And there was a second reason. On Thursday afternoon, three hours after I signed the closing papers, I had signed another set of papers in the office of the city manager of Fernhill, accepting appointment as the city's next Chief of Police, effective upon swearing-in at the regular city council meeting on September fifteenth. The city hadn't announced it yet. The search had been contentious, the outgoing chief was popular in some quarters, and his deputy, a man named Garrett Kessling, had wanted the job badly and been told he wouldn't get it. The city manager wanted to announce me at the meeting, with the council present, so that the news came out all at once and not in pieces. I had agreed to keep my mouth shut until then.
So that night I was nobody. I was a widow in a cut-off flannel shirt with an old truck and a houseful of boxes, and for three weeks I would get to find out what that was like in Bittern Ridge. I'll be honest: some part of me was curious. You learn things about a place when nobody thinks you matter.
We finished at ten-oh-five. I tipped the boys more than I could afford, sent Jerome back to his apartment with a cooler of leftover sandwiches, and sat down on the front step with a warm ginger ale. The house was a brick ranch with a low roof and a deep front porch, built in 1988 when Bittern Ridge was the only subdivision on this side of Fernhill, back when, according to the listing, you could see the river from the end of Plover Lane. It had been renovated inside by the seller, an outfit called Tidewater Home Solutions, LLC, in the way flippers renovate: gray vinyl plank floors, white shaker cabinets, a light fixture in the dining room that looked like a cluster of glass bubbles. But they'd left the porch alone. It had a beadboard ceiling painted haint blue, the old Southern color that's supposed to keep spirits from crossing the threshold, and there were hooks in the ceiling where a swing had hung.
It was the porch that sold me. That, and the bedroom at the back of the house that opened onto the yard with no steps, so my father could get in and out with his walker, and the price, which was lower than anything comparable within fifteen miles. I'd wondered about the price. I'm a suspicious person by training. But the inspection came back clean, and the title was clear, and Tidewater's agent, a pleasant woman named Tamara who smelled like expensive hand lotion, had said the previous owner was an elderly gentleman who "had to go into care," and that the family wanted a quick sale. That happens. People get old. Houses outlive them.
I finished the ginger ale and looked up at the haint-blue ceiling and thought about Lorenzo, who would have loved that ceiling, and who would have said something about Marcella Vasbinder that would have made me laugh so hard I spilled the ginger ale. He'd been gone three years in October. Pancreatic cancer, eleven weeks from diagnosis to the end. He taught high school band in Richmond for twenty-six years, and at his funeral four hundred people showed up, and a drumline of his former students played him out of the church, and I stood there in a black dress and thought, I have spent my whole life investigating what people do wrong, and I married the one man in Virginia who only ever saw what they did right.
He was the reason I took the job in Fernhill, in a roundabout way. He grew up here. His mother's people are buried in the cemetery behind Mount Gilead AME on Tanner Road. When he was sick, he'd talk about Fernhill the way people talk about a place they've only half-left: the river, the peach stand on Route 9, the Fourth of July fireworks off the old textile mill. "You'd like it," he told me once, near the end. "It's small enough that you could actually fix something." When the posting for police chief came across my desk, from a recruiter who'd gotten my name from somebody who'd gotten it from somebody, I almost threw it away. Then I saw the town's name and sat there for a long time.
The other reason was my father. Obadiah Batts was a letter carrier for the Postal Service for thirty-eight years, and for most of them he could tell you the name of every dog on his route and which ones would bite. Two years ago he started forgetting the names of people instead. Now it came and went. Some days he was entirely himself, sharp and funny and full of opinions about baseball. Some evenings, as the light went, he got confused, and he'd want to go home, by which he meant a house in Petersburg that was torn down in 1991. My brother lives in Germany with the Army. There was nobody else. I needed a smaller job, with steadier hours, in a smaller place, and a house where he could sit on a porch.
I went in and slept on the mattress on the floor of my bedroom with the window open, and at some point in the night I heard footsteps on the sidewalk and the click of a small flashlight, and they slowed in front of my house, and then they went on.
On Sunday morning I returned the rental truck at six-forty and picked up Daddy from the motel. He was waiting in the lobby in his good brown cardigan, with his hat on his knee, and when he saw me he said, "Beatrix. Did we stop the newspaper?"
"We did, Daddy."