One Cold Night

days.
    “Yello?” he said, gauzy behind his screen door.
    Dave had expected Officer Braithwaite to speak first, since this was his jurisdiction, but he just stood there.
    “Detective Dave Strauss.” He showed his gold shield. “Are you John Childress?”
    The old man nodded. He opened the door, stepped onto the porch and keenly eyed Dave’s identification. Clearly Braithwaite didn’t feel it necessary to produce his own, since he was in the uniform of the local police.
    “Not from around here.” Childress’s voice was gruff but not unwelcoming.
    “New York City,” Dave said. “Brooklyn.”
    Half of Childress’s mouth crooked up and froze in place. “Well, well, well. What can I do ye fer?”
    Dave wasn’t sure if the hick locution, the ye fer, was genuine or for the city slicker’s amusement. He decided to ignore it. “We’re looking for a girl,” he began, “who was abducted from Brooklyn last night.”
    The ridicule dropped off Childress’s face. He began to listen carefully as Dave explained what was necessary to convince him they needed earnest answers, and quickly.
    “Haven’t seen a girl.” Childress rubbed his whiskered cheek; Dave noticed a cluster of blackish lumps on his skin beneath the growth. “The Stutley house, you say?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Don’t know the current tenant. Last ones were all right, used to come by for apples regular. Told them to take what they wanted, didn’t care if they paid.”
    He was chatting now; lonely. Dave forced patience upon himself, knowing that often it was during the idlest parts of conversation that something essential flared out.
    “My wife, she loved chocolates, all kinds. Eight years ago, before she passed, I would have told you” — he snapped his fingers — “‘talk to Althea! She spends my money like there’s no tomorrow.’ Chocolate apples.” He shook his head wistfully, and Dave knew this man spent his days in yearning for a long-departed wife.
    “So I guess you yourself didn’t order any chocolate apples from New York,” Dave said. “I guess that’s not something you would do.”
    Childress smiled. A front tooth was broken off at a jagged angle. “No, sir, that’s not something I would do.”
    “What about one of your workers?”
    “Let ’em all go a few years back. Couldn’t afford’em; didn’t need ’em. This place has been paid off a generation, my kids are gone, no one wants the place anymore, and me...” He didn’t finish the sentence.
    Dave nodded and looked at Braithwaite, whose eyes were fixed on Childress. What was he seeing? Thinking? Why wouldn’t he speak?
    “We’d like to take a look around the orchards, Mr. Childress,” Dave said. “And also the house, if you don’t mind.”
    Childress didn’t pause to consider it; he just swung open the screen door and stepped aside to let them in.
    Dave went in and Braithwaite followed. Childress let the screen door bang shut behind them. The living room was worse than the Stutley house, where old furniture had soaked in years of dust; that was mere neglect. Childress had embalmed the place with plastic wrap, evidently seeking to stop time. Every stick of furniture and every surface was clumsily swathed to preserve Althea’s arrangements of doilies and knick-knacks. The book she had presumably been in the middle of reading sat on a side table, bookmark posted between the pages; Dave couldn’t see the title beneath the thick skin of dust that had settled over the plastic. The only things not covered were the pictures that hung on the walls: a painting of a barn and scattered chickens, with a woman bent over a butter churn; a wizened photograph of Childress Farms a century ago; and a family portrait taken against the kind of blue-sky background used by most department store photographers. In the picture, John Childress had short brown hair, tan skin and looked about forty; his plump wife had dyed-black hair in a shag haircut and a cheerful smile; and with them were two boys, both blond and toothy with moss-green eyes and forcedsmiles. On the bigger one’s right cheekbone was a bright red slash that looked as if it had been recently stitched.
    Dave stared at the image of the blond-haired boy with the bright scar beneath one eye.
    “Yep,” Childress said, following Dave’s gaze, “Theo was a wild one. Got that scar riding his bike full-tilt down a dirt hill. Fell flat on his face. He was a thrill seeker, that kid. Nearly wore my strap out on