The Name on the Broadcast novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: The Orchard

The detective put one hand up.

Behind us, car doors opened without a sound.

Six troopers went over the fence and down the rows in a line, low and fast, with their lights off.

"You stay here," the detective said to me.

Then he went too.

I stood at the fence with Frances on one side of me and Ben on the other.

My father stood a little apart, by his truck, with his cold coffee still in his hand.

The shovel stopped.

Somebody down there said, "Did you hear that?"

Then every flashlight in the orchard came on at once.

"State police! Drop it! Hands where I can see them!"

The beams caught two men by the leaning pear tree.

One was holding the shovel. The other had a wheelbarrow and a tarp.

I knew them both.

The tall one had passed the plate at church every Sunday of my life.

The short one ran the feed mill and taught me to fish when I was nine.

They both put their hands up.

The shovel fell in the hole.

"We were just cleaning up," the tall deacon said. "Verna asked us. It's her orchard."

"At two in the morning?" the detective said.

"She don't like the mess in daylight."

The troopers put them face down in the wet grass, in the fallen pears.

I heard the cuffs click from all the way up at the fence.

Frances made a small sound beside me.

I took her hand.

On my other side, Ben's fingers found mine.

He didn't say anything. He just held on.

We stood, the three of us, linked, while the sky over the hills went from black to gray.

They put yellow tape around the last pear tree.

They set up lights on poles.

Two more cars came up the dirt road, and people in white coveralls carried cases down the rows.

Nobody let us past the tape.

Frances stood right at it anyway, with her hands on the plastic, for four hours.

She didn't sit when Ben brought her a folding chair from a trooper's trunk.

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