Praying for Sleep

kitchen,” Owen said, exhaustion and discouragement thick in his voice. “But you can take your time.”
    “How’s that?”
    “I said there’s no rush. The only place she’s going tonight is the morgue.”

3/
    The Spirits of the Dead

19
    “Who is it? Not Mary Haddon? Jesus, not their daughter ?”
    “No, that’s not her.”
    “That’s not Mary?”
    “ Look at her, for God’s sake! It’s not Mary.”
    But nobody wanted to look. They’d look at the wall calendar, the Post-it notes, the shattered teacup, the scraps of paper clinging to the avocado-colored refrigerator door under fruit-shaped magnets. They’d look everywhere but at the terrible creature tied with bell wire to the maple captain’s chair. The senior medic walked carefully into the room, minding the huge slick of blood on the tile floor. He bent down and studied the intricately tied knots. Her head, loosened by the deep cut to her throat, lolled backwards, and her blouse was pulled open. The awkward letters cut into her skin were stark against her blue-white chest.
    “Fucking mess,” one of the young cops said.
    “Hey, let’s don’t have any of that talk here,” a plainclothes detective said. “Check out the house. All the bedrooms.”
    “I think Joe and Mary’re over at the church. The charity auction’s tomorrow and he’s chairman. I heard they’re working late. Oh, I hope their daughter’s with them. Man, I hope that.”
    “Well, call ’em up or get a car over there. Let’s get on with this.”
    One cop entered and looked at the corpse. “Lord, that’s Mattie! Mattie Selwyn. She’s the Haddons’ housekeeper. I know her brother.”
    The nervous banter continued. “Oh, this is a bad thing. What’s that in her lap, that little white thing? . . . Jesus, some kind of skull or something. A badger?”
    “Why tonight?” a deputy lamented. “Storm’ll be here any time. Already had a twister in Morristown. Couple people died. You hear? Man—”
    Owen stood in the doorway and looked again at the carnage. He shook his head.
    “You the one who called us, sir?” the detective asked, running his hand through his salt-and-pepper hair.
    Owen nodded and wiped sweat from his face. After calling 911 he’d glanced into a window and seen on his face the mud smeared on his cheekbones and forehead to mask the glossiness of his skin. He had washed his face before the police arrived. Still, his handkerchief now came away from his forehead dirty and he supposed he looked a mess. He explained about Hrubek’s escape, the bicycle, following him here. The detective said, “Yessir, we had a notice about that runaway. But we thought he was heading east.”
    “I told them he wasn’t,” Owen said heatedly. “I told them he’d turn west. They wouldn’t listen. Nobody took this thing seriously from the start. And now look. . . .”
    “We also heard he was harmless,” the detective said bitterly, staring at the body. Then he glanced at Owen. “What’s your role in this exactly?”
    He told them that he’d come out to see what the state police were doing to capture the escapee, who appeared to have a grudge against his wife. As he spoke he realized that the story was outlandish and he was neither surprised nor offended when the officer asked, “Could I see some ID, please?”
    Owen handed over his driver’s license and his attorney’s registration card.
    “You don’t mind if we confirm this?”
    “Not at all.”
    The detective picked up the phone and called his office. A moment later he nodded and hung up. He walked back to Owen and returned the ID. “Are you armed, sir?”
    “Yes.”
    “I assume you have a firearm permit, Mr. Atcheson?”
    “I do, yes. And four years of combat experience.” He said this because the detective was about his age and had a serenity in the face of butchery like this that comes from only one thing—surviving firefights. The detective squinted a bit of reluctant camaraderie into his face.
    One cop stuck his head into the foyer and, his wide eyes on the dead woman, said to the detective, “Found something, Bob. We got motorcycle tracks. They look fresh.”
    The detective asked Owen, “Yours?”
    “No.”
    The cop continued, “Only, the helmet’s still on the ground. It seemed—”
    The policeman who’d identified the housekeeper called from the living room, “That helmet? Was hers, Mattie’s. She drove a Honda. Yellow one, I think.”
    The detective called, “Where do the tracks