Happy Policeman by Patricia Anthony

haunted?”
    “If that is how you must understand it.”
    Seresen walked off to the postal van, the other Torku crowding around him. He looked to where DeWitt still stood, frozen by the autumn wind and his own surprise. Then DeWitt went to his squad car, keyed the ignition, and drove off. He’d not gone a hundred yards when there was a blue-white strobe behind him and a quiet crunching sound.
    He stepped on the brake and turned. Loretta’s house had vanished.

Chapter Eleven

    DEWITT opened of the door of his darkened house and was struck with the chest-thudding, nonsensical fear that it was vacant. Following a glowing trail of moonlight, he crept into Denny’s room and studied the blanket-covered mound of sleeping child.
    Denny was a silent slumberer given to gentle dreams, a child who surrendered so freely to unconsciousness that he sometimes appeared to have died without protest in his sleep.
    DeWitt loved his children with the fierceness of despair. There were so many dangers: the heavy tires of school buses; the lake that could turn a tiny body into a pale, bloated sponge; traffic accidents that made unrecognizable splashes of red and splinters of white. Each time DeWitt investigated a child’s death, he would imagine Denny’s face, or Tammy’s, or Linda’s, on the small, dead body, just to see how surviving felt.
    He put his hand near Denny’s mouth, close enough to feel the boy’s warm breath.
    Realizing that he was hungry, DeWitt tiptoed to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, and indexed the food. He settled on the last of a Sara Lee chocolate cake, which he ate standing in the lighted V of the open refrigerator.
    Licking the frosting from his fingers, he made his way to the back bedroom.
    Janet was a hard lump under the bedclothes, a granite mountain range with snow cover. He sat in an armchair and pulled off his boots in the dark. The right one made a clunk as it hit the floor. Guiltily, he looked up. There was no answering creak from the mattress.
    In stocking feet he rose and took off his belt, eased the top drawer of the dresser open, and by feel took out the old sweatsuit that functioned as his favorite winter pajamas. He laid his jacket, his sweater, and his jeans carefully over the back of the chair.
    His wife’s voice was a disembodied thing. “Who killed her?”
    Was it you? Now there was a white form between DeWitt and the headboard. Janet must have sat up and pulled the covers with her.
    “I don’t know.”
    “What about the kids?”
    “I haven’t found them yet.” He had a sudden image of Tammy or Linda missing: he pictured himself, clothes rent in Biblical mourning, wandering through the streets shouting their names.
    “Do the Torku know who the murderer is?”
    The question made the cake in his stomach churn. What if Janet had killed her? And what if the Torku had seen? DeWitt was Seresen’s main liaison. If Seresen knew Janet had killed Loretta, he’d never tell.
    “They’re acting like they don’t.”
    “Are you coming to bed?”
    He was tired but no longer sleepy. A nerve twitched in his neck.
    Tammy had been a terrible sleeper in infancy, all body jerks and small cries. Every night DeWitt and Janet had wrestled with her until terror wore her down. He was exhausted like that. “In a minute.”
    An angry squeak of bedsprings as Janet flung herself under the blankets. The left side of the bed, his side, was suddenly brighter. She’d taken the covers with her to make an annoyed cocoon.
    Holding his keys to prevent them from jingling, he walked barefoot to the carport, flicked on the thirty-watt overhead bulb, and closed the kitchen door. By the woven mat lay Janet’s sneakers, socks inside like nesting hens, Over the canvas sides was a drying scum of mud. He picked the shoes up. In the soles’ ornate grooves were chips of something white, He looked quickly at the Suburban. There was a pebble in the muddy right front tire.
    DeWitt put the sneakers back, and pried the