They're Calling You Home

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty The hotel is called The Singing Sands because of the sound the dunes make in and around Michigan City; they creak and groan, slip and moan. The tourist brochure states that there has to be a great deal of silica in the sand to produce the dull whining sound. The grains have to be .5 mm in diameter , the humidity around 62 percent. It’s early afternoon now, and I can’t seem to make any real decisions, other than to sit at the table in the hotel room and read the tourism highlights. For a moment, while Browder uses the bathroom and Pascal lies on the floor asleep, I think I can hear the sand dunes groaning all around the hotel, the foundation slipping and inching incrementally toward lake Michigan’s coastline, a body of water that might as well be an ocean, the farther shore distant and highly doubtful. If we fall into the massive lake, maybe I’ll find the riley boy’s body, sunken at the bottom, a treasure, the mystery finally solved. But it’s only a daydream, only a distraction from the work I need to do. I set up the desk, booting up the laptop and searching for some free WiFi , which is plentiful here. The network someone has named “hoosier Slide” allows me to surf and check e-mail. Michael has sent three; the last one delivered yesterday is bolded in the memo line and reads: are you oKAy? DID They CoMMuTe your SenTenCe? I can’t take reading anything from him, knowing that he’s going to badger me about getting the new prologue for the memoir to him. Deadlines are proof that all of us have a specific date preordained to die. Instead of clicking on the two e-mails from Cindy, who is probably trying to warn me that I’ve been lax about entering Browder’s notes on the case manager’s e-file system, I type in rodney Finch’s name and begin reading through all the news clippings , most of which I’ve already seen. I scroll and click, squint and hunch They’re Calling You Home 151 over, going at it until my ass numbs and my back is stiff. When I come up for air, Browder is on one of the hotel room beds asleep, his long legs bent to his chest, almost in a fetal position. I’m tired, too, but I need to reread the sections of the transcript that lay out how rodney Finch killed the rileys. Still, I’m afraid if I try to read from the court file papers, I will slip into a comalike slumber; something about the way that paper smells, the way it feels both slick and grainy in my hands, makes me want to avoid it altogether and simply test my memory on the specifics of the crime. I lie down, too, and fold my arms behind my head, staring up at the ceiling , like a teenager pondering a broken heart. In my head, I assemble what I know of the murders. The night before the killings, it was reported by two clerks at Willcom’s grocery store that rodney tried to get Mrs. riley to follow him out to his van. The two clerks witnessed rodney pulling Mrs. riley by the arm as the two of them stood in the center of aisle 7, frozen breads and novelty ice creams. Mrs. riley tried to be polite at first, shaking her head and attempting to push her cart forward, but after rodney apparently applied more pressure, both physically and verbally, Mrs. riley scolded him. While rodney had a driver’s license and could read and write at a fifth-grade level, he rarely used much language, but when he was around Mrs. riley, apparently his mouth was foul, proposing to do any number of things that he said she’d love. Some grocery store personnel had overheard him a few times before, and Mrs. riley on at least two occasions told her mother about rodney’s advances. one of the clerks said Mrs. riley dismissed her questions when she offered to phone the Smallwood Police. Mrs. riley reportedly told her, “no, he’s harmless. Just a little infatuated is all.” The next day rodney drank alone at a bar called Baldies near the county line. The owner testified that rodney wasn’t fall-down drunk, and that he even seemed to quit a...