Behind the Third Pine

I have never been good at looking at what everyone else is looking at.

It is one of the things about me that teachers used to note on report cards, in the polite coded language that they use. June is a thoughtful girl who often seems to be elsewhere. It is not that I am dreamy. It is that, when a room turns to look at the speaker, some small restless animal in me goes on watching the door. When a crowd looks up at the fireworks, I look at the faces. When fifty men stand in a field and watch a woman with flowers, I find that I am staring at the shadow behind her.

So I was not looking at my mother.

I was sitting in the back of a florist's van that smelled of wet chrysanthemum stems and diesel, on a folding stool, with a screen in front of me that glowed like a small blue aquarium. It showed six squares, six pictures from six cameras, in the cold gray-green of night vision. The gate. The road. The bench. The lodge with its dim bulb. The angel with her broken nose. And in the sixth, a long-lens view up the hill, at the top left, my mother's small shape walking.

She walked well. She walked like a woman going to church. She had her head down and her flowers in the crook of her arm, and when she reached the family vault she paused, as Grandma always did, and put out her gloved hand to touch the iron door. She said nothing. Her lips moved, a little. Then she went on.

Good, I thought. Mom. That's good.

Devon sat beside me with the radio in his lap. Across from us, in the folding seat by the door, sat Officer Ray Pruitt, quiet and solid, a big comfortable shape in a dark uniform with his hands on his knees. He had given me a stick of gum when we left the annex. I had put it in my pocket, and I had not eaten it. He had said, Your mother's very brave, miss, in a voice like a warm blanket, and I had said yes, and looked at the screen.

I did not suspect him. I would like that known. I had no reason. He had been cleared. He had twenty years on the force, a commendation, a handshake like a handrail. What I felt toward Officer Pruitt was only what I felt toward all grown men that night, the tight careful politeness of a girl who has learned how long a hallway can be.

But I noticed that he kept asking about the road.

…

"The second turn," he said softly. "She'll go left there, miss. Do you remember? By the walnut?"

"I think so."

"And then to the bench." He nodded at the screen. "That's the way. That's just as your grandmother went. You've got a very good memory."

"Thank you."

"Did she ever say why?"

"Why what?"

"Why she took the long way." His glasses held two tiny squares of blue. He did not look at me. He looked at the monitor, at the white speck of my mother, with an air of mild and amiable curiosity. "It's a long walk for an old lady. All that way round. I'd have gone straight to the grave, myself, and saved my knees."

"She said there was more shade."

"Did she?" He smiled. "How very sensible."

I turned back to the screen. My skin was prickling, and I did not know why. It was the same sensation I had had on the stairs of Cedar Terrace, a certain quality of silence. I put my hand on the metal shelf in front of me and pressed it flat.

Don't be stupid, I told myself. He's a policeman. He's asking because he's a policeman.

I stared at the sixth square, and did the only thing I knew how to do. I stopped looking at my mother, and started looking at the trees.

…

They stood on both sides of the path, in two long ranks.

They were black walnuts at the bottom, and then cedars, and then, farther up, where the ground steepened and the old section began, pines. I could see them in the long-lens view: tall dark shapes with ragged crowns, drawn in grays on gray. The picture was grainy. Pixels swam. The wind moved the branches in slow waves, and everything on the screen shivered, as a field of wheat shivers, in one direction.

Everything but one.

I did not see it at first. I felt it, the way you feel a missing tooth. My eyes had gone along the row of pines and snagged, and I went back, and counted. One. Two. Three. On the right, the third pine up from the bend. It was a big one, thick as a car, with a trunk scaled like a crocodile's. And at its foot, in the lee, in the angle between two swollen roots, there was a shadow.

It was a perfectly ordinary shadow. It was dark and rounded, a little taller than the tree's own, lying in the hollow of the roots. On the screen, in the pale gray ink of the night vision, it looked like a clump of dead bracken. It did not move.

And that was what was wrong.

The wind was blowing. All the branches were swinging, all the needles trembling, all the long grass at the foot of the trunk bending and rising in the gusts. The shadow lay as still as a carved thing. It did not shake. It did not breathe. It sat in the roots of that tree with the blank stillness of something that has learned, by long practice, not to be seen.

"Devon."

"Mm?"

"Not just the car." I did not turn my head. I laid my hand on his wrist. "There's someone behind the third pine on the right."

He went rigid.

"The camera. Zoom in. Please."

…

It took four seconds. Devon bent over the console, his fingers fluttering on a little joystick, and I watched the picture swing and blur and settle. The pines came up toward us. The pixels swelled. The shadow grew, until it filled half the frame, and then it grew edges, and then it grew a shape.

A crouching figure.

It knelt in the lee of the roots, bent forward, with its arms wrapped around its knees and its back to the trunk. A hood. A slight, narrow set of shoulders. A pale smear of face, turned downhill, toward the gate. And on its head, jammed low, with the visor curving down over the eyes, a cap.

A baseball cap. Gray. The bill frayed at the edge.

I felt the blood leave my face.

"That's the hat," I whispered. "That's the one. The one from the school."

"Troy Haskell's in custody."

"Not in this one." I was shaking. "It's another. There's more than one. It's a kind of—a uniform. They give it to the boys. Look at the way he's sitting." I pointed. "He's looking at the car."

"Yoon," said Devon, very low, into his collar. "Yoon, on your ten o'clock, third pine from the bend, right side. One subject, crouched. Possibly armed. Do not engage. Move off the path. Come around the hill."

"Copy," said a woman's voice, a bare whisper.

On the screen, a small brown dog, tugging at its lead, stopped dead at the edge of the gravel and lifted its nose.

"I'm going round," said Devon.

"Round?"

"Behind him. There's a service lane on the far side. If Yoon comes from the front and I come from the back, he's boxed." He was already moving. He thrust the radio at me and wrenched open the van door, and the night rushed in, cold and sharp and smelling of leaves. "Stay here. Stay in the van. Lock it behind me. Don't open it for anyone but me."

"Devon—"

"Two minutes."

He was gone. The door slammed. I heard his shoes on the gravel, quick and light, and then nothing but the wind.

I locked it.

…

I do not know how long I sat there. A minute. Less. The van was very quiet. The monitor hummed. In the sixth square, my mother had come to the head of a narrow lane, a footpath no wider than a man's shoulders, running between two ranks of waist-high headstones, black and furred with moss, set so close together that they touched. The lane ran straight ahead into the dark. At its far end I could see a pale smudge, a monument of some kind, and, in front of it, a small round thing like a bowl.

"The incense burner," I said.

Nobody answered.

"There's a stone with no name. Grandma went there every year. She'd stop and stand for a minute, with her head bowed. She'd put her hand on the little iron pot in front of it." I could hear my own voice, high and quick. "I asked her once what it was for. She said, It's an old thing. For the people who were here before."

"Fascinating," said Officer Pruitt.

I started.

I had forgotten him. He still sat in the folding seat by the door, with his hands on his knees, and the blue light of the screen caught the edges of his glasses. He was leaning forward a little, as if to see better. His face wore its usual expression of grave and kindly interest.

"The people who were here before," he repeated. "That's a lovely way to put it. She must have been a remarkable woman."

"She was."

"I'm sorry I didn't know her."

He stood up. The van rocked slightly with his weight. He had to stoop under the low roof, a big man in a cramped place, with his shoulders hunched and his head tilted to one side. He put a hand on the back of Devon's empty stool, and gave me a smile of such sad, tender apology that for a moment I almost loved him.

"My knees," he said. "I'm afraid they don't like these small spaces. Would you mind terribly if I stretched my legs? Only for a minute. I'll stay right by the door."

"Devon said to keep it locked."

"Of course. Of course he did. And you're quite right." He patted the hand rail. "I'll be just outside. I'll hear if anyone comes. You can watch me through the glass."

I hesitated.

I want to explain why I did what I did next, and I find that I cannot. Something in me said no. It said it very small and very clear, like a bell at the bottom of a pond. But I was thirteen, and I was tired, and Officer Pruitt had a good gentle face. He had been cleared. He was a policeman. And I did not want to be the girl who would not let a stiff old man stretch his knees.

I undid the lock.

"Thank you, miss," said Officer Pruitt. "You're very kind."

He slid the door open and stepped down into the dark, and pulled it to behind him. I watched his shape go by the window, dark on darker, with its shoulders rounded and its head bent. He stopped by the corner of the van. I saw the glow of a lighter, the tiny orange bloom of a flame, and a thread of smoke. A man having a cigarette. A man stretching his knees.

I turned back to the screen.

…

My mother had reached the stone.

It stood at the end of the lane in a small clearing, a battered upright slab of dark granite, a little taller than she, leaning slightly back as though tired. It had no name. There was no date. There was nothing carved on its face but the faint, worn ghost of a cross, and along the bottom a shallow rectangle where an inscription had been scoured off, long ago, by some patient hand with a chisel. In front of it, set on the grass, stood a squat iron bowl on three legs. It had been black once. Now it was red-brown with rust, and filmed with lichen, and heaped with the black wet mush of dead leaves.

She stood before it a long time.

I saw her lift her hand to her left ear. Once. Twice. A signal. I'm here. In the corner of the screen, small and distant, I saw the black speck of Detective Brandt raise her head over the lodge hedge and sink again.

My mother knelt.

I don't know what she was thinking. I imagine she was thinking of her mother, who had stood here, and bowed her head, and put her hand to the iron. She laid the white flowers down on the grass. Then she reached out, slowly, and brushed the dead leaves from the bowl with the back of her glove, and then with her fingers, and I saw her go still.

She was looking at the ground.

The leaves had hidden it. Now that they were swept aside, I saw it too, on the screen, in the gray light: a patch of earth around the base of the iron bowl, perhaps two feet across, darker than the turf around it. It was loose. It was heaped, a little, in a low mound. The surface was ruffled, like a freshly raked bed. And along the edge, where the grass had been cut cleanly away, ran the sharp straight line of a spade.

Somebody had dug there. Tonight. Not an hour ago.

"Mom," I breathed. "Don't."

I wanted to shout it into the speaker. I put out my hand for the microphone. Then, from the speaker beside the screen, thin and tinny and perfectly clear, came another sound.

It was the crunch of a footstep on gravel. And a man's voice, close, level, courteous, behind my mother's shoulder.

"Ms. Ostrander," said the voice. "Don't move."