The Fever

14

From the rain-whisked parking lot, Tom could see the gym burning bright as a game night.

Streaking past him, a Channel 7 News van, its antenna corded like a peppermint twist.

In the distance, he could see Dave Hurwich having a heated discussion with a woman in a yellow raincoat and matching hat, a container of some kind in her arms.

Walking faster, Tom passed a trench-coated reporter standing at the foot of the building’s front steps, a camera light illuminating his face as he spoke:

“Though school officials claim the purpose of this hastily scheduled meeting is to address all parental concerns, it is hard not to see a connection to tonight’s revelation.”

Another reporter ten feet away, fingers to earpiece:

“If Miss Court never received the much-discussed vaccination, many parents are saying that calls into question the most pervasive theory for the outbreak.”

The reporter held the microphone out to a woman in a purple slicker beside him. Tom vaguely recalled her from Parents’ Night.

“The vaccine was a red herring,” the woman said sternly, leaning over the microphone. “So where does that leave us now? Now it could be anything. That’s just not acceptable!”

Tom kept walking.

A small group was gathered at the school’s front door. At the center, a man with headphones and a Channel 4 baseball cap was talking to Assistant Principal Hawk.

“This is a public meeting, isn’t it?”

“This isn’t a school-board meeting,” Hawk said, his face bone-white and wet, his Dryden Stallions baseball cap soaked through. “This meeting was called by the parent-teacher association. We need to respect their privacy.”

“But you’re a public school, aren’t you? What makes you think—”

Tom hurried past, ducking his head, nearly tripping over the long licorice cords snaking from the van.

“Is that the Nash girl’s father?” he heard someone say.

He didn’t stop. He just kept going.

Her mom left two long messages that Deenie let play as the phone rested on the counter and she ate her cereal.

She turned the radio louder so she could hear even less.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise that her mom wouldn’t come. It wasn’t a surprise.

In the past two years, she hadn’t spent more than ten minutes in the house, more than an hour in Dryden. When she picked them up, she waited in the car as if there were police tape draped across the entryway.

Sometimes, peeking under the sun visor, her mom would look up at it like it was haunted.

Deenie threw the rest of her cereal into the sink and opened the refrigerator, considered a bottle of beer nestled in the back corner. She had only had maybe ten beers in her life, but it seemed like what you did, what one did in a situation like this. As if there had ever been a situation like this.

The news report came on with that plunky news music.

…called by Sheila Daniels, mother of Lise Daniels, and her attorney, possibly to discuss attempts to move her daughter to the medical center at Mercy-Starr Clark. The press conference will be held on hospital grounds at ten o’clock tonight, after the school’s PTA meeting is expected to end. The hospital denies the story, asserting that any such event on their property requires permission to assemble and they have received no such request.

Deenie sat back down, thinking of the hospital again, of being in the parking lot the night before, the closest she’d been to the thing that was happening. It was happening there. With Lise.

And then hearing Kim Court’s voice again, her eyes muddy ringed.

Deenie Nash is here now too…I knew she had to be here. Deenie’s the one.

She picked up her phone, trying Gabby again.

“Deenie, I don’t want to talk.” Gabby’s voice sounded soft and sludgy, like when she had strep, her tongue furred white.

“But what happened today? Weren’t you going to the hospital for more tests?”

“Yeah. I’m home now.”

“What did they do to you?”

“I don’t know, Deenie. More blood, gross stuff. More head-shrinking. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Deenie paused. She pictured Gabby like a ball rolled tight and there was nothing she could do to unpeel her arms from her legs, unfurl her head from her chest.

“Is Skye with you?” Deenie asked, then felt embarrassed.

“What? No.”

“Did you see the videos?” Deenie tried again. “Kim Court?”

“No,” she said. “No, I’m not watching anything. My mom said I couldn’t watch anything. Deenie, I don’t want to talk about it. Okay? Please.”

But Deenie couldn’t stop herself, her voice pushing forward.

“Gabby, we have to do something. What if we went to the hospital? Maybe, with everything going on, we could try to see Lise now—”

“No” came Gabby’s voice, loud and urgent. “I’m never, ever going back there. What is wrong with you, Deenie? What do you think is going to happen if you go? That Lise is dying to see you so much she’ll come out of the coma?”

Deenie didn’t say anything for a second.

“Coma?” she said at last. “What do you mean, ‘coma’? I thought she was just unconscious.”

There was no sound on the other end.

Then a vague clicking, like a tongue across the roof of the mouth.

“Deenie,” Gabby said finally, “people aren’t just unconscious for four days.”

“But we don’t know… she may be conscious now. We don’t know.”

There was a muffled sound, but Deenie couldn’t hear what it was, her forehead wet and tingling. She felt so far away from Gabby. Like with everything lately, even before this, all Gabby’s adventures with Skye. The only other time she remembered feeling that way was a few years ago. That time Gabby stayed with them for almost two weeks. Every night, Deenie tried to get her to talk and she wouldn’t. A few times, though, she heard Eli talking to her downstairs and Gabby laughing, and it had to be Gabby but didn’t sound like her laugh, or like Gabby.

Which was funny to think of now, because those weeks Gabby stayed with them seemed to be the thing that had made them best friends. After that, they were closer than ever.

“Deenie.” Gabby’s voice returned, a whisper. “What is it you’re trying to do?”

Click, click, and Deenie felt her own lips, tongue. Was the sound coming from her own mouth?

“Deenie,” Gabby said, “we’re all sick here.”

Ten minutes later, her coat on, she was ready to go.

If I text him, she thought, he’ll say no.

Tearing a page from her spiral notebook, she wrote a note.

The minute Tom walked inside the school, he felt it.

It was loud, louder than any school event he could remember.

The pitchy clamor of nervous parents finding other nervous parents to be even more nervous together.

A flurry of shouts at the door as the sole security guard tried to keep another reporter or producer from entering through the loading dock.

The screeching of gym risers pushed down the hallway, veering hard into the rattling lockers, sending a rolling garbage can careering into the wall.

Two sets of parents shouting at each other, something about a fender bender in the parking lot, and one of the fathers inexplicably crying, humiliating tears of frustration he tried to hide behind his shirtsleeve.

At the gym’s double doors, the fleecy-haired student-council president stood as sentry, a name tag slapped across his navy blazer: PATRICK.

“I don’t have any information. But don’t worry,” the boy said, his voice cracking, to the mother speaking fervently to him, her glasses crooked and fogged. “They’re gonna explain everything.”

He couldn’t remember ever seeing the gym so full.

Principal Crowder himself, shirtsleeves rolled up like a junior senator, was directing a letter-jacketed student-council type in how to push open the high windows with the extension pole.

If it hadn’t been so hot already, the air outside so preternaturally mild and the school holding all the furnaced breath of months of winter, then maybe the two hundred or more parents packed so tightly would not have radiated so much heat.

The air thick with it, the high windows wisped with condensation, Tom walked through, pushing past the straining masses, the gym starting to feel like some kind of torpid hothouse or sweatshop, the creaking hold of an ancient ship.

And they were all there.

A This Is Your Life of parents, current, recent, long past (what was Constance Keith doing there, both her rambunctious, teeth-flashing, hell’s-yeah daughters and her Adderall-dealing son long gone to state schools, possibly state prison?).

There were the earnest parents, notepads and pens out, clasping copies of news articles printed from the Internet in their shaking hands.

And there were the ones wearing vaguely stunned expressions, the same ones who could never quite believe their children were failing chemistry, had scorched their lab partners’ hair while swinging burners like flamethrowers, had referred to other classmates as “pass-around pussies.”

And there were the ones, fewer than usual, with their eyes fixed on their phones, just like during Back to School Night, concerts, graduations, their faces veiled now so you couldn’t be sure if they were merely biding their time, reviewing the news reports, poised to pounce on the school officials, or if their thoughts were elsewhere (on work, on Scrabble, the Tetris slink).

Standing room only, like a rock concert, and Tom tried to avoid them all, finding a corner by the boys’ locker-room doors, against the vaguely damp wall mats smelling strongly of mildew, spit, boys.

Through the aluminum crossbars, fifteen feet away, he could see Lara Bishop in her own hideout, chewing gum with the vigor of a former smoker.

He worked a long time to catch her eye, but finally she nodded back, a half smile filled with knowingness. Sometimes she reminded him of one of those world-weary actresses in old movies, the ones who looked knocked around but instead of making them harder, it seemed to make them more generous-spirited.

“You’re hiding too,” a voice beside him said.

It was the French teacher, Kit, walking toward him, sliding off a tiny leather jacket, tomato red, like her Vespa.

Where did this woman come from? he wondered. And where had she been when he was single? Then he remembered he was single.

A sudden screech from the mike system made her wince, smiling, her shoulders pushing together in a way that reminded him, unnervingly, of Gabby, Lise, Deenie.

“If I can have your attention…”

Principal Crowder began, papers rolled in his hand, pen behind his ear. A cartoonist’s drawing of an important person. First, he introduced the murderers’ row of officials standing at his side. Sue Brennan, next to the superintendent in his usual taupe suit, then a silver-haired woman introduced as the hospital’s “chief information officer,” flanked by an unidentified man in a three-piece suit, fingers tight around his cell phone.

And poor Mark Tierney, the PTA chair and a pediatrician, his face crimped and flushed, like a man caught in the middle of a rope pull.

“Thank you for coming tonight,” the superintendent began. “Concerned parents are involved parents, and involved parents make our district strong. The safety and well-being of our students is our utmost priority. We are working closely with the affected students, their parents, and health officials to gather all the facts. We ask the community to respect the privacy of the families involved as we progress and that any questions you may have be addressed to Principal Crowder directly.”

It was a marvelous string of sentences containing no information at all.

All eyes turned over to Crowder, who momentarily flashed his toothy grin, as if forgetting the occasion.

“Thank you all for coming. While privacy laws prevent us from getting into specifics, we want to be clear that all girls have received or are receiving appropriate medical attention. The headline here is that there’s no evidence—and Mrs. Tomlinson from the hospital can back me up here—suggesting we are dealing with a contagious threat of any kind.”

The silver-haired hospital woman stiffened visibly, locking eyes with Crowder. It was like watching a couple of battery men at a ball game, still working out their signals. Crowder caught her signal, only a little late.

“But the investigation is ongoing,” Crowder said, eyes dropping down to a folded sheet of paper in his hands. “Essentially, what we’re trying to do here is walk the cat backward. The district and health officials are working together, trying to determine any commonalities the girls share that might explain their conditions.”

“Here’s a commonality,” someone shouted from the throng. “They all attend this school.”

There it was. It hadn’t taken long, but it almost felt like a relief to get it over with, to have someone start.

Tom could feel the pressure in the gym release momentarily around him and, in seconds, build up again, random parents straining to move forward, others waving for the student with the microphone. The buzz of two dozen or more conversations vibrating louder.

Crowder cleared this throat. “I was getting to that. The department of health is preparing to conduct a full review of the premises, and the deputy commissioner can tell you about that now. I know she’s happy to answer any questions.”

Sue Brennan stepped forward to the mike stand, teetering ever so slightly on her heels.

Tom focused closely on her, this woman who had spoken so inscrutably, so evasively, it seemed to him now, about his daughter.

“After Ms. Bishop’s incident, our staff reached out to officials at the state department of health, including the environmental health and communicable diseases divisions. They’re helping us review all available medical tests and sharing epidemiologic, clinical, and environmental data. Several of you have asked about autoimmune conditions, like PANDAS, but none of the girls have recently had strep. We’ve ruled out many standard infections—E. coli, staph. Also neurological infections—encephalitis, meningitis, late-stage syphilis.”

You could feel the frenzy in the gym ramp up more and more with each word. Listing all these possibilities, even to dismiss them, seemed like a bad idea. The word syphilis felt like a fever in Tom’s own brain.

“But it’s important to note,” she continued, “infections don’t discriminate. If this were an infection, we’d see more people affected and not just young girls. But the process is ongoing. The main thing we need is your patience.”

“Why would we trust you now?” a voice bellowed from within the body of the twitching crowd. “Any of you? You’re the ones who pushed your poison down these girls’ throats.”

Tom moved forward a few steps, closer to Kit now, and saw it was Dave Hurwich, a tankard of coffee in his hand, a sheaf of curling papers under his arm.

“Lined them up like concentration-camp victims,” he added, rising to his feet as the student-council rep with the portable microphone ran toward him.

“Sir,” Sue Brennan began, “if you are referring to the HPV vaccine—”

“Principal Crowder, why did you give it to them?” a woman up front called out, voice shaking. “I’m not against shots, but this isn’t like the measles. My daughters can’t catch HPV in school. Why did you make it mandatory, given all the risks?”

“Mrs. Dunn,” Crowder said, stepping forward quickly, “the vaccine was not mandatory. But HPV is a virus. No, you can’t catch it from a doorknob, but—”

“Are you going to allow sex in the halls next?” someone shouted. “Because that’s the only way they could catch it at school.”

Dripping with sweat now, the mounting anxiety in the gym crackling loudly in Tom’s ears, Tom shifted a few feet, hoping for more space, more room to breathe.

It was an odd thing, to disagree with everything everyone was saying but at the same time share the dread behind it.

“When are you going to admit we’re likely dealing with a hot-lot situation here?” It was Dave Hurwich again, shouting and waving papers in his hand. “You’ve been playing Russian roulette with our daughters!”

“Sir, if you’re referring to rumors that there may have been a bad batch of the HPV vaccine, that’s highly unlikely,” Sue Brennan replied, her voice just starting to break as she tried to be heard. “Vaccine lots contain thousands of doses. If that were the problem, we’d be facing a citywide or even regional crisis.”

Hot lot, bad batches—this was the first Tom had heard about any of it. He felt negligent, wondered if he should at least have been reading up on all this instead of just waiting for someone to tell him what went wrong.

“I wonder what guys like Dave Hurwich did before the Internet,” Kit whispered, rubbing the back of her neck, the peacock-feather tattoo flaring. “Don’t you sometimes wish you could have a school without parents?”

Tom looked at her and she seemed to catch herself, her eyebrows lifting in mild alarm. “I mean parents like that,” she added, nodding toward the rising noise up front.

“Why are we even talking about the vaccine?” a woman up front shouted. “We know the Court girl didn’t get it. That’s all been a costly distraction.”

There was a low roar of approval from all corners of the gym.

“That’s true,” Sue Brennan began, her voice nearly drowned out by the noise. “Kimberly Court did not receive the vaccine. Due to a yeast allergy, she—”

“The Court girl’s the one speaking the truth here,” the same woman interrupted. “Didn’t you hear her video?”

“Are you a reporter?” a male voice barked from somewhere. “I’ve never seen you before!”

The woman stood now, and Tom recognized her: Mary Lu, Bailey’s mother. A member of the Dryden Land Trust, of Energy Watch, of Safe Dryden. Tom had signed dozens of her petitions, had once even let her sucker him into a phone bank about pesticide drift.

“My daughter attends this school,” Mary Lu was shouting at the man, voice breaking. “And I have as much right as you to—”

Dozens of voices reared up across the gym, shouts and yeas and boos.

“Can we please keep some kind of order here, please?” Crowder was saying, another screech from the sound system as he tried to drag the microphone stand to himself.

A few yards away from Tom, Carl Brophy, the physics teacher, waved his hand vigorously until the student-council kid found him with the microphone.

“Excuse me,” he said. “What about the obvious explanation? That this isn’t something coming from outside but from inside these girls’ heads?”

“Hear, hear,” a tired-looking man in front agreed loudly but somehow wearily from his seat. “As a doctor, I’m pretty skeptical of any epidemiological event that affects only girls—”

A billow of hisses, claps, and shouts swept through the gym.

Tom glanced over Kit’s shoulder but could no longer see Lara Bishop.

“It only affects girls because they were the ones shot up with poison,” Dave Hurwich said, face surging with blood.

“—and from what I’ve heard, the affected girls have troubled home lives,” the doctor continued. “Girls without fathers in their lives, broken homes. Emotional issues.”

A great ribbon of noise seemed to unfurl across the gym, and in the row closest to Tom, a woman leaped to her feet.

“What does that have to do with my Tricia?” she said, nearly bounding forward, looking like she wanted to shake the doctor, any of them, by the lapels. “Until yesterday, she was always a happy, normal girl!”

“Mrs. Lawson—” Principal Crowder tried, stepping toward her.

“Ma’am,” the doctor said, “I don’t know your daughter, but do you?”

More shouts and jeers.

“How does a divorce or whatever explain why her head turned to one side so far I thought it might spin,” Mrs. Lawson cried out, her voice splintering. “She said it felt like her skin was burning off. I wanted to call a priest.”

She snatched the microphone from the white-faced student-council rep and turned to the audience.

“Tricia hasn’t had any trauma,” she announced, seemingly to everyone, the microphone piercing with feedback. “She’s a varsity athlete. She’s a beautiful girl. She never did anything wrong.”

“Jaymie was just happy, going along,” Dave Hurwich said, rising beside her, voice breaking, touching the woman’s shoulder gently. “She was as happy as can be.”

At just that moment, there was a loud snap from one of the high windows: its rusty prop rod had slipped loose.

Suddenly, a spray of rainwater shot forth and landed, sizzling, on the audio speakers, which fizzled and crackled.

“Be careful!” Tom called out as several sparks flew, a group of parents jumping back.

The room burst into a new level of noise and confusion, the speakers popping and squealing, a sense of cascading panic.

The superintendent hijacked the portable microphone from the student-council boy himself.

“Everyone stand away from the equipment,” he said. “Can we all just try to stay on point here?”

“But you’re not listening!” shouted Mary Lu. “This school district spends a king’s ransom on refrigerating a goddamn ice rink, but when it comes to protecting our—”

“Mrs. Lu, we’ve received your e-mails and—”

“You keep talking about what might be in the girls,” she said, stepping forward, sneakers squeaking on the wet wood. “What about what’s in the school. In the walls. Under the floors.”

Tom looked down at his feet, at the splintery shellacked floor. It didn’t seem any more likely a cause than the vaccine, or at least not much more, but even he could feel the hysteria. All the things Georgia used to say. About this town, this rotting place.

“The school passed all prior air- and water-quality inspections,” Sue Brennan said, her face looking slicker now under the lights.

“Isn’t it true that the school is heated by those natural-gas wells just a few hundred feet away?” Mary said, shouting even louder now, voice gaining confidence. “And that some of those tanks have leaked onto the football field? Some trees died. You walk through it and your ankles are covered with black powder. Wasn’t the school told to dig up the affected soil?”

The stir was loud and immediate, the floorboards seeming to thrum, the gathered sense of gathering something.

“That powder is just common grass smut,” called out Crowder, but without the microphone he could barely be heard, except for the word smut. “We sprayed—”

“It’s important to note,” Sue Brennan interrupted, talking over him rapidly, “just like infections, environmental causes do not discriminate. If the cause were environmental, we would see a wide range of people affected, not just these few girls.”

The cavernous space seemed to explode with diffuse panic: hollers and howls, countless arms raised above heads, fingers pointing like lightning bolts.

Up front, Julie Drew’s mother was keeling as if about to swoon from the heat and terror.

“Get her some water!” someone called out, inciting a new spasm of shoving bodies and tumult.

More and more, Tom sensed that if he stayed a moment longer, he would start to feel it too. Feel this sense that nothing could protect his daughter from anything because everything was out to doom her. To annihilate her.

Looking over Kit’s shiny head, he searched once more for Lara Bishop. She was definitely gone.

In her place, a pair of oblivious students were making out with long, ravenous stretches of tongue, as if none of these dangers could ever befall them. The cluelessness he wished for all of them, amid this.

Looking past them, through the crossbars of the bleachers, he saw a woman with a long dark braid who looked familiar.

It took a moment, but as she turned to talk to the man next to her, something in the stiffness and purpose of the way her body moved triggered his memory.

The woman in the parka. The one in the classroom questioning Deenie.

She wasn’t wearing the parka anymore, just a dark raincoat.

And the man she was talking to was a uniformed cop.

“Isn’t it enough that our lake is forever polluted by who knows what sins of the past?” Mary Lu was shouting, her voice strong and searing.

But everything else fell away for Tom. Because it seemed suddenly, palpably clear that his daughter had been talking to the police that afternoon and didn’t know it.

The woman and the cop started walking swiftly toward the back exit.

Placing his hand on Kit’s shoulder—her body jumping from it—he moved past her and walked quickly toward the pair, disappearing behind the heavy exit doors.

“Hey,” Tom called out. “Hey, stop!”

There was a thud from the school’s east breezeway, something hitting the glass.

A light arced across the floor.

Eli walked slowly toward it, the same spot he and Brooke had stood a few hours ago.

That’s where, she’d said, pointing to the bushes. Right there.

Outside, there was a blur of movement, the strobing of flashlights.

From the dim corridor, just before the breach into the breezeway, he peered through the glass.

Three figures in dark jackets, caps. Light blue plastic gloves like at the hospital.

One of them was lifting something off the ground with a stick. A bit of pink fabric, spattered with mud.

Another was holding a shovel, its tip grass-stained.

A camera flashed and Eli jumped back, as if they were looking for him.

And that made him think of something.

He couldn’t be sure if he’d have thought of it sooner if he hadn’t smoked with Skye, or if he wouldn’t have thought of it all.

Walking briskly now, he returned to the trophy case. The banquet picture.

The shaggy-haired kid next to him.

“You two are sporting quite the hockey flows,” the photographer had said to them both. “You think you’re Guy Lafleur or something?”

The forward from Star-of-the-Sea, Sean.

The one who worked with Deenie.

Sean. Sean Lurie.

The night air like a wet hand over his mouth, Tom pushed through the doors, caught sight of the woman and the uniformed cop walking purposefully ahead of him, across the parking lot.

Running now, the fierceness in his chest nearly took his breath away, reminded him of when the kids were little, those moments you’d realize how vulnerable they were. A decade ago, that visit to DC, he’d made Deenie hold his hand everywhere, made her walk on the inside of the sidewalk, her rampart against chaos, against pain.

“Stop!” he called out again, chest clutching.

Both of them swiveled around.

“What were you talking to my daughter about?” He panted, hand to chest.

“Excuse me,” the woman said, blinking.

“My daughter, today. You locked her in a room.” His voice sounded rough and unfamiliar to him.

She squinted, then appeared to recognize him. “Mr. Nash,” she said, “I tried to tell you this afternoon, those were standard questions. The room was not locked.”

The officer next to her stepped forward slightly, his hands at his waist.

“You didn’t say you were a cop,” Tom said. “That’s what you are, isn’t it?”

“Detective Kurtz,” she said. “And all we were doing was gathering information.”

“What do you have to do with any of this?” Tom said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Sir, can you keep your voice down?” she said, but all he could see was the woman, the flat line of her mouth, and the way everything felt wet and close and she was not giving him anything.

“We’re here to help you,” she said, “all of you.”

“How does interrogating my daughter help anybody?” He couldn’t stop his voice from sounding loud, ragged. The way they were looking at him, standing so still it made him feel like he was lurching.

“We were not interrogating your daughter, Mr. Nash,” she said. “Do you have a reason to believe we might be?”

“You know something,” Tom insisted, not answering the question. “Why aren’t you telling us what you kn—”

“Now I remember,” the uniformed cop interrupted. “How are you, Mr. Nash?”

Tom pivoted. “What? Do I know you?”

Both of them so infuriatingly calm, their hands at their waists, their feet planted, watching him.

“I was there that time your wife called us,” the cop said. “That fistfight between you and that fellow in the parking lot of her office building.”

The back doors to the school now rattling open and shut, Tom felt the push of people exiting, gusts of heat and wet insulation and rage, and his chest corded tight.

“Hope things are easier now,” the cop added.

Tom stared at him, his glistening rain-cap cover and fogged glasses.

“That was a long time ago,” Tom said, breathing carefully, “and that wasn’t how it happened.”

It wasn’t a fistfight, or any kind of fight. There’d been some shoving, like you might see at a ball game, a barbecue, or a bar after one too many beers.

He couldn’t believe the officer remembered.

Georgia, he never understood why she’d gotten so upset, that look on her face and crying. They hadn’t even put cuffs on him.

And he hadn’t known until now that she was the one who’d called the police.

“Mr. Nash,” the detective said. “You should go home now, be with your daughter.”

Later, he would try to understand what happened next, what tore through him, the words seeming to come from some hidden well inside him, bottomless and newly ruptured.

“Do you have a daughter? Did either of you ever have a daughter?” he said, his voice shredding. “Because if you did, you’d know why I have to ask you these questions, why I had to chase you out here, why I have to not care what you or anyone thinks. I have to do something, don’t I?”

Moving closer and closer to her.

“I have to do it, raise her, protect her. And no one ever tells you what it means. To hurl your kid out into this world. And no one ever warns you about the real dangers. Not dangers like this.”

His hand, his pointing finger, a hard jab, perilously close to the woman’s chest before he stopped himself, the officer stepping forward fast.

Moving back, hands in the air, and saying, “Did you ever look out in that dark and fucked-up world out there and think, How do I let my daughter out into that? And how do I stop her? And the things you can’t stop because you’re…because—”

“Mr. Nash,” the detective started, voice firm, arm out, but Tom could barely hear her, people everywhere now, noise and confusion, and the car lights coming up, “don’t make us—”

But both their radios began clicking then and the uniformed cop whispered something in her ear.

From the edge of the parking lot, from the tall hedges that crept along the breezeway, another officer emerged and headed toward them carrying a plastic bag in either gloved hand, his face wet and forearms streaked green.

“Mr. Nash,” the detective said, moving to block his view, turning her eyes hard on the officers, “Mr. Nash, you need to leave…”

Her eyes suddenly avid, anxious, desperate.