It was Howie, dressed in duds much nicer than the ones Marcy had just bagged up. He gave the girls a quick hug and bussed Marcy on the cheek.
“Are you going to bring my daddy home?” Gracie asked.
“Not today, but soon,” he said, taking the suit bag. “What about a pair of shoes, Marcy?”
“Oh, God,” she said. “I’m such a klutz.”
The black ones were okay, but they needed a polish. No time for that now, though. She put them in a bag and went back into the living room. “Okay, I’m ready.”
“All right. Step lively and pay no attention to the coyotes. Girls, keep the doors locked until your mom gets back, and don’t answer the phone unless you recognize the number. Got it?”
“We’ll be okay,” Sarah said. She didn’t look okay. Neither of them did. Marcy wondered if it was possible for preteen girls to lose weight overnight. Surely not.
“Here we go,” Howie said. He was bubbling over, cheerful.
They left the house with Howie carrying the suit and Marcy carrying the shoes. The reporters once more surged to the edge of the lawn. Mrs. Maitland, have you talked to your husband? What have the police told you? Mr. Gold, has Terry Maitland responded to the charges? Are you going to request bail?
“We have nothing to say at this time,” Howie said, stone-faced, escorting Marcy to his Escalade through a glare of television lights （surely not necessary on this brilliant July day, Marcy thought）。 At the foot of the driveway, Howie powered down his window and leaned out to speak to one of the two cops on duty. “The Maitland girls are inside. You guys are responsible for seeing they’re not bothered, right?”
Neither responded, only looked at Howie with expressions that were either blank or hostile. Marcy couldn’t tell which, but she leaned toward the latter.
The joy and relief she’d felt after looking at that video—God bless Channel 81—hadn’t left her, but there were still TV trucks and microphone-waving reporters in front of her house. Terry was still locked up—“in county,” as Howie had put it, and what a terrible phrase that was, like something out of a lonesome country-and-western song. Strangers had searched their house and taken anything they pleased. The wooden faces of the policemen and their lack of response were the worst, though, far more unsettling than the TV lights and the shouted questions. A machine had swallowed her family. Howie said they would get out of it unharmed, but it hadn’t happened yet.
No, not yet.
14
Marcy was given a quick patdown by a sleepy-eyed female officer, who told her to dump her purse in the plastic basket provided and step through the metal detector. The officer also took their driver’s licenses, put them in a Baggie, and tacked it to a bulletin board with many others. “Also the suit and shoes, missus.”
Marcy handed them over.
“I want to see him in that suit and looking sharp when I come for him tomorrow morning,” Howie said, and walked through the metal detector, which went off.
“We’ll be sure to tell his butler,” said the officer on the far side of the detector. “Now get rid of whatever you’ve still got in your pockets and try again.”
The problem turned out to be his keyring. Howie handed it to the female officer and went through the detector a second time. “I’ve been here at least five thousand times, and I always forget my keys,” he told Marcy. “It must be some kind of Freudian thing.”
She smiled nervously and made no reply. Her throat was dry, and she thought anything she said would come out in a croak.
Another officer led them through one door, then another. Marcy heard laughing children and a buzz of adult conversation. They passed through a visiting area with brown industrial carpet on the floor. Children were playing. Prisoners in brown jumpsuits were talking with their wives, sweethearts, mothers. A large man with a purple birthmark dripping down one side of his face and a healing cut on the other was helping his young daughter rearrange the furniture in a dollhouse.
This is all a dream, Marcy thought. An incredibly vivid one. I’ll wake up with Terry beside me and tell him how I had a nightmare that he’d been arrested for murder. We’ll laugh about it.
One of the inmates pointed her out, with no attempt made to hide the gesture. The woman beside him stared, round-eyed, then whispered to another woman. The officer who was guiding them seemed to be having some trouble with the key-card that opened the door on the far side of the visiting area, and Marcy couldn’t quite dismiss the idea that he was lollygagging on purpose. Before the lock clunked and he led them through, it seemed that everyone was staring at them. Even the kids.