Cypress Grove by James Sallis

retelling the story had baked to hard clay; nothing new or surprising was likely to peer out of doorways or corners.
    “Sarah stopped because she saw something move.”
    “Said she did. You’re gonna talk to her, too, though—right?”
    I nodded. “She didn’t scream, anything like that.”
    “Unh-unh. She just pushed herself up in the seat and said, ’Seth, what is that?’ I didn’t see anything, but I got out of the car and went to look. After a minute she came up behind me.”
    “Was there blood?”
    “Not near as much as you’d expect. I remember thinking then how that made it all seem so much stranger. Just that hunk of wood sticking up out of him, and everything arranged so neatly there by him like he was, I don’t know, in his room at home.”
    “Were there field mice around, rats, anything like that?”
    “If there were, we didn’t see them.” He looked full at me. “Why would you ask that?”
    “No real reason. What you do is, you go ahead and ask whatever comes to mind, never mind if it makes sense or not, just trying to get the shape of the thing, hoping it might shake something loose.”
    “For you, or for me?”
    “I’d settle for either.”
    “Interesting.” He jotted something down on a notepad beside him.
    “How long have you and Sarah been dating?”
    “Sarah and I aren’t dating. We just hang out together.”
    “In the driveways of unoccupied houses.”
    He started to say more, then shrugged.
    I glanced pointedly at the photograph on his desk. “What does she have to say about that?”
    “A lot. Pretty much nonstop. But Sarah . . . Sarah and I have been friends a long time. A lot of the others don’t like her, think she’s weird. But there aren’t many people around you can have a conversation with, talk about the things you think are important. Look, you’re from the city, right?”
    “Yeah. But the place I came from’s a lot like this one.”
    He nodded.
    “Then maybe you know how it is.”
    I HAD NO IDEA what was playing on her CD. I wouldn’t even have known what to call it. It wasn’t like any rock and roll I’d ever heard. And it wasn’t on her CD player at all, as it turned out, but coming directly off her computer.
    Music’s the first handhold you lose in growing old, I thought as we made our way down narrow wood stairs to the basement Sarah Perkins had claimed as her own. The stairs were plain, untreated planks set into notches in doubled two-by-fours, heads of ten-penny nails dark against them.
    Sarah sat below in a pool of light. The music washed up from below, too, a drain in reverse. To me, it sounded like a slurry of things recorded from nature—cricket calls, footsteps over gravel, apples falling—then tweaked beyond recognition.
    Sarah turned in her chair as we stepped onto the cement floor. Years ago, someone had laid in a frame of two-by-fours, started putting up Sheetrock, even tacked up one wall of cheap woodgrain paneling before abandoning the project. Sarah had covered the spaces with old album covers (mostly 1950s jazz), movie posters (a decided taste for horror films) and a hodgepodge of pieces of dark fabric of every conceivable size, shape and texture. Books were stacked against every wall. But mostly the room took its form from the U-shaped desk within which Sarah sat in the midst of three or four computers and as many monitors, along with various cross-connected black boxes, scanners and the like. The huge half-dark, half-bright room was the inside of her head, this the cockpit from which she kept it on course.
    Almost instantly, she broke into Don Lee’s introduction.
    “How’s Seth?”
    “He’s fine,” I said. “You two haven’t seen one another?”
    “Our parents won’t let us. Here.” She handed across one of those clear folders with a plastic piece that slips over the edge to bind it. “This should help. And save time.”
    Don Lee looked at it a moment and handed it to me. The cover read, in small capitals: INCIDENT OF