw’s office assistant also identified it, said she’d see him spinning it around on his desk sometimes, called it his lucky piece.”

Oh, to see him so animated, so enlivened. And I did that. Savoring it, I try to put Dusty out of my head. If she doesn’t believe me, what does it matter? I keep telling myself that. Over and over.

Then it’s on the news that night.

A college student comes forward, identifying herself as the girl the old lady saw jumping into Green Hollow Lake, the one she thought was Evie.

“I was just collecting samples for Geology class,” the girl tells the reporter. Her hair’s long and dark like Evie’s, but she’s nothing like Evie. I wonder how anyone could think this college girl with her big dorm-fed shoulders and cork sandals could be Evie.

All my mother can talk about, though, is the milk chute, as if it linked us to everything.

“I can’t believe it,” she says, standing in front of the refrigerator, trying to imagine dinner. Ted is nowhere to be seen. “The idea of that man skulking in our driveway. Hiding his things here, creeping around our house at night.”

This is what she says.

In my head, Dr. Aiken stumbles through our back hedges.

I nearly laugh, I nearly do.

Sometimes, though, it’s like I believe it myself. Sometimes I forget my own lie and I think of Mr. Shaw jerking open our milk chute door, fumbling his hands inside, hiding his secrets. He gave his secrets to me anyway, didn’t he? Or I took them from him. It was me who took them from him, my hands reaching, grasping.