Donnelly refused in the manner of a man refusing a trick he had spotted early. He said people who did not belong in houses always knew something about what was inside them, that talking a good game about drawers and folders proved nothing except that Derek had looked around before they arrived. The logic of it was sealed against him from every direction. Knowing the house proved he had studied it. Not knowing it would have proved he was lying about living there. Silence would have been stubborn and speech was suspicious, and there was no third thing he could offer that the afternoon had not already spoiled. He recognized the sealed quality from somewhere deep in his experience, the feeling of a room where the conclusion had entered before he had. The recognition did not make him angry. It made him tired in a way that went past his shoulders and his knee.
Vance had shifted his weight twice during the last exchange, and now he did something Derek was quietly grateful for, which was to repeat part of the offer aloud, as if testing how it sounded when another man said it. He said the man was offering to stay outside while one of them checked. Donnelly answered without looking at either of them that he was not sending his officer into an unsecured house on the say-so of a suspect. The word suspect settled over the yard. It had probably been used on the radio already. It had a different weight spoken in the open, in earshot of the street, where anyone behind a curtain could take it home with them as the official version of the day. Derek Malone, who had worn his country's uniform for twelve years and then served it in other capacities for five more, who kept a Silver Star in a locked box upstairs that he almost never opened and had mentioned to no one on this street, was a suspect on his own grass because a deed in a drawer could not speak for itself.
He asked, finally, whether he could make a phone call. He asked it without urgency, as a man might ask about the time, because he had been calculating the request for several minutes and had decided that calm was its only chance. He said there were people who could confirm who he was in under a minute if he were allowed to reach them. Donnelly looked at him for a long moment over the light-spattered yard, and Derek held the look and kept his hands raised and his face empty of everything but patience, and he waited to learn whether a telephone would be permitted to do what a deed in a drawer could not.
Chapter 10: The Crowd
They came out the way people come out on a street like Willow Creek Lane, gradually and then all at once, in the manner of neighbors who could tell themselves they were only stepping onto a porch. First it was doors opening along both sides of the block, then figures at the edges of lawns, then a loose line forming along the sidewalk opposite Derek Malone's house, where the shade was better and the view was unobstructed. No one crossed the road toward the cruisers. The road itself had become a kind of boundary that everyone understood without discussing, with the police and Derek on one side of it and Cedar Bluff in its slippers and Saturday clothes on the other, watching.
He caught sight of Barbara Nielsen at the edge of her own front yard across the street, standing a little apart from the others with her arms folded. She was not on her porch. She had come down several steps toward the road and stopped, as if the call she had made had pulled her out of the house behind it and left her in the open with its consequences. Her face was not triumphant. From the distance allowed him, Derek thought it looked set in the expression of someone who had committed to a judgment and now had to stand beside it while it played out in public. She did not look away from him, and he did not look away from her, and the moment lasted only until Donnelly moved between them, checking his radio, and broke the line of sight by accident. Derek felt no need to recover it. There would be time enough, on this street, for whatever passed between neighbors after today.
It was George Park who finally crossed the boundary. He came from two houses down, on the same side as Derek's, a man in his late fifties with a graying head and the careful gait of someone aware that walking toward police is its own decision. He had a garden hose nozzle still in one hand, as though the sirens had interrupted him mid-task and he had set everything down except that. He stopped well short of the cruisers, at the corner of Derek's driveway where the patrol cars blocked the concrete, and he raised the empty hand in a gesture meant to show he was nobody's problem. He said his name out loud before anyone demanded it. George Park, he said. He lived at the yellow house. He was a neighbor.
Donnelly turned on him with the same volume he had used on Derek, scaled down only slightly for a man standing upright of his own free will. He told George to get back on the sidewalk, that this was an active scene, that he could make a statement later if he had one. George nodded at each instruction as if he were agreeing with all of them, and then, in a voice that carried because he made no effort to lower it, he made his statement anyway. He said Derek lived here. He said he had watched the moving truck three weeks ago and had helped carry a bookshelf up the front steps because the delivery men were going to leave it in the drive. He said he had taken in a package for this address last Tuesday while Derek was out, and had handed it to him that evening at the door George now pointed at, the door with the tools around it, the door Derek had spent the day sanding.
They were not, quite. Donnelly told George that he did not know what he thought he knew and that people could be fooled about who belonged where, and another voice from the sidewalk, someone Derek could not see, said something low about waiting for the facts that was taken up in murmurs around it. The crowd had begun to sort itself the way crowds do, into those who moved a step closer to George's version and those who moved a step back toward the safety of having seen nothing decided. A woman Derek did not know said she had not seen the man before today. George answered her without turning around, still facing the officers, and said she had not seen him because she had not looked, and that he had waved to half this street from that yard. There was a sound then, not laughter exactly, but the small exhale a group gives when something true and impolite has been said in public.