Chapter 2 - The Chase
Behind me, Diana shouted my name, but I barely heard her over the music and the kids screaming with joy inside the bounce house.
Walter cut across the Hendersons' lawn, clipped a plastic flamingo, and nearly went down on a coiled garden hose. For a guy in his sixties, he moved.
The officer was younger and lighter on his feet. "Walter! Stop running!"
Walter didn't even turn his head. He hit his own driveway, ripped open the side door of his garage, and vanished inside.
The officer followed. I got there maybe five seconds later, lungs burning, half expecting to walk in on something terrible — Walter with a gun, Walter halfway out a back window.
Instead, he was standing over a rusted steel barrel with a thick stack of paper shaking in his hands. Smoke curled up out of the top.
The officer caught his wrist before the papers went into the fire.
"Let go of me!" Walter shouted.
"What are you doing, Walter?"
"None of your business."
The officer pried the stack out of his fingers. Envelopes spilled across the concrete. Every one of them sealed. Some had gone yellow and brittle. Others looked like they'd come in yesterday's mail.
He crouched and picked one up. His voice dropped. "You still have all of these."
Walter stopped fighting him.
I hovered in the doorway, feeling like I shouldn't be there.
The officer glanced back at me. "Give us a minute?"
Walter let out a short, ugly laugh. "No. Let him stay. The whole street already thinks I'm out of my mind. Might as well have a witness."
"Nobody thinks that," I said.
He gave me a look that told me he knew I was just being polite.
The officer pulled his sunglasses off. Early forties, tired around the eyes, a small scar on his chin. "I'm Marcus," he said to me. "I met Walter seventeen years ago."
Walter turned his back on both of us.
Marcus started gathering the letters off the floor. Every envelope had Walter's name on it in the same slanted handwriting. No return address. Just his name, over and over.
"What happened seventeen years ago?" I asked.
"Nothing you need to hear about," Walter snapped.
Marcus kept talking like Walter hadn't said anything. "I was an EMT back then. Twenty-four years old. Walter's wife went down in her kitchen."
Walter's shoulders climbed toward his ears.
"Brain aneurysm," Marcus said, careful with it. "We did everything we could in that house. It wasn't enough."
"You don't have to give him the whole story," Walter muttered.
May you like
Marcus looked at him flatly. "You called the police on a seven-year-old's birthday party. Then you ran across a yard the second you saw my face. I think we're a little past keeping things private."
Walter dropped onto an old wooden stool. Whatever had been holding him up straight let go all at once. What was left looked smaller. Just grief, maybe. Or plain exhaustion.
