The Padlocked Box Behind The Foreclosed House

“Who did it, Josie? Who put the lock on?”

She looked at me for a long time in the dark.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But Daddy said if Rooster wasn’t gone by Friday, he’d take care of it.”

There it was again. Wade’s own words, now in his daughter’s mouth.

I wanted it to be him. It would have been simple.

But I had seen his face at the car wash.

I called Tara Harlan. She met us at the clinic in her nursing home scrubs, and when Josie saw Rooster lift his head off the kennel floor, she climbed straight in there with him, and he licked her face from her chin to her hair, and Tara stood in the doorway with both hands over her mouth.

“Wade didn’t do this,” Tara said to me quietly, while we watched them. “I know what this town is saying. He punches walls when he’s mad. He doesn’t hurt things that can’t hurt him back.” She wiped her eyes. “He cried when we left that dog behind. Till you walked up to him this morning, he thought Rooster had been dead for two weeks. He hasn’t known how to tell Josie any of it.”

I did not answer. I did not know what to believe.

That was when Tara’s mother-in-law came in to drive them home.

Lois Harlan was seventy-one, and everybody in Halbrook knew her. She ran the funeral lunches at First Methodist and had sat with half the widows in the county. She was small and straight-backed, with white hair set every Friday and a tan Buick she had driven since the Clinton administration.

She would not come past the front desk. She stood by the door with her purse held in front of her in both hands and said, “Josie, it’s late.”

Josie came out, rubbing her eyes. And Lois, without a word, opened her purse and took out a piece of candy and unwrapped it and handed it to her granddaughter. She folded the little wrapper and put it in her pocket.

It was a butterscotch. In gold cellophane.

I stood there with my hands in my pockets and felt my whole spine go cold.

Then Lois reached in her purse again for her car keys, and her key ring caught on something and the whole thing came out and fell on the linoleum. I bent down to pick it up for her. Old brass keys, house and church and car. And one small silver key, bright and new, still a little sharp along the edges the way new keys are.

It had a brand name stamped into it. The same brand stamped into the padlock that was sitting in an evidence bag in Cal Brewer’s cruiser.

Lois took the ring out of my hand and looked at me, and I saw it land in her face that I knew. Then she turned, and took her granddaughter’s hand, and walked out to that tan Buick without a word.

I thought of the two wrappers lying by the white chairs.

I thought of Bev Sutton’s curtain falling.

The next morning I went to Bev’s door and did not leave it until she let me in.

She sat at her kitchen table under the window that looks straight out at that freezer, and she told me.