Page 2 of Good Dirt

Shattered

2000

L ater, the retired couple would tell the police they had run over to the Freeman place after hearing the shots. Their exact words would be shots rang out . But that was just a phrase that people of their generation had picked up from watching television. On the TV news, people were always saying shots rang out. In the old detective shows, shots were always ringing out. At the box office, Rambo and the Terminator and Serpico and Shaft had all made buckets of money by making shots ring out. But this was real life, in a town with one of the lowest crime rates in the nation. Few people around here had a vocabulary suited to a situation like this one.

The space between houses being what it was in these parts, it was unlikely that anyone else living along Windward Road would have heard the shots, which did not, in fact, ring out so much as make a dull crack-crack sound. It was unlikely they would have heard the splitting open of the antique jar when it tumbled from the table in the study. Nor could they have heard the thud of the victim’s flank against the floor when he fell. What the neighbors heard for certain was the screech of the van’s tires as the panicked robbers tore out of the driveway and took the first road north away from the shore, in the direction of the country club.

The neighbors had been collecting seeds from their coneflowers and black-eyed Susans. It was that time of year. They had been working side by side, knees in the dirt, murmuring to each other as they did. Taking in the clicks and chirps of their backyard. The whisper of the sea breeze through the tulip tree. The scent of fallen apples warming in the sun. But now they were hurrying past the line of trees that separated their garden from the Freemans’, their shoes flattening dirt clods and snapping fallen twigs as they went. They were surprised to see the children’s bicycles were still there.

Later, they would recall that this was the moment when panic setin.

Weren’t the kids supposed to be gone? The Freeman children were almost always gone during the week, now that school had started up. They would head back out on their bikes after classes, if they came home at all. Piano lessons for her, tennis or debate club for him. The neighbors banged on the side door, now. They called out. They ran around to the front and found the entrance to the main hallway wide open. And that’s when they heard it. A sound that would stay with them for years. The voice of a child, bleating like a lamb that had lost its way. A child they had watched grow from infancy. A girl who had played with their own granddaughter for most of her ten years.

It was a sound that could shatter a person’s heart.