CLICK.
“Let it play,” the man says. Mid-forties. He hasn’t looked this stressed in a while.
The surveillance footage runs as a timely cover of some holiday song—“Sleigh Ride,” perhaps—calls from the radio above his filing cabinet. He shifts his gaze away from the woman buying gas to the lifeless figure sitting in front of him. It’s true, they’re the same person. The woman on the screen is the President of the Homeowners Association, the neighbor straight down the cul-de-sac, the woman who’s friends with his wife—that’s her, staring into the camera.
The woman lifts her head up from the cold shelter of the wooden interrogation table. “You brought me in here this morning, and it’s a quarter ‘til nine,” she wails.
“Just answer the question, Camille,” the man begins. “What happened at your residence last night?” She attempts to shrug, finally realizing the handcuffs as her new accessory. The replacement for the worn stone on her finger. Rarely would she acknowledge that anymore. “If you answer the question—and I mean really try to answer it—we might let you go.”
“Coffee, please,” she says. “Two sugars.”
Officer Harris gestures at the other officer in the room, Officer Daniels, to grab Camille some coffee.
“I thought the first rule of the job was not to negotiate with criminals.” Camille laughs, trying to break the tension in the room as Moses had once parted the Red Sea, one of the many Bible lectures she remembers.
“You’re Joan’s friend,” Harris replies. “Not a criminal.”
“And I was planning on seeing her for brunch this weekend.”
Suddenly Harris can’t maintain his typical stare toward the suspect—the trait he’s best known for at the department, which will get him promoted to Chief Officer in a few weeks. Harris recalls that this particular suspect was far from a doting housewife. At all the functions he attended with her family, Harris often noticed the tight ship Camille ran: always doing whatever she could with her power so that the image of her family was not once immodest. In spite of all their conventionalities, some believed that Camille’s front was enough to inspire Mr. Dawes to search for more wantonly features elsewhere. And after hearing about this at the country club one summer afternoon, Harris believed it.
Mark his words, she was not a woman to underestimate. Remembering this, Harris finally looks away, turning toward the sight of Daniels sauntering back to the interrogation room. Daniels returns, setting the coffee on the table.
“I don’t think there’s sugar in that,” Camille critiques, studying the contents of the Dixie cup like the melted peanut butter morsels on the cookies her daughter made the other night, now no longer.
“Two sugars, please.”
Daniels, ready to speak, stops at the sight of Harris’s hand. “Camille, what could you have used all that gasoline for?”
“I have to keep the house warm for my kids. It’s mid-December.”
“But,” Officer Harris begins, “you used it all in one sitting last night—”
Impatiently, Daniels bursts, “We have OnStar recordings from your car of you singing earlier this morning about burning something down.” Daniels, wanting to take over the investigation, knows Harris won’t budge because this is the first big case in several weeks. Besides, this would make more headlines than what it already has.
High profile case. Three words neither Harris nor Daniels have heard in their careers, and soon it would become one of theirs.
“This all sounds deliberate to me,” Harris states, trying to take charge of what’s his.
“And now, Camille,” Daniels interrupts, wanting to reel Camille back into reality and put Harris back in his place, “there is no home for your family.”
“It’s poetic,” she states, “It’s a pile of rubble and soot. A mess I can’t clean up.” Studying herself on camera, she continues, “For once nothing’s expected of me—”
“Your daughter wasn’t at school today . . .” Daniels interrupts, visibly lacking tolerance for Camille’s nuanced analysis of her flight away from suburban domesticity.
Our cheeks are nice and rosy and comfy and cozy are we—
It didn’t affect Camille yet. Her makeup, still intact. She will feel it soon.
“ . . .and an unidentified body has been found at the site.”
Let’s take that road before us and sing a chorus or two—
Slowly she unravels.
SPENCER PECHART blames cable television and novels that didn’t belong in his twelve-year-old hands as what caused his teenage idleness. Both of those influences, however, led to Scholastic recognition and one publication with Literary Orphans. Pechart now stays productive as a middle school English teacher. Tough business, he already knows.