Furnace. Muriel Gray
a fax it don’t matter if you’re on the moon. I guess they like the mountain air.’
Josh nodded, disappointed at the mundane explanation. The easy resolution of the mystery did little to make him feel better. But then he was far from feeling good. He was feeling worse than he’d ever felt in his life. The image of that tiny foot, that thick black blood, bobbed to the surface of his consciousness like a plastic ball held under bath water and released. He swallowed hard, fighting back his horror, as Pace brought the car to a stop outside a sprawling white house. The sheriff cut the engine and sighed deeply. He tapped the wheel thoughtfully for a moment, then turned to Josh.
‘This is out of order and I ain’t no psychiatrist but I reckon if you meet this lady you’re goin’ to realize that you made a mistake.’
Josh felt cold. My God. This was her house. John Pace was going to make him talk to her, make him look again into those eyes that had drilled him just before she …
‘But I don’t want you tellin’ her why we’re here, you understand? That’s important. No way am I goin’ to treat Councillor McFarlane like a suspect. This here visit is just so you can straighten things out in your mind and get on your way again. Can you handle that?’
Josh looked up to the dark windows of the great house and knew he had to see her. He nodded. Pace studied his face for a moment returned the nod, then got out of the car. Josh followed him, a few steps behind.
The arrival of the police car had already made one of the drapes twitch. A child’s face looked out from behind pale flowery material, and opened its mouth in naked delight that the sheriff was coming up their driveway. The drapes fell and swung as the child dived away.
Pace rang a doorbell that buzzed deep inside the house. There were voices, children’s and an adult cheerfully telling them to be quiet, and then the mock-period door swung open.
She opened it. The murderer.
Councillor Nelly McFarlane was wiping her hands on an apron that hung loosely around the waist of a plain denim knee-length dress. Her red hair was tied back in a knot and her open friendly face was without make-up. Clinging to her skirt was a girl of about nine or ten, and in the background a younger boy and a slightly older girl hopped around with open curiosity.
Nelly McFarlane looked at them both and smiled, showing those fine white teeth that graced her campaign handbill.
‘John! Hi! Come in.’
She motioned to the men to enter, but looking questioningly at Josh. He was aware that he looked like a criminal. Take a trucker from his truck and he always does. He was well used to being followed round factory outlet malls by store detectives who fixed on his clothes and haircut like pointer dogs on a duck. But right now, he was more aware that he was looking at a criminal. A first-degree murderer. Pace put a hand behind Josh to push him gently forward, speaking to the woman as he did so.
‘I want you to meet Josh Spiller. He’s a trucker from Pittsburgh.’
She widened her smile and raised her eyebrows. Josh was grateful that she didn’t offer a hand to shake. He was barely in control, but to have been forced to touch the flesh that had launched the baby into oblivion …
The children scuttled away inside and vanished, satisfied that the police visit was to be a dull social one.
Josh hesitated, his heart racing in his chest. The space between his shoulderblades told him that he was about to be clubbed from behind with a baseball bat, but his eyes, his logic, his head told him he was the unannounced guest of a bewildered and respectable Furnace citizen. He stepped into the large, cool hall. In the spacious living room to which she led them, a television was blaring cartoons to a room now vacated by children. Nelly McFarlane moved to a low mahogany coffee table, picked up the channel changer and silenced the noise.
Josh flicked his eyes to it just in time to see a coyote being pursued on a dusty road by a huge rolling rock before the picture fizzled away to black. He looked away quickly, a hot, sick feeling returning to his head. She sat down on a long sofa and motioned for the men to do the same on an identical one on the opposite side of the coffee table. They sat, and Pace clasped his hands on his knee.
‘Sorry to trouble you, Nelly, but there’s been a real bad accident.’
Josh watched her face carefully as a line of fear and confusion passed over its undoubtedly handsome structure. She was much younger than he’d thought. In her late forties maybe. It was hard to tell. But she looked good. He held his breath. He was confused and light-headed. Pace saw what she was thinking and hurried along to halt it.
‘Alice Nevin’s baby was killed this morning.’
Her hand went to her mouth. ‘Oh sweet Lord. Alice? Berry Nevin’s girl?’
Pace nodded.
‘How?’
Her voice was croaky.
‘It was out the front of the mall. Maybe you saw some of the commotion if you were in town early?’
He looked at her carefully, but if there was to be any flicker of guilt or duplicity it was not going to register on this woman’s sympathetically open face.
She shook her head slowly, her hand now at her neck.
‘We haven’t been out yet, John. What happened?’
‘Stroller rolled right out into the street. I’m here to tell you ’cos I know that’s a big piece of your campaign, Nelly. To get them metal barriers up in front of the store.’
She was shaking her head in disbelief now, and Josh watched her, seeing only a woman in genuine distress at an appalling tragedy. Pace was continuing.
‘Mr Spiller here, well, he was the real unfortunate one who just happened to be passing by slowly in his truck. Just shows you, you were right about an accident waitin’ to happen. He was way under the speed limit, braked an’ everythin’, but there was nothin’ he could do. Little Amy rolled right under there. Didn’t stand a chance.’
She silently mouthed the words ‘little Amy’ to herself, then turned her eyes on Josh. There was a fleeting second, no, less than that; a fraction of a second, in which a cold wind blew across his heart and he imagined he saw the same cold reptilian eyes that had stared him down at seven o’clock this morning, light years away.
And then his bruised mind allowed him to see what was really in front of him. Two eyes that were already glazing with tears and regarding him with an expression of horror that the killer, albeit an unwitting one, was here in her house, which was being replaced with some obvious effort by a sympathy that seemed so warm and genuine he felt tears prick his own eyes again.
John Pace looked concerned. ‘You okay, Nelly?’
She swallowed and waved a hand at him. When she spoke, she was still visibly wrestling with revulsion and compassion. ‘I don’t know what to say. You poor man.’
Pace looked at his feet.
‘Like I say, Nelly, if those barriers had been up like you’ve been shoutin’ for, this’d never have happened. I just wanted Mr Spiller here to know that it ain’t never goin’ to happen again. Kind of put a bit of his mind at ease.’
Josh stared at her, his mind spinning. How did he get here? A few hours ago he was on the interstate trying to find his breakfast, and now he was in a living nightmare that he was never going to wake from. Nothing would ever be the same again. He had killed a child. Not her. Not this middle-class, bland and ordinary woman who spent her life campaigning for tiny small-town victories. Him. He had been sleepless and crazy. Seeing things. He had seen some dumb poster on a wall and his mixed-up, fucked-up brain had concocted that stuff. It was no one else but him. He was the killer.
She got to her feet. Her face told the story that she was still unsure of him, almost as though she were reading his guilty mind, and as she spoke her next hospitable words, her eyes suggested she was thinking of running to get a gun.
‘Can