“I suppose anything’s possible,” I said.
Apparently the Chinese had showed up Monday morning to do whatever they were doing up there, found the bodies, called the police. Back at the plant Pops had said Phil and Bubby were the Chinese’s problem now, so I knew we were both hoping the Chinese would clean up the mess themselves, but apparently they intended to be good citizens about it.
By the end of the day customers were coming into the bank talking about the revolver found under Donnie’s body at the wreck. The police hadn’t mentioned it when the first news report came out, but now that Phil and Bubby had turned up, the township police turned everything over to the state boys, and they sent the revolver and recovered bullets off to be tested. According to Cindy, who had been hearing about it all day long from her customers and other tellers, a lot of people in town felt pretty good about the whole thing. Apparently we weren’t the only people the McClaines and Donnie rubbed the wrong way.
“I think Mom’s the only one feeling bad,” Cindy told me.
“How about you?” I asked.
“What do you think?”
“Even so . . .”
“Even so what?”
“He’s your father, that’s all.”
“That’s only a word, Russell. Kind of an honorary title. Some men live up to it, other men don’t.”
Me, I kept holding my breath for the next couple days.
On Friday I started breathing again too. That was the day the ballistics report came out in the paper. All the evidence pointed to some kind of disagreement between the McClaine brothers and Donnie and Shelley. Most people figured drugs were involved. Others believed that Donnie was banging Shelley, and the McClaine boys found out about it. Somehow Donnie had gotten the upper hand in the crushing plant, and put an end to the disagreement with an unregistered .22 revolver. When Donnie and Shelley were fleeing the scene, driving too fast for conditions, poetic justice stepped in and had its say.
Of course there were other people who wanted to lay the blame on the Chinese somehow, like maybe they’d bought the crushing plant as a front for importing opium and heroin, or for setting up a mega-meth lab with Phil and Bubby handling the distribution.
I didn’t care what crazy theories people came up with. The more, the better. As long as the police never looked in my direction or Pops’. I knew I’d be on pins and needles for a while until the case was officially closed, but nervousness was a small price to pay for all the trouble I’d caused.
Later that same afternoon I talked to Pops for the first time all week. I guess he’d read the paper too, and felt like it was time to get in touch again.
He called and said, “You doing okay?”
“Better now,” I told him. “You?”
“Grateful for every breath I take,” he said. “How are those little darlin’s of mine?”
That same night when Cindy came home, she was looking at me kind of differently, I thought. All through dinner it was like she was sneaking glances at me. Usually when she and I do the dishes together, the girls will sit at the table, coloring or drawing or something. This time Cindy let them watch TV in the living room.
So I’m scraping the dishes over the disposal, then I hand them to Cindy and she rinses them clean and puts them in the dishwasher. She looks over her shoulder to make sure one of the girls isn’t standing in the doorway, and then she says, “What do you think about what the police are saying?”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“That Donnie and Shelley did it.”
“The McClaines, you mean?”
“I can’t see it,” she says. “I don’t know what she was like, but I know Donnie, and I know he was never anything but a lying sneak and coward.”
“Thing is, the bullets match the gun found underneath him.”
She stared out the kitchen window and shook her head. “It doesn’t make any sense. Why would the four of them get together up at that empty plant?”
“Maybe they were meeting somebody there. Most likely some kind of drug deal.”
“There’d be evidence of that, wouldn’t there?”
“It rained pretty hard all that night.”
“Not inside it didn’t.”
“I only know what you told me and what I read in the papers.”
She put the last of the silverware into the dishwasher, put in the gel, and set the dishwasher to running. I used a wet cloth to wipe down the table and counters.
“The real mystery,” she says, “is why that girl would be with Donnie in the first place. Let’s say it was them against the McClaines for some reason. Why? Why would she side with that piece of crap about anything?”
“Babe, there’s no telling why people do what they do.”
“There’s absolutely no good reason for her to be with him.”
“I didn’t say it had to be a good reason. I mean, look at your mother. She took him back in a minute.”
She didn’t say anything more for a while. Then it was, “You’ve already wiped that table clean three times, Russell.”
So I came back to the sink, rinsed out the cloth, wrung it dry, and draped it over the basin divider. I could feel her eyes on me the entire time. So finally I forced myself to turn around and face her and smile.
She said, “I never asked you how Pops was that night.”
“Good,” I said. “He was good. He was restless for a while. Needed somebody to distract him from his thoughts.”
“What time was it when you got back?”
“It wasn’t that late. Eleven thirty maybe?”
“You must’ve been awfully quiet getting into bed.”
“You woke up for a minute,” I told her. “You asked how Pops was doing.”
“Did I? I don’t remember that at all.”
“You were barely awake,” I said.
She nodded. “So that was it then? You went to his place for a couple hours, sat and talked, watched TV?”
“That’s about it. Oh, I did drive him down to the convenience store before I came home. He usually walks but it was still raining pretty good. Turns out he can’t make it through a night without his hot chocolate and a Slim Jim.”
She wrinkled up her nose. “Those meat sticks are nasty.”
I put my hand on the side of her face. “So is the interrogation over?”
“Why would you call it an interrogation?”
“That’s what it felt like.”
“Talking to your wife feels like an interrogation to you?”
“Baby,” I said. But there wasn’t anything more to say. Nothing halfway smart anyway. So I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead.
She surprised me by wrapping her arms around my waist and holding me there.
“The important thing,” she said, “is that we’re all okay now.”
“Better than okay,” I said.
“And the next time you see a naked girl?”
“It’s going to be you.”
“And the time after that?”
“You, you, and only you forever. No, wait. Newborn babies don’t count, do they?”
“This one’s going to be a boy,” she said.
“We don’t know that for sure.”
“If it’s not, I’m sending it back.”
“Like heck you will.”
And after that we held each other for a while. And that’s the last we’ve ever talked about it.