The younger officer, whose nameplate read Vance, had come forward along the passenger side of the second cruiser. He held his position a few feet behind and to the side of Donnelly, and his eyes kept moving. Derek noticed that Officer Paul Vance looked at the tools on the porch more carefully than his partner had. He looked at the sandpaper, the folded rag, the neat row Derek had made without thinking. Something in his face tightened, not with certainty, but with the beginning of a question he did not ask out loud. He glanced once toward the house number beside the door and then back at Derek, and his hand, which had been hovering, settled lower.
Donnelly was giving another set of instructions now, about turning around. Derek turned slowly, the way a man turns when he is carrying something fragile, his boots whispering in the grass. The late light was behind the house now and the yard lay in a flat, even shade. He could see his own shadow stretched toward the street, arms raised, larger than life against the lawn. From across the road he felt more than saw the attention gathering. He did not turn his head to find it. A complete turn brought him back to face them again, and he stopped exactly where he had been told, though no one had told him in words to stop there. The moment needed an end and he gave it one.
He said, as evenly as he could, that he was calm. He said he would do whatever they needed him to do, in the order they needed it done, if they would tell him one instruction at a time. Donnelly answered that he would be the one deciding how this went. The sentence had the practised ring of something said often. Derek nodded once, a small movement he kept to his chin alone. He understood that nodding could be read as agreement with more than he meant, and not nodding could be read as worse, and he chose the smaller risk.
Vance spoke then for the first time, more quietly, asking Donnelly something Derek could not quite hear because a car passed slowly at the end of the block, its driver staring. Whatever Vance said, Donnelly shook his head without looking at him. The partnership between them had a shape Derek could read from the outside. One man had already settled the story in his mind and was working to make the scene match it. The other man was still looking at the scene. That difference was the only opening Derek had, and it was not an opening he could use himself. He could only remain consistent enough, long enough, that the second man's questions stayed alive.
Behind him, the front door he had worked on all afternoon stood slightly ajar, because he had been testing its swing when the sirens came. A thin line of interior shadow showed at its edge. It struck him as a cruel detail, that open inch. To anyone committed to the call that had brought them here, a door standing open behind a stranger was evidence. To Derek it was simply a job interrupted, the house breathing out cool air he had paid to cool, a hallway he had painted nothing in yet and had plans for. He wanted to say so. The urge rose and he set it aside, because Donnelly was speaking again and because timing, he had learned, could matter as much as truth.
He kept his hands up. He kept his breathing even. He let the sweat run down the side of his face without wiping it, and when Donnelly ordered him down onto his knees on the grass, he went down slowly, first one knee and then the other, the bad one protesting as it folded, and he hid the wince by looking at the ground for exactly as long as the movement required and no longer. Then he raised his eyes again and waited.
Chapter 8: The Water Bottle
From his knees, the yard looked different. The grass Derek Malone had cut on Thursday pressed damp through the thin fabric of his sweatpants, and the smell of it rose up green and ordinary around him. Donnelly stood over the distance between them giving orders that had nowhere left to go, because Derek had already done everything that had been asked of him, one instruction at a time, exactly as it was given. His hands were up. He was away from the house. He was on the ground. The scene had arrived at a shape it could not improve on by shouting, and yet the shouting continued for a while longer, as if the volume were holding everything in place.
When it finally eased, Derek spoke into the gap it left. He kept his sentences short, because long sentences could trail into pleading and he was not pleading. He said his name. He said it again more slowly, Derek Malone, and then he said that he lived here, at 412 Willow Creek Lane, that he had bought this house three weeks ago and that he had been repairing the front door because it stuck in the humidity. He said it the way a man might give directions, plainly, with the landmarks in order. The street. The number beside the door. The work on the porch behind him. He watched Donnelly's face while he said it and saw the words land and make no impression at all, like rain on a windshield at speed.
His throat was dry enough now that the last word had scraped. Without thinking, the way a body asks before the mind approves the asking, he glanced toward the porch step where his water bottle stood. It was a plain clear bottle with a blue cap, the plastic beaded with condensation, a ring of wetness darkening the wood beneath it. He had been drinking from it all afternoon between passes with the sandpaper. It sat beside the folded rag, in the row of his things, and it belonged to the true version of this day so completely that for a moment it seemed to him like evidence better than words. A man breaking into a house did not set his water down neatly on the step and go back to it through the hours. A man at home did.