The Other Shoe Read Online Free PDF Page A

breathing these fragrances they must buy by the ounce and wear by the pint? And go where? In the middle of the night with no way home? To Fitchet Creek? Did they think their coffee was so delicious, or that she’d been so fascinated by their silly, numeric way of talking to each other? She did not know what she could afford to say, or how she could say anything without further hurting someone, and she was not going to be of much use to the authorities, or herself, or anyone else, but she had sat with the poor officers through the shank of the night, and none of them could bring themselves to leave, and all she gave them for their company and kindliness was the shoddy refrain she’d framed in the first few minutes of the interrogation, before the camera had been arranged: “It’s a terrible thing, I know it is, and I am so, so sorry. But, please, I just wouldn’t know what to tell you, and please, please, please, no lawyers.” Soon their smiles were brittle and vacant, their questions rare and further and further from the point, and she sat with them, with nowhere else to go, almost basking in their disgust until she went to sleep. Sleep, if you could call it that.
    What was hers to say? She had gone well out of her way to avoid learning that poor boy’s name. She knew that Henry, for reasons Henry had yet to mention, had hit the boy with his cane, which broke,and which she instantly, convulsively, broke in three more pieces and sent down the creek. It had been a stick, then Henry had used it for his cane, then as a club, and now it was sticks again, caught in a thicket or washed all the way to the river and indistinguishable from hundreds of thousands of other sticks. But they had never for an instant considered trying to dispose of the boy, and that, of course, was the problem, this dead boy she’d think of as dead for as long as she lived, and surely there would be hell to pay; but what was hers to say about it? Nothing.
    She had driven in dread down to Buck and Mimi’s, the Knuths big-eyed at their darkened door—here’s the neighbor wanting to call cops—and Karen had called the dispatcher and hinted broadly at their trouble, told its exact location, and then she’d gone back up the mountain to wait with Henry, squatting on her heels like a farmer in his field, but turned a little away from the boy and from Henry, who was also sitting on the ground so as to cradle the boy’s head in his lap, and while they were waiting for the others to come she might have asked her husband, “Why? Why, Henry, did you have to hit that poor guy so hard? Why’d you hit him at all?” Or she might have said, “He never meant to hurt me. Did you know that?” But she hadn’t asked for explanations, hadn’t offered any, and so there were none, and they found, she and her dear, gentle husband, that they dared not speak at all. There in the dark, waiting, she’d known already that she was never to have the luxury of confession, and that she was far from done with doing wrong.
    She needed to pee. The door to the hallway, steel of course, had no latch on her side, but only a hole for a huge and complex key she did not possess, and another hole for a window looking onto a near prospect of more cinderblock. Someone’s odd impulse had made the door powder blue. She banged it with the meat of her hand and it clanged like an empty holding tank. “Hello?” A fan blew distantly inthe ductwork. She turned her back to the door and began to kick at it with her heel, and in kicking she attained a calm, eased the pressure in her bladder, and she was still kicking at the door when it opened. “Oh . . . ” She stumbled backward into the hall and nearly into her liberator, who looked to be a cowboy dressed for a wedding with his white shirt and blue jeans and thick brown hands. “Thank you,” she said. The man was of her father’s age, or her