He looked away from the bottle before the glance could become anything that might be called a movement toward the house. Even so, Donnelly caught it. He demanded to know what Derek was looking at. Derek told him the truth at once and in full, because any delay would have given the truth a guilty shape. He said it was his water bottle, that his mouth was dry from working, and that he was not going to reach for anything or move toward anything unless he was told to. He stayed perfectly still while he said it, hands raised from his kneeling position, and let them decide what to do with a fact as small and human as thirst.
Vance moved then. It was not much, a step along the driveway and a hand half raised toward his partner, but it changed the geometry of the standoff by a degree. He said, in a voice meant mostly for Donnelly, that the man had been cooperative and that maybe they could let him sit instead of kneel while they sorted out the address. Donnelly did not turn around. He said the man would stay exactly where he was until they knew whose house this was. The words whose house hung in the air between them. Derek felt them more sharply than he had felt the shouting. He had a deed upstairs and a name on file at the county and three weeks of mail in the kitchen, and in the yard he had nothing at all but the clothes he stood in, which were not even clothes a person would choose to be believed in.
He tried once more, differently. He asked if either officer had seen the welcome notice that the homeowners association had sent around at the start of the month. He did not know the exact date himself, because he had skimmed it standing at his mailbox, but he remembered the photograph of the house that had been attached and the short paragraph about a new resident on the street. He remembered thinking it was a kind thing, a small-town kind of thing, and feeling cautiously optimistic about Cedar Bluff because of it. Saying it now, he could hear how thin it sounded. He was citing an email he could not produce to men who had not read it, about a house he could not enter, and each layer of it made the next sound weaker. Vance frowned at the mention, as if he might be trying to recall something, but Donnelly dismissed it without a pause.
Donnelly got on the radio again and asked for a check on the address and for any name attached to it, and Derek felt a brief, irrational hope that the radio would simply say his name back and finish this. But the reply, when it came, was broken up by static and by a passing truck, and whatever it contained did not change Donnelly's expression in any direction Derek could use. The officer looked at the house, then at Derek, then at the pry bar glinting by the door, and the suspicion in his face renewed itself on the same evidence as before, arranged the same way, yielding the same conclusion. Nobody believed him. The water bottle went on sweating quietly on his porch step, untouched, while Derek knelt on his own lawn and waited to be allowed to prove he belonged there.
Chapter 9: The Deed in the Drawer
The proof existed. That was the hardest part, harder even than the kneeling, and Derek Malone found his mind returning to it the way a tongue returns to a sore tooth. The deed to 412 Willow Creek Lane, with his full name printed on it in the formal lettering the county used, sat in the top drawer of the desk in the small upstairs room he had meant to make into an office. Beside it, in the same drawer, lay the closing papers in a thick folder, the cashier's receipt for a purchase made outright and in full, and the insurance documents with the address repeated on every page. Three weeks ago a woman at a title office had slid those papers across a polished table toward him and smiled the smile reserved for people who had finished something difficult. He had carried them home in the folder under his arm like a man carrying good news. Now they were perhaps forty feet from where he knelt, through a front door that stood ajar behind him, up a staircase he could climb in the dark, and they might as well have been in another state for all the use they were to him.
He tried to tell them about the drawer. He described it carefully, perhaps too carefully, because in his effort to sound helpful he heard himself begin to sound like a man inventing detail. The desk by the window. The top drawer on the left. The folder with the blue cover. The key to his truck on the hook by the kitchen door and the registration in the glove box with the same address on it, if they would rather start there. He offered his wallet, which was inside on the hall table, with a license that listed a previous address but a military identification that carried his photograph and his name together. Each offer he made required someone to cross into the house or to let him cross into it, and each offer died on exactly that requirement. Donnelly said no one was going inside until the situation was secured. Vance said nothing at all, which Derek understood as the same answer wearing a quieter face.
What he wanted to ask, and did not, was how a situation with a kneeling man and empty raised hands remained unsecured. He knew the shape of that question too well to risk its sound. Instead he asked whether one of the officers could go in alone, without him, and look in the drawer he had described. He said the front door was already open because he had been working on it. He said they would not need to touch anything else in the house. He said the office was the second door at the top of the stairs. As he said it he pictured a stranger's boots on his stairs, pictured the office as he had left it that morning, boxes still stacked against one wall, the desk bare except for a lamp, and he discovered that even now, even with everything the afternoon had become, some part of him disliked the thought of police in the house before he had finished making it a home. The dislike shamed him a little with its smallness, and he pushed past it and made the offer again.