All the Things You Are by Declan Hughes Read Free Book Online Page B

from the Dane County Sheriff’s office, there to serve her a reminder notice (a
reminder
notice)
that the property she is standing in must be vacated within the next thirty-one days, as per the terms of the court-ordered foreclosure against the house three months previously, so as to enable free and vacant possession for its auction one calendar month from now, and two detectives from the Madison Police Department, there for reasons they have yet to disclose, stretches her to the limit. Some vague formulation about a sitcom written by David Lynch scuttles across the shore of her brain, but she’s pretty sure it’s second-hand.
    She’s standing, literally shaking (she can see she’s shaking because the notice to quit in her hand is flapping in the air) in the doorway of the house as the deputies depart and the detectives move in. Claire knows they are detectives because they show her their badges, and because she knows they are detectives. Who else would come this early in the morning, dressed in suits that don’t entirely fit them, the man’s gray and shiny at the seams, sagging and loose at the shoulders, the woman’s navy and new, bulging between the two buttons of the two-button coat?
    The woman, who is in her thirties and not really overweight, eight pounds tops (maybe the suit was a stretch to begin with) looks at the paper in Claire’s hand and raises her eyebrows in, not quite sympathy, that would be unprofessional, but what-are-you-gonna-do empathy, or so it seems to Claire, and bats it towards her partner, who is brown-eyed and fleshy faced and has eighties hair in a side parting, and does not look like he is in the empathy business this morning.
    â€˜Ms Taylor?’ he says.
    â€˜Mrs Brogan. Ms Taylor, yes.’
    â€˜Detective Fowler, of the Madison Police Department. This is Detective Fox. We’d like you to come take a look at something in your backyard.’
    Mr Smith. Oh My God, Mr Smith. Claire had finally fallen into a blessed, bourbon-induced sleep somewhere around four, four-thirty. Since she awoke a couple of hours later, fully clothed, to the sound of the doorbell, she has simply been reacting – to the sheriff’s deputies, to the cops – all the while having forgotten most, if not quite all, of what happened last night:
    The emptied house;
    The vanished family; and
    Mr Smith.
    (And what happened to Dee? Wasn’t Dee here? Where did she go? Home, let’s hope, so she doesn’t a) get caught up in this; and b) witness Claire’s further humiliation.)
    Jesus Christ, the court-ordered foreclosure
three months ago
? Her house is about to be seized within the month and auctioned off to the highest bidder, because it isn’t her house any more. And now cops are here, like at the beginning of some TV show, leading her to the scene of the crime, and she has to figure out what to say about her dead dog.
Claire is aware, as she follows the detectives past the deck and down towards the apple trees in the backyard, that they are looking at her strangely, as if she is not sufficiently surprised or upset by their arrival. But she knows what they’re going to find, and in any case, what is the appropriate way to behave when you’re confronted with the kind of news she has had? She has been more or less gaping for the twelve or so hours she has been home, gaping and bailing and gasping for breath and waiting for the camera crew to appear out of the bushes and say ‘Surprise! It’s all a big hoax! Here’s your husband!’
    So she can kill him with her bare hands.
    It’s not that the death of her dog is the least of it, but she does wonder if, across the United States, whenever a pet is found dead, two detectives are dispatched to the scene as a general rule, or is it just a Mid-West thing? Since she has no direct experience of the police to date, she can’t say, but it does strike her as unlikely. And how do they know