They kept him for twenty-four hours. He did not ask to see a lawyer as he had not been charged with the commission of any crime. He gave them his name, and told them that he was originally from Montgomery, Alabama, but had been on the road for almost twelve years. He wasn’t sure about his age, but he thought he might have been thirty-three, ‘like Our Lord, Jesus Christ.’
During the period of his incarceration, a piece of cloth was found on a nail by Karen’s window. It matched perfectly a hole in Clarence Buttle’s coat. He was charged with forcible entry, trespass, and possession of a deadly weapon: a shiv found tucked into the lining of his coat. He was taken to the county jail to await trial, and was still there when his fingerprints produced an AFIS match. A year earlier, a nine-year-old girl named Franny Keaton had been abducted from her parents’ home in Winnetka, Illinois. After a week-long search, her body was found in a storm drain. She had been strangled, but there was no sign of sexual assault, although the girl’s clothing had been removed. The fingerprint that matched Clarence Buttle’s had come from the left eye of the doll found alongside Franny Keaton’s body.
When asked about Winnetka, Clarence Buttle had smiled slyly and said, ‘I’ve been a bad, bad boy…’
As the years went by, Karen Emory would still wake at least once every month, convinced that Clarence Buttle, that bad, bad boy, had come back to take her down to a storm drain and ask her to play with him.
But now other nightmares had taken the place of those concerning Clarence Buttle. She had heard the voices whispering again in their strange tongue, but this time she believed that they were not trying to communicate with her. In fact, she sensed their complete disregard, even contempt, for her. Instead, they were anticipating the arrival of another, one who would respond to their entreaties. They had been waiting a long time, and they were growing impatient. This time, in her dream, she saw Joel entering the basement, stepping into the darkness, and the voices rose in a crescendo of welcome…
But Joel was not here. Before he had departed, he had put a small box on the pillow beside her.
‘I was going to keep them for your birthday,’ he said. ‘Then I thought, why wait?’
It was an apology, she supposed, an apology for striking her, and hurting her. She had opened the box. The earrings were dull gold, but intricately carved, and so delicate that they seemed more like lace than metal. She knew before she touched them that they were old; old, and valuable.
‘Where did you get them?’ she asked, and as soon as the words were out of her mouth she knew that she had reacted wrongly, that her tone was doubtful and not filled with the wonder and gratitude Joel had anticipated. She thought that he might snatch the box away from her, or explode into another fit of rage, but instead he just looked hurt.
‘They’re a gift,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d like them.’
‘I do,’ she said, her voice trembling. She reached out and lifted them from the box. They were heavier than she had anticipated. ‘They’re beautiful.’ She smiled, trying to rescue the situation. ‘They’re really beautiful. Thank you.’
He nodded. ‘Well, okay then,’ he said.
He watched as she put them on, but his response as she turned her head to let them catch the sunlight filtering through the drapes was distracted. She had disappointed him. Worse, she felt that, by her actions, she had confirmed a suspicion he had of her. When she was sure that he was gone, she took off the earrings and put them back in the box, then pulled the sheet over her head and prayed for sleep to come. She so wanted to rest, and not to dream. Eventually, she took half an Ambien, and sleep came, and with it the voices.
It was late afternoon when she woke. Her head felt fuzzy, and she was disoriented. She was about to call out for Joel, and as she recalled his absence she wished, even amid their troubles, that she was not alone, and that he was near. He said that he would be gone overnight, perhaps even for two nights. He had promised to let her know. A big deal was about to come good for him, he said, and they could look for a better place. They might even head off somewhere for a while, somewhere pretty and quiet. She told him that she’d like to go away with him, but she was happy too just to stay where they were. She’d be happy anywhere, she said, as long as he was beside her, and as long as he was content. Tobias said that that was one of the reasons why he liked her so much, because she didn’t go asking for expensive things, because she had simple tastes. But that wasn’t what she had meant at all, and it annoyed her that he’d misunderstood her. He had patronized her, and she hated being patronized, just as she hated the stupid secrets he now kept in his basement, and the fact that he wasn’t telling her everything about the trips he took in his truck, and the goods that he delivered.
And then there were the earrings. She rolled over on the bed and opened the box. They were beautiful. Antique, too. No, older even than that. Antiques were like furniture or jewelry from the 1800s, or so she had always thought. These earrings, though, were ancient. She could almost feel their age when she had first touched them.
She got up and ran a bath. The day was as good as gone, and she decided that she wasn’t going to bother getting dressed. She would spend the evening in her robe, watch some TV, and order a pizza. With Joel absent, she rolled a joint from the little stash of pot that she kept hidden in her personal drawer and smoked it in the tub. Joel didn’t approve of drugs, and although he had never tried to forbid her from smoking joints he had made it clear that he didn’t want to know about it if she did. For that reason, she only tended to smoke when he wasn’t around, or when she was with friends.
After the bath and the joint, she felt better than she had in a long time. She looked at the earrings again, and decided to try them on. She piled her hair up on her head, wrapped herself in a clean white sheet, then stood in front of the mirror just to get a sense of how she might have looked in another time. She’d felt kind of silly doing it, but she had to admit that she appeared elegant, the earrings gleaming in the lamp-light, fragments of yellow light falling like dust motes upon her face.
There was no way that Joel could afford a gift like those earrings, she knew, not unless he really was lying even more than she suspected about how much he was earning as a truck driver. The only conclusion to be drawn was that he was involved in something illegal, and the earrings were part of it: an exchange, perhaps, or a purchase with some of the proceeds. It took away some from the beauty of them. Karen had never stolen anything in her life, not even a piece of candy or some cheap cosmetics, the standard targets for the petty thieves among her high school friends when she was growing up. At the diner, she never took more than was permitted her under her food allowance. It was more than generous anyway, and she saw no reason to be greedy, even though there were one or two other waitresses who used the allowance as an excuse to take food home and gorge themselves, their boyfriends, and probably anyone else who happened to be dropping by their place too.
But the earrings were so beautiful. She had never been given anything so lovely, so old, so valuable. Now that they were on, she did not want to take them off. If he could convince her that he had come by them honestly, she would keep them, but equally she would know if he was lying. If he did decide to lie to her about them, their relationship would be under real threat. She had already decided to forgive him for striking her again because she loved him, but it was time for him to be honest with her, and maybe with himself too.
She sat on the bed and turned on the TV. What the hell, she thought, and rolled a second joint. She watched a movie, some dumb comedy she’d seen before but that seemed far funnier now that she was a little high. Another movie followed, an action one this time, but she was starting to drowse. Her eyes closed. She heard herself snoring, and it woke her up. She lay down and rested her head on the pillow. The voices came again, but this time she had the peculiar sensation that this dream, and her nightmares about Clarence Buttle, had become conflated, because in the dream she sensed a presence nearby.