Free The Pig Did It by Joseph Caldwell

counteraccusations. Kitty was, to Aaron’s mind, as much a candidate for the crime as the woman she’d named. How the scene between the two of them might end Aaron had no notion. But he should be there. He was, after all, a writer. This display of human conflict, of murder and of love, should not pass unseen by the artist’s eye. He owed it to himself and to his readers, to those dependent on him for uncommon insights, to say nothing of high drama and the amusement that only a killing can provide.
    Sleek as a seal, Aaron slithered from the rock into the water. He’d swim the distance to the switchback path, then walk the road back to the house. He was wet anyway and accustomed by now to the cold. Maybe Lolly McKeever would still be there when he’d arrive, and she would see him soaked and dripping, having just risen, like Cuchulain of old, up out of the sea.

4
    T hat’s not my pig.”
    Lolly McKeever stood near the shed looking more at the damaged door than at the pig snuffling its way through the pasture grass between the house and the cliff. She swung the dangling hinge open, then shut, loosening the last screw so that the hinge fell clattering onto the hardened ground that surrounded the shed. “Sorry,” she said, then put the tips of her fingers on the door itself as if to complete the damage done by the pig and release the door, letting it, like the hinge, fall at her feet. But the lock held fast and the door swayed only slightly, still secure with one corner dug into the earth, an almost balletic toehold that held it balanced free of all other support except for the sturdy hasp of the padlock that refused to let go.
    â€œWhat do you mean, it’s not your pig?” Kitty picked up the hinge, dusted it off, blew the dirt from its surface, then dropped it again, cleansed, onto the ground.
    â€œIt’s not my pig.”
    Kitty gave the hinge a kick. It moved no more than an inch. “Tell her, Aaron,” she said.
    Aaron, shivering in his wet clothes, had been trying not to let his teeth chatter or his body twitch. The sea, to complete the trouble it had caused him, had sent a stiff breeze from off its vasty deeps, making sure that the brine soaking his shirt and pants sustained the near-arctic temperatures they had enjoyed before they had been sponged up out of their native element and been brought so thoughtlessly to this arrogant headland. The sea had not finished with him yet. Now the drying salt began to sting his flesh and shrink his skin and there was as well the stench of dried seaweed and rotting fish. Only a pelting rain could help him now, cleanse and warm him, but the sky was a pitiless and uncharacteristic blue, and the sun seemed more mockingly benign than it had ever been on these primal shores from the beginning of time. He looked at Lolly McKeever and opened his mouth. Lolly, for the first time, looked at him. Her eyes brightened, her mouth opened, and she let out a laugh of pleasure and delight, similar to the laughter excited by the unmanageable pigs the day before. The sight of Aaron was apparently equal in calamity with the ditched truck and the chaos that followed. Aaron, hurt, confused, moved his jaw up and down, his mouth not quite closing, “I—I—I—
    I—” He clamped his lips together, swallowed, then tried again.
    â€œI—I—I—”
    â€œThere, you see?” Kitty said. “The pig was in your herd. As he said, he chased it up the hill and down, and you’d already gone off and left him. And the pig too. But now it’s here and you can take it home.” Lolly’s laughter stopped. She turned her attention from Aaron to the pig. “It’s not mine.”
    â€œIt has to be yours.” Kitty had little patience with contradiction.
    â€œIt doesn’t have to be. And it isn’t.”
    â€œI’m not going to make you pay damages, if that’s what you’re so afraid