Five Days

It was supposed to be hours. A night, maybe, while they worked the scene. That's what the morning radio said the next day, cautiously: an abundance of caution, the perimeter would lift once the area was processed. We packed the groceries into the little fridge in the motel room anyway. Mae made eggs on a hot plate that wasn't meant for eggs. Theo went for coffee and came back with news that was not news: still closed, still closed, still closed.

By the second day, hours had become a count. They had not cleared the lane. They would not tell us anything specific, we were not family of the deceased, we were not on any list. I was not family of Eli, either, technically. I was his girlfriend of two years, which counted for nothing with a county dispatcher who had been answering one phone for forty straight hours. I gave them his name, his description, the cottage address. They said they'd send someone to check the cottages. No one called back.

The dead person on the lake road turned out, in the slow way these things do, to be a man who lived alone in the first cottage on the lane, a retired man, a fisherman, someone none of us had ever met. That was the first concrete thing I learned, and it should have been a relief and it was not, because it made the killing specific instead of abstract, a real hand on a real person, and also because it made the lane a place where a real hand had been, recently, in the dark, and Eli was still on that lane.

Mae held me at night. She was good at that, Mae. She didn't say it would be fine because she didn't lie to me, not about real things. She just held on. Theo slept on the floor by the door, or said he slept, and ran the errands and kept the calendar of the days straight and was, in his quiet way, the structure the three of us were leaning on. I was grateful for him then. I want to say that clearly, because it was true, and because of what came after I want to remember that it was true.

Day three. Day four. The perimeter held. They found things, the radio said, details they wouldn't share, a method, a thing about the method that made them want to be sure. The word lockdown stopped sounding like a word and started sounding like weather, a front we were stuck in. I stopped eating the eggs. I stopped sleeping. I called Eli's phone until the calls stopped going through at all, the number out of service or the battery finally dead, and I sat with the silence where his voice had been and I tried to decide what each new silence meant.

On the fourth night Theo came back from the gas station with a case of beer and the four-lane highway behind him dark and wet with new rain, and he sat on the floor and didn't drink any of it, and he said, in that steady voice, "They think it was someone local. Someone who knew the road." He'd heard it from a deputy at the pump. "They're interviewing the year-round residents. They're going cottage to cottage." He looked at me. "If he's at the cottage, they'll have reached him. They would have made him open the door."

"Then why won't they tell me?" I said.

He didn't answer. He didn't have an answer. He just held my gaze a second longer than he needed to, and in that second I saw something I didn't have a name for yet, a patience in his eyes that was the wrong flavor, too calm for the situation, like a man watching a fuse and already knowing where it ends. I blinked and it was gone and he was just Theo again, just Theo on the floor, and I decided I was losing my mind from the waiting, and that was that.

Day five. The news broke in the morning, on the little TV bolted to the motel wall. The perimeter would lift at noon. They had a person of interest. They weren't naming anyone yet, but they were done with the lane, and the cottages would reopen, and the residents could go home.

Home, they said. I didn't have a home on that lane. I had Eli on that lane, if Eli was still on that lane, and at noon exactly Mae started the car and we drove back, the three of us, the groceries we'd bought five days ago now absurd in the trunk, the bread green, the cherries a memory, and the barricade was gone and the lane was open and the red and blue lights were gone and the road was just a road again, pale gravel and green, and my heart was so loud I could feel it in my teeth.