Wish I May, Wish I Might

Chapter 6

I don't remember much else after that before I found myself in a much-stricter part of the police station that I had been the night before. I had my face buried in my hands, my elbows resting on the cold metal table where I was seated. For the first time in hours, my head wasn't spinning, and my thoughts weren't a volcano in my head. I was almost calm with how focused I was. That was, focused on the fact that my neighbor was dead and I had done it.

The door opened and two pairs of footsteps walked in. I peeked through my fingers and saw the lower halves of two police officers approach the table. I assumed they were detectives because they had badges, but they weren't in uniforms.

"He's dead, isn't he," I said it, deadpan. I already was sure of the answer, but maybe there had been some sort of medical miracle, where they had brought my strangled seventy-something old neighbor back from the dead.

"Yes," a feminine voice said, making me finally lower my hands from my face and look at their faces. There was one woman and one man. They were middle-aged and their eyes were sympathetic, but their eyes were stony and cold. The man was holding a paper cup of water, which he set down in front of me. I immediately felt my mouth go dry, and I realized how much I had been crying that day. I took a few tentative sips from the cup. It was warm and tasted slightly of chlorine, nothing like the natural mineral-filled water I was used to from home.

"What do you need me to tell you?" I asked when I had drank a quarter of the cup.

The woman reached into her pants pocket and pulled out a small silver device. They were recording everything being said. "Just tell us everything that happened after you left the baseball game," the man said.

In truth, I probably should have been preparing for this moment since another neighbor I had never met called the police while I incoherently screamed that they needed to call 911. But instead I'd been focused on what had just happened.

The silence dragged on between the man's request and my answer.

"Take as much time as you need," the woman said, although her tone of voice said this wasn't actually an option, it was just something they were supposed to see.

"I ran to Mayfair Park," I said finally. That was true. "There was a family there. Some little kids. They waved at me. And then I walked home." Also all true.

"And then what happened?"

It was like someone else was speaking as the words came from my mouth. "I heard a noise from outside."

"So you were inside the house?" the man asked.

I nodded, then when the woman opened her mouth to tell me to say it out for the recording, repeated it verbally.

"And if we look at the log of your family's garage door opening, it'll agree with that? Because you didn't have a key with you."

"I- what?" I asked.

"Your house has a digital garage door, correct?"

"Yes?"

"And if we were to look at the recordings of when the garage door opened and closed, we would see that you entered at around that time?"

"Why would-" I paused. "Wait, is this an interrogation?"

If anything, the detectives looked annoyed by the question. "Carter, we're just trying to get a sense of the bigger picture here."

I set down the paper cup and leaned back. "I want my parents here. And a lawyer."

The two detectives continued to tell me that it wasn't an interrogation and that they were just innocent questions, but I did the thing that I should have done all along: I kept my mouth shut.