The Name of the Star - Maureen Johnson [38]
“Right. And they . . . I mean, I guess, you . . . didn’t find a body. So we waited for a while, about ten minutes or so, then Jazza wanted to go home, because it was creepy. So we ran across the square—”
“You crossed the square at two in the morning?”
“Yes,” I said, shrinking in my chair.
Detective Young pulled her chair in a little closer, and her expression grew a bit more serious. She nodded for me to go on.
“We had just gotten to the back window of Hawthorne and were climbing in, and this guy walked around the corner of the building. And he asked if we were supposed to be doing that—climbing back in the window. And I said it was okay, because we went there. He was creepy.”
“Creepy how?”
The more I thought about it, the less I could explain why the guy was so creepy, aside from the fact that he was hanging around the school. There was just something about him that made my brain twitch and gave me the very strong feeling that he shouldn’t be there. The guy was just wrong in every way . . . but that is not an explanation.
There’s something witnesses do that my parents had explained to me many times. Once witnesses find out that what they’ve seen might be important—that it might have something to do with a crime—their brains get out the crayons and start coloring things in, making things seem moody and suspicious and full of meaning when it’s entirely possible that nothing was going on. The noise in the night that you thought was a car backfiring is now clearly a gunshot. That guy you saw at the store at two in the morning buying lots of trash bags? At the time, you thought little of him. But now that he’s on trial for killing someone and chopping up the body in the tub, you remember that he was nervous and sweaty and shifty and maybe even splattered with blood. And you won’t be lying, either. The mind does this. It constantly rewrites our memories to accommodate new facts. This is why police and lawyers break people down to make sure witnesses report the facts and nothing but the facts.
In short, I felt I should have been better at being questioned by the police. I’d practically been trained for this. What I’d seen was a guy walking past our window. He could have been completely innocent. But still, all I had was “creepy.” If pushed, I could add “icky.” Out of place. Incorrect.
“Just . . . creepy.”
“Then what happened?” she asked.
“He said something about how we shouldn’t be out, and then Jazza came to the window and helped me inside.”
“And what happened to the man?”
“He walked away.”
“What did he look like?” she asked.
“He was, I don’t know . . .”
What did people look like? Suddenly I didn’t know how to describe anything.
“He was in a suit. A gray suit. And it was kind of weird . . .”
“In what way?”
“It just looked . . . weird. Old—”
“He was an old man?”
“No,” I said quickly. “His suit looked kind of old . . . ish.”
“In what way? Was it very worn?”
“No,” I said. “It looked new, but old. Just . . . I . . . I don’t know much about suits. Not super old. Not, like, historic. Kind of like . . . something on Frasier? Or Seinfeld or something? You know, the show? It was like a suit out of a nineties sitcom. The jacket was kind of long and big.”
She hesitated, then wrote this down.
“Right, then,” she said patiently. “How old would you say he was?”
I imagined Uncle Bick, without his beard, maybe forty pounds lighter, in a suit. That was about right. Uncle Bick was thirty-eight or thirty-nine.
“Thirties, maybe? Forty?”
“All right. Hair color?”
“No hair,” I said quickly. “Bald.”
We ran through every option—tall, short, fat, thin, glasses, facial hair. In the end, I painted a portrait of a man of average height and weight, with no facial hair or distinguishing characteristics, who was bald and wore a suit that seemed to me a little out of date. And since it was dark and “crazy” isn’t an accepted eye color, I couldn’t help much on that front either.
“Stay here for just a moment,” she said.
She went away. I shivered and looked around. A few of the officers who were working in the library glanced over