Free Five Minutes Alone by Paul Cleave

face down in a pool of blood. Is it possible this is one of those cases where everything turns out okay? Kelly is fine and Dwight is dead, and their worlds intersected at the service station last night, but then parted half a block later.
    “What’s happened?” Kelly asks.
    “Can we come in?” I ask.
    She nods slowly, her face changing as she figures something out. “You’re here because of what happened to me five years ago,” she says, the words are flat, but then her voice rises a little. “You’re here because that sick son of a bitch is now saying he didn’t do it, right? Do people believe him?”
    “It’s nothing like that,” Kent says. “Please, can we come inside?”
    Summers looks at Kent, and I see her eyes locking onto the damaged part of Kent’s face, and as it does her hand goes up to the damage on her own. “Okay,” she says, and she stands aside and lets us in. Then she closes the door behind her and locks it as, I imagine, is her habit.
    She leads us into the lounge. It’s warm in here. Warm colors, warm furniture. There’s a stereo, but there’s no TV. There’s a large painting of a field of daises, a woman in a yellow dress walking through them with her back facing the artist, her head turned slightly sideways, not quite enough to get a good look at her, but enough to see an expression on her face that immediately makes me think of loss. Both her hands are reaching out and touching the flowers as she passes them.
    “It’s not my best work,” Kelly says.
    “You painted this?”
    She shrugs. “Used to be a hobby.”
    “Used to?”
    “I gave it up,” she says, but the unspoken words are there—she gave it up after her life changed.
    “It’s beautiful,” I tell her.
    She gives another shrug, but she seems pleased with the compliment. This is a nice room. A happy room, and the painting, even though it’s sad, contributes to that. Only thing that’s missing is the smell of coffee. Offering to make coffee is a great way to make friends with a policeman, but Kelly doesn’t seem keen to make friends.
    I take my jacket off and rest it over the edge of the couch. Then I sit down on the couch next to it. Kent sits down on a chair that’s at a ninety-degree angle to it, and Summers sits opposite us, forming three points of an equilateral triangle—give or take a handful of degrees. Kelly will have to look left and right to talk to us both.
    “Dwight Smith was released from jail two weeks ago,” Kent says.
    Summers leans back and onto her side a little so she can pull her feet up to tuck them under her. She’s wearing stripy socks that disappear into her pajamas. She becomes absolutely still as she stares at Kent, and after a few seconds of being a statue, she smiles, then shakes her head. Then her smile disappears for a few seconds, then comes back. She’s trying to process something that doesn’t fit. Her mind is banging a square into a round hole.
    “I’m . . . I’m sorry,” Summers says, and she’s still smiling, “but you’ve got your facts wrong. He’s still got six more years to serve.”
    “He was released early for good behavior,” Kent says. “It was always a possibility.”
    The smile is still there on Summers’s face. But it’s the smile of somebody who isn’t feeling any warmth, or experiencing any humor. It’s how a person who doesn’t know how to smile would smile if they’d just seen somebody doing it on TV.
    “No,” she says. The room goes quiet. We wait her out, knowing she’ll fill in the silence. It becomes uncomfortable. Five seconds pass. Then ten. “Somebody must have put you wrong,” she finally says. “Dwight Smith isn’t capable of good behavior. This,” she says, running her finger the length of her face that Smith sliced open with a fillet knife, “didn’t come from somebody who knows what good behavior is. Therefore you’ve made a mistake. Therefore you didn’t need to come here. Therefore somebody is wasting your time.