Detective Frank Stynes brought his car to a stop, then checked his face in the rearview mirror. Sick, he thought. I look sick. The air-conditioning in his city-owned sedan was on the fritz, so he drove to the Mannings’ house with the windows down, the hot summer air swirling through the car, rearranging his remaining strands of hair into a comical mess on his head. Without fail, his allergies kicked in with the arrival of the first official day of summer. The whites of his eyes were more pink than anything else, and the tip of his nose was red from repeated blowings. A good day to meet the press and pose for photos, he thought as he climbed out.
Stynes couldn’t remember the last time he had been to the Manning place. Five years, maybe seven. Whenever Dante Rogers had been up for parole the last time, and Stynes had gone over to brief them all on what to say before the board. Whatever he told them or whatever they said worked-for a time. But after twenty-two years of being a model prisoner and repeated claims of being a born-again Christian, Dante was released back into the community. And so Stynes came to the Manning house one more time-probably the last-to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the murder of a four-year-old.
Stynes’s right hip creaked as he climbed out of the car. He needed to have it replaced-so his doctor told him-and he planned to have it done as soon as he retired. He’d do that in two years, when he turned fifty-seven. He’d opted to stay in for the full thirty. He told himself because he wanted the full pension and then some, but he knew the truth. Some people looked forward to traveling after retirement. Others to gardening or time with the wife and kids. Stynes had been a widower for four years, no kids. He hated to travel and paid a neighborhood teenager to cut his grass and pull weeds out of the cracks in the sidewalk. As far as he could tell, all he had to look forward to in retirement was a new hip.
The Mannings lived in a decent middle-class neighborhood in Dove Point, one planned and built in the sixties that had always housed schoolteachers and bank managers and salespeople. Kids ran or rode their bikes through the streets, and everyone spent their weekends grilling burgers or washing their cars. Janet Manning told Stynes she had moved back in because her father was contemplating early retirement. Stynes read between the lines of what she said, and he understood. Her dad-a guy a few years older than Stynes-had been laid off and didn’t think he could find another gig. At least you have that going for you, Stynes, he said to himself. Bad hip or not, no one is forcing you out.
Stynes climbed the steps to the porch, and just a few seconds after he’d hit the bell, Janet Manning opened the door.
“Hello, Detective,” she said, stepping back so he could enter. The living room caught a lot of light through the open curtains, and the place looked clean and orderly. Stynes assumed the woman’s touch-either Janet or her daughter or a combination of both-kept the house looking in good shape, but then stopped himself for being sexist. Maybe her dad liked to keep a neat house? Maybe he spent his enforced retirement vacuuming and dusting? The thought depressed Stynes more than he could have anticipated. He caught a quick flash of himself tending to his own little house-cooking meals on one burner, washing one dish and one cup in the sink…
Maybe he could land a private security job or do some consulting once the hip was fixed…
“So,” he said, “you’re back in the old homestead.”
“The house you grow up in always seems like home, doesn’t it?” Janet said. She looked trim and fit in her work clothes, and despite the grim news they discussed, her voice and movements possessed a lively energy. “And with me working so much, and Ashleigh in her teenage years, I thought it would be good to have another parental influence around.”
Stynes nodded, but he could tell Janet wasn’t fully convinced by what she was saying. He’d always liked Janet Manning. Even as a kid, in the swirl of her brother’s disappearance, she seemed pretty tough. As a seven-year-old, she didn’t cry or act scared when they interviewed her in the wake of the disappearance. Over the years, she always put on her best face and marched to the parole hearings without hesitation. Stynes knew her mother had died about seven years after her brother, and somewhere along the way Janet ended up pregnant and raising a kid by herself. He never knew-and never asked-who the father was. But she worked and supported herself, and Stynes sensed a measure of ambivalence about moving back into her childhood home. No independent person wanted to move back in with Dad. They did it, but they didn’t like it. Stynes concluded that if he’d had a daughter, he’d want her to be like Janet Manning.
Janet pointed to an overstuffed couch, so he sat. The TV played a political show with the sound down, the screen dominated by a wildly gesticulating host in a tricornered colonial-style hat. “Dad watches that junk,” she said, turning the TV off. She sat in a love seat perpendicular to the couch.
“You’ve done all this before,” Stynes said, “so I don’t see that I have to give you any pointers.”
“About that,” Janet said. She scooted to the edge of her seat. She rubbed her hands over the tops of her knees as though trying to generate heat. “Do you think-I mean, why am I doing this? Rogers is out now, and everything is over. Do I really have to do more interviews?”
“You don’t have to do it,” he said. “No one can make you.” She nodded a little, so Stynes went on. “People in Dove Point remember the story. We haven’t had many murders here since I was on the force. Certainly none involving children. I encouraged you to do this when the reporter called because I think it’s important we remind people of what has happened and what can happen, even here. To be honest, this is twenty-five years. It’s probably the last time you’ll have to do this.”
Janet still looked distracted. She nodded, as though she understood everything Stynes said and as though it made sense to her, but something told him it wasn’t all getting through. He watched her and realized how young she really was despite all she’d lived through. She was only in her early thirties, a young woman from where Stynes sat, staring down the barrel of retirement.
“If you want,” Stynes said, “you can beg off. I’ll deal with the reporter.”
“I don’t want to inconvenience anyone.”
“Is something wrong?” Stynes asked. “You really seem to be struggling with this.”
“Do you think-?” She stopped. She stared at a fixed point somewhere in the space between her and Stynes. “I guess that article about Dante Rogers got me thinking.”
“About what?” Stynes waited. Janet didn’t answer. “Are you afraid? Do you think he’s going to hurt you or your family?”
“No, not that,” she said. “He looks so pathetic in the picture.”
“That’s what twenty-two years of being in prison for killing a child will do to you.”
Stynes hoped that he could turn the conversation in a different direction, move the focus to the punishment of Rogers rather than Janet’s doubts or anxieties about the past or the present. But who was he to think he could play psychological mind games with the family member of a crime victim? Stynes was who he was-an aging detective in a midsized Midwestern town, a guy who had investigated three murders in almost thirty years as a cop. He too had seen the pathetic picture of a doughy, paunchy Dante Rogers in the morning paper, and like Janet Manning he even felt the questions rise in his own mind: had this guy really lured a little kid away from a playground and killed him? Unlike Janet Manning, Stynes was supposed to know better. Regular-looking people committed awful crimes every day. Appearances didn’t tell the whole story. They never did. Circumstantial or not, Dante Rogers was guilty. He had served his time.
But Stynes held his own doubts, had held them for the past twenty-five years. Sure, they’d done everything right while they investigated the crime, and the case-circumstantial though it was-held enough water to put Rogers away. Stynes fell back on an old trick, one that had served him well ever since the jury returned with a conviction against Dante Rogers: he told himself to forget about it, to not dwell on things from the past that didn’t need to change. It was over, long over. More important, it was time for everyone to move on.
“Maybe if you think of this as the last time you have to answer these questions, it will make it easier,” Stynes said.
Janet nodded but didn’t seem convinced.
“You know, Janet-” Stynes began. He shifted forward on the couch. He’d always wanted to say something to her but never felt the time or moment was right, even when she was a kid. He decided to take his chance. “No one blames you for what happened. It wasn’t your fault.”
Janet looked surprised by what he said. Her eyes widened a bit, and Stynes worried he’d overstepped his bounds and said the wrong thing.
“Thank you, Detective,” she said.
“I hope you don’t mind me saying so,” he said. “I’ve worried sometimes-”
Janet shook her head and smiled, and Stynes saw the smile contained a hint of bitterness.
“I’m not worried about that at all, Detective,” she said. “In fact, these days, that’s the least of my concerns.”