Thursday, 1:30 p.m.
The observation room was the size of a closet and smelled of burnt coffee and carpet glue. There was a steel desk against the wall with a monitor on it showing the room next door from a camera up in the corner, gray and a little fish-eyed, and above the desk was the window, which on the other side was a mirror. Jo had seen rooms like this on television. She hadn’t known they had a dying spider plant on the filing cabinet.
Through the glass he was sitting at a table with his mouth open.
A woman in purple gloves was holding his jaw with one hand and running a long cotton swab along the inside of his cheek with the other. She counted under her breath. He sat with his head tipped back and his mouth wide, patient as a horse, and from where Jo stood she could see all the way in: the worn molars, a gold-brown stain along the lower incisors that she’d have needed twenty minutes and a scaler to get off, and the gap on the upper left. The tech did the other cheek and slid the swab into a paper sleeve and sealed it and wrote on it.
He closed his mouth. He looked up at her.
“That’s it?” he said, through the speaker on the desk. “That’s the spit test?”
“That’s it.”
“Awesome,” he said, and the tech laughed before she could stop herself.
Treadwell was standing at Jo’s shoulder with her arms folded. She’d been there since Jo came in, and she hadn’t looked through the glass once.
“You’re next,” she said.
◆
Haskins did Jo’s in a room down the hall with a coat rack and a box of Kleenex. He put the gloves on wrong, the left one twisted at the thumb, and he held the swab too tight, and Jo could have told him ten seconds a side with a rolling motion, not scrubbing, you’re not cleaning a grill. She sat with her mouth open and didn’t. He sealed the sleeve and wrote VOSS, J. on it and the date.
“We also need a reference,” Treadwell said from the doorway. “For Toby.”
Jo closed her mouth.
“We took a hairbrush out of the camper on day one.” Treadwell had her readers on and was looking at a sheet on a clipboard, not at Jo. “Lab says it gave us nothing. Hair falls out, you don’t get the root, you don’t get the DNA. So I need something of his. Something he’d have had in his mouth.” She looked up over the readers. “Toothbrush is best.”
“It’s in the bathroom,” Jo said. “In the hall. The green one, with the dinosaur.”
“Haskins can run over with your key.”
Jo took the house key off her ring and held it out. Haskins took it. She watched him put it in his shirt pocket and button the flap.
She had seen it this morning at 5:20, lying on the edge of the sink with the bristles splayed, and she had heard the water run at two.
“State lab’s running it priority,” Treadwell said. “Missing child. We’ll have something tomorrow morning.”
◆
They’d put his satchel on a table in the hall outside the interview room, and Haskins came back from Larch Street at 1:55 with a paper evidence bag and went through the satchel before he went in. He did it with his gloves on, one thing at a time, and laid each thing on the table and wrote it on a form.
A cloth bundle of dried fruit, dark red, wrinkled. Some kind of cherries. A flat piece of bronze the size of a playing card, cut in the shape of a triangle, with a hole drilled at the top for a cord. A folded square of what looked like paper but thicker and softer, and when Haskins unfolded it there was a drawing on it in brown ink, a long wandering double line with little marks along it and writing in the same cramped angular letters Jo had seen inside the boots. Haskins turned it sideways and upside down and wrote map (?).
Then the leather pouch.
Haskins opened it and looked in and sniffed it and made a face. He tipped it, and one of the leaves slid out onto the table, gray-green, soft, furred like a rabbit’s ear.
“Unknown plant material,” he said, writing.
Jo had been told to stay in the observation room. She was standing in its doorway.
She’d taken pharmacology at Lane Community College in 2009 from a man named Mr. Feeney who wore a bolo tie, and he’d put a picture on the overhead of a tall spike of purple bells, the insides freckled, and said Digitalis purpurea, foxglove, the cardiac glycosides, which is where your digoxin comes from, which you’ll see on health histories every day of your careers, people. She’d seen it on health histories every day of her career. Mrs. Ruiz, Tuesdays, digoxin 0.125. You had to watch the heart rate. You had to watch for nausea. The leaves were downy. That was the word Mr. Feeney used. Downy.
“That’s foxglove,” Jo said.
Haskins looked up.
“It’s for his heart,” she said. “He’ll need it. He’s got an arrhythmia. You can hear it. If he doesn’t take that, he—” She stopped.
Treadwell had come up behind Haskins. She looked at the leaf on the table and then at Jo.
“Then he can tell the jail nurse,” she said.
Haskins slid the leaf back into the pouch and the pouch into a clear bag, and sealed the bag, and wrote across the seal. He put it on the table beside the bronze triangle.
Jo stood in the doorway. Treadwell waited. She waited long enough for Jo to say anything at all, who he was, whose heart it was, and then she nodded, once, the way you’d nod at a witness who’d answered the question she was asked and not one word more, and went back into the observation room.
◆
The clock in the interview room was on the wall behind him, where he couldn’t see it, so he asked.
“What time is it?”
“Two-fifteen,” Haskins said. “Sir, when did you first meet Toby Voss?”
“When I was born.”
Haskins had a legal pad and a fat file he’d put on the table and never opened. He’d taken off his hat. Without it he looked about nineteen, and the peeling skin on his nose was pink and raw.
“Okay. Let’s try again. When did you first come into contact—”
“I’m him. I told the lady.” He had his hands on the table. “I’m sorry. I know it’s hard.”
He answered everything. Jo stood behind the glass with the monitor humming at her hip and listened to him answer everything. Where he was on August twenty-second: at the lake, and then he followed his mom down the path, and then he went up the Whistler, because it was whistling. What was in the Whistler: rock, and then it got flat, and then there was a place where your nose bleeds. Where he’d been since: in Varra. Where Varra was: through there. How long: fifty-five years. Haskins wrote it down in big angry loops and underlined things.
“Last night,” Haskins said. “You slept at the house on Larch Street.”
“In my room. The bottom bunk. It’s too short now.”
“The little girl was in the house.”
“Pip.”
“What did you do with Pip last night, sir?”
Jo’s hands closed. Beside her Treadwell didn’t move.
“I taught her sessa.” He said it simply, the way he’d said Varra. “It means hush. She couldn’t sleep, so I sat on the floor, and she held my finger.” He held up his first finger to show Haskins which one. “She’s scared of me a little. That’s smart. You should be scared of people you don’t know.”
Haskins wrote for most of a minute.
“Is my mom here?” the old man said.
Haskins looked up. “Mrs. Voss isn’t your mother, sir.”
“Is she behind there?” He tipped his head at the mirror without looking at it. “On TV they’re behind there.”
“I can’t tell you who’s where.”
“She’s there,” he said. He didn’t sound upset. He sounded like somebody noting where the door was. “Can she come in?”
“No, sir.”
“Can you ask her?”
Haskins didn’t answer. He turned a page on the legal pad, and the old man nodded, as if that were an answer, and put his hands back on the table. Every half hour after that, for the rest of the afternoon, he asked it again, in the same voice, without looking at the glass. Is my mom here. Can she come in. Can you ask her. Haskins stopped saying no. He just turned the page.
Treadwell didn’t watch any of it. She stood with her back to the filing cabinet and her arms folded, and she watched Jo.
At 2:38 he asked the time again, and Haskins told him, and he went quiet. He looked down at the table. Then he held his right hand out over it, flat, palm down, low, an inch above the fake wood, and kept it there. His lips moved. It lasted maybe ten seconds. Then he put his hand back beside the other one.
“You okay, sir?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“You need some water?”
“Please.”
Haskins went out and came back with a paper cone of water from the cooler, and he drank it, and asked for another, and drank that. His color was bad. Jo could see it even on the monitor, even in gray. He’d sat through a lot of chairs today and this was the hardest one, straight-backed and bolted down, and every so often he pressed the heel of his hand into his breastbone and held it there.
Haskins pushed a form across the table. VOLUNTARY STATEMENT, it said across the top, and lines under it.
“Why don’t you write it down,” Haskins said. “In your own words. Everything you just told me.”
He looked at the form. He picked up the pen Haskins had put on it and turned it over and clicked it a few times, and then he turned the form over, face down, to the blank back, and he started to print.
He printed slowly, pressing hard, the way they taught you in first grade before you learned to make it small. Jo leaned toward the monitor. The camera was above and behind his shoulder. Big capitals, careful, a little tipped, the S backward and then scratched out and done again the right way.
SENNA
And under it, a column. A number and a time beside it, then another number, another time. His hand moved down the paper, stopping, starting. Haskins watched him with his mouth a little open.
When he was finished he put the pen down and looked at the clock that wasn’t there.
“What time is it?”
“Two fifty-eight.”
He nodded. He turned the paper around on the table so it faced Haskins.
“My wife’s birthday was twenty minutes ago,” he said. “She’s sixty-seven. When I left she was sixty-two.”
Haskins bent over the paper. Jo could see it on the monitor now, upside down to her and right side up to him.
SENNA 63 — 7:26 64 — 12:14 65 — 5:02 66 — 9:50 67 — 2:38
and under it, in the same big print, a line he’d drawn a box around.
“‘One hour here,'” Haskins read, “‘seventy-six days there.'” He looked up. “What is this?”
“It’s how fast. I did it off the clock. Every time I ask you what time it is.” He tapped the box with one finger. “Sixty-six was when we got to the house this morning and the sheriff was there. I didn’t even get to think about her. I was thinking about my dad’s truck.”
Haskins sat back in his chair. He glanced at the mirror for the first time, fast, like a kid in class checking on the teacher, and then back at the old man.
“Where did you bury him?” he said.
The man across from him didn’t move.
“Toby Voss,” Haskins said. He leaned forward. His voice had gone up and gotten thin. “Eight years old. Four foot two. Fifty-eight pounds. I was on that lake eleven days. I pulled logs up off the bottom thinking they were him. So I’m asking you, sir. Where did you bury him?”
“I didn’t,” the old man said. “He’s sitting here.”
He pressed his hand flat against his chest, over the linen shirt, and held it there.
“He’s tired,” he said.
◆
At 3:04 Jo’s phone buzzed in her back pocket.
I have Pip. Since you didn’t ask.
And a second one, a minute later.
She wants to know where Toby is. She says TOBY. Call me.
She put the phone face down on the steel desk.
Through the glass Haskins had gone out and come back and gone out again. The man had put his arms on the table and his head on his arms, with the braid across his shoulder, and was either asleep or pretending, and on the monitor the gray shape of him rose and fell, rose and fell, with a hitch at the top every third or fourth breath. She counted without meaning to. Sixteen. Fourteen.
“Twenty years I did search and rescue,” Treadwell said.
Jo didn’t turn around.
“Before this. Hikers. Hunters. Kids. You know how many kids I pulled out of lakes in twenty years?” She didn’t wait. “One. And he’d driven his dad’s four-wheeler off the boat ramp. Lakes don’t take children, Jo. People do. And then people come down off that mountain eleven days later knowing what’s on the otter’s face.” She uncrossed her arms and crossed them the other way. “That man is either the saddest thing I’ve ever seen or the worst, and I don’t know which, and you do.”
Jo watched him breathe.
“I just talked to the DA,” Treadwell said. “He won’t let me charge a sixty-three-year-old with a heart condition for walking into your camper. But he’ll let me hold him overnight for giving false information to a police officer. Which he’s doing, every time he says his name.” She paused. “Unless there’s some reason it isn’t false.”
◆
At quarter past six Haskins went back in with a jailer, a heavy older man with a ring of keys on his belt, and said, “Okay, sir. Time to go.”
He sat up. He’d been asleep. He had the red mark of his sleeve on his cheek, and he put his hand to it and looked at the two men in the door and then at the table, at the form turned face up with SENNA on it. Jo watched him understand. He didn’t argue. He put his hands on the table, ready to get up.
Then he didn’t get up. He turned in his chair and looked at the mirror.
He couldn’t see her. He found the place where she was standing anyway, or close enough.
“Mom,” he said. “Tell them.”
The monitor hummed. The spider plant had a brown leaf hanging off it by a thread.
Treadwell hadn’t moved from the filing cabinet. She didn’t raise her voice. She said it as if the two of them were alone in the room, which they were.
“Is there anything you want to tell me, Jo?”
“No,” Jo said.
On the other side of the glass he kept looking at the mirror. He waited. It wasn’t long. It was about as long as it took her to say it, and then about as long again, and then he turned back to the table.
He held his right hand out over it. Flat, palm down, low, the way he’d done it at 2:38. The jailer shifted his keys. Haskins opened his mouth and shut it.
He began to speak.
It wasn’t English. It was a long low run of words, even and unhurried, with stresses in places English didn’t put them, and it rose a little and came down, rose and came down, the way the song had gone last night in Pip’s room. There were pauses in it. After each pause, a word, said a little apart from the others, and then a space after the word, as if he were waiting for somebody out in the dark to answer.
“What language is that?” Haskins said.
Nobody answered him.
Jo had her hand flat on the glass. She didn’t remember putting it there.
“Senna,” he said, into the space above his hand. Then the low run of words, and a pause. “Pell.” The words. “Davit.” Other names, three or four, that went by her before she could catch them and hold them. “Ilse.” A longer pause, and his hand came a little lower over the table, and he said the next one more quietly than the others. “Oss.”
Then the words again, a short run of them, and a pause, the longest one.
“Jo,” he said.
He left the space after it, the same as he’d left it for the others. Then he put his hand down on the table beside the other one, and he got up in stages, one hand on the table and then on the back of the chair, and went with them.