now that we never questioned the whole enterprise. We went to Sunday school the way salmon go home to spawn—relentlessly, unreflectively, as part of our nature. It’s spawning season—the salmon must get home. It’s Sunday morning—I must hie me to Sunday school. I must be here with Mr. Ring and Joseph’s coat of many colors. I must figure out, somehow, what this story has to do with me—with playing outside, and school, and my dark, secret thoughts.
secret for now
It’s hard for me to believe I was ever part of such a world. I wonder if Sunday school even exists anymore. It’s been so many years since I’ve gone to church that I have a hard time remembering exactly what goes on there. Can little kids, somewhere, still be singing, “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight”? Are there still cannibals in the world?
“Miss Sinclair is very nice to me.”
I keep driving.
“She said I looked … looked pretty in my Easter dress of mine.”
I feel a stab in my stomach. Now I remember Miss Sinclair. She was a high school girl who was very active in the church and was later killed in a car wreck. She had been especially good to Judy.
I remember that Easter dress, too. She must have been ten or eleven. It was an archetype—or parody—of the genre of cute, petticoated, wavy-rufflely little girl dresses. Judy loved the showers of praise and admiration from Dad when she walked down the steps from her bedroom wearing it, Mother trailing behind and clearing her throat to make sure the men of the house took proper note. Dad claimed not to recognize her.
“Where’s Judy? Miss Princess, could you tell me where my daughter Judy has gone?”
Judy immediately struck a pose, aloof and regal.
“Why, I … why, I am your very own daughter, Judy.”
“No, my daughter is very pretty, of course, but you are the most lovely woman in the world. You cannot be my daughter.”
“Yes, I … I am lovely. But I am also your daughter … Judith Anne Mote. How do you like my … my new dress of mine?”
If Judy got praise for her dress at home, she got a few stares at church. In those days you didn’t call attention to a tragedy, maybe even to a judgment of God. For some it was a scandal that she still lived at home, a situation that would change soon enough.
By the time we get home from the university, I can feel the first dimming of the light. I refuse it the encouragement of direct attention. I tell myself I am simply tired, which is true enough. I know for sure I shouldn’t have agreed to look into Pratt’s murder. Too many ghosts at the university. They linger in the seminar rooms and library stacks—patient, vaporous, not quite sinister, not quite friendly. At best they wish me no particular good. They are better left alone and at a distance, like the rumor of faraway disaster.
we wish you no particular good either
I try talking to Judy to keep my thoughts from turning inward, but I’m having a hard time paying attention. While her words pile up on her tongue like rush hour traffic, I am drawn to the dark edge of the mind where thought descends into randomness and randomness into emptiness and emptiness into oblivion. I feel an overwhelming need to escape the press of judgment and evaluation. I don’t exactly want to sleep. I want to absent myself from the world for a while. It isn’t a new feeling, but one I haven’t felt this strongly for a long time. It is a feeling I have never been good at resisting, or even wanting to resist. I tell Judy I am going to lay on the couch for a few minutes. She looks alarmed.
SIX
The next day I go down to the Minneapolis police headquarters between Fourth and Fifth streets to introduce myself to Detective Wilson, the lead detective on the case. The headquarters are in city hall, which looks appropriately authoritative, like a cross between a grand French chateau and the witch’s fortress in The Wizard of Oz. Mrs. Pratt called Detective Wilson after our meeting to let him know about me, and it has had the effect I expected. When I appear in his office he looks at me like a father looks at a biker picking up his daughter for a first date.
“I may as well tell you right out that I don’t like this.”
“I understand.”
“But Mrs. Pratt has the right to hire whoever she wants.”
“Yes.”
“As long as that person doesn’t get in the way of the investigation.”
“Of course.”
“Or break any laws.”
“I understand.”
“Including laws of privacy and search and seizure.”
“Of course.”
“You are not a cop, and I don’t want you playing cop. If you leave anyone with even the faintest impression that you are an officer or in any way connected to the official investigation …”
“You’ll have no problem …”
“I will charge your ass.”
“… with me.”
“And if you should by absolute random luck come across anything—and I mean anything—I want to hear about it before your next breath.”
He pauses, standing behind his desk, leaning forward on his knuckles.
“Do I make myself clear.”
“As a bell.” Cliché answering cliché. Judy would be proud.
“Is there any more I can do for you, Mr. Mote?”
This normally would be my cue for a mumbled exit line and a quick departure. I stand up to do just that when I see something in a plastic bag on top of a stack of papers on the edge of Wilson’s desk that makes my heart jump. It looks like a knife, but I instantly know it isn’t a knife—I know what it is instead.
“What is that?”
long time no see
Wilson looks where I’m pointing and snorts. He takes the bag and drops it into a drawer.
“That’s none of your business, that’s what it is.”
“It’s the murder weapon, isn’t it?”
Suddenly Wilson is keenly interested.
“And how would you know that, Mr. Mote?”
“I’ve seen it before.”
Now Wilson is more than interested; he’s riveted.
“That is indeed the weapon Dr. Pratt was attacked with. But the public doesn’t know that. We disclosed that Dr. Pratt was stabbed, but we didn’t describe the weapon. We let people assume it was a knife, so we could distinguish a false confession from a true one. Mrs. Pratt doesn’t even know. If you’ve seen it before, Mr. Mote, then I think perhaps I should read you your Miranda rights.”
It
