The Murder Channel by John Philpin

she agreed.
    “He didn’t see us.”
    Her laugh was gentle. “How could anyone not see you?” she asked.
    Mr. Polowski saw me, I thought.
    That August morning.
    I pulled myself away from the kitchen window, slipped my feet into the basketball shoes I left under the kitchen table the night before, grabbed my canvas sack from the hall, and walked to the front stoop. I folded each
Informer
in thirds, tucked the right third into the left, and slowly filled the bag with creased photographs of Gina Radshaw.
    My bicycle leaned against the wall in the driveway.
I hooked the bag of papers over the handlebars and pedaled along Ridge Road.
    After only three stops, I could not keep the sweat from streaming into my eyes, stinging, blurring my vision.
    “Too hot to be doing that, Felix,” Mr. Polowski called from behind the bamboo shade on his porch. “You should be at the pool with the other kids.”
    I smiled and waved.
    If I were at the community pool, Gina would be there. She would not be pleated in my bag. Perhaps she would save my life.
    “You’ve gone away again,” Sable said.
    “I was watching the snow.”
    “What happened that day? You said it was in summer a long time ago.”
    When I delivered Mrs. Dayle’s paper, she did not come to the door.
    I made the big curve on Ridge Road, then turned right on Maple Street and stopped in front of Shannon Waycross’s house. I knew that she sunned herself on the other side of the fence, but I could not see her.
    As I pedaled away I realized that when Gina Radshaw finished guarding lives, she walked down the hill from the pool on Butternut Lane, walked from one end of Maple to the other, passed Shannon Waycross behind her fence, then turned left on Ridge Road, passed Mrs. Dayle who breathed her
words, then took the shortcut through the woods to the bus stop.
    For six days a week since July 1, these people shared space on different planes.
    My father called at noon, like he always did. “I left tuna from when I made my lunch,” he said.
    “Okay,” I told him.
    “You do your papers?”
    “Yours is on your chair.”
    “It’s hot.”
    I waited.
    “Where will you be?” he asked.
    “I don’t know. Here.”
    “I’ll be home at six.”
    The only variation each day was what my father left me to eat. Tuna, Swiss or cheddar, bologna, turkey roll, salami.
    I switched on the TV, allowed the news to unwind itself in silence until 12:15, then turned up the volume for “Local Scene with Wendy Pouldice.”
    “Today’s guest is …”
    I wanted her to say my sister’s name.
    “… Levana Zrbny.”
    The camera panned from Pouldice to a pile of dirt-encrusted bones.
    “… guest is Leonard Portman, a man with an unusual hobby, and he’ll tell us about it when we return after …”
    I wandered into the kitchen and examined the refrigerator’s contents. Tuna in a metal bowl covered
with waxed paper; a plastic container of iceberg lettuce; five bottles of Carling’s beer; a jar of sausage and olive pasta sauce—the previous night’s leftover. I sat cross-legged on the floor and felt the cool air on my face.
    Now, I looked at Sable. “You don’t have a TV,” I said.
    She shrugged. “They offered to put one here. I didn’t want it.”
    “How do you know the world?”
    “I live in the world, Felix.”
    I gazed at the street, the blowing snow, a police cruiser driving slowly past the building. “It’s getting dark,” I said.
    “Is this when you kill someone?”
    I studied the drifting snow, watched it fold over itself and pack against a parked car or a wall. Where there was no immovable object, it blew and tumbled from the glow of one streetlight to another.
    “I have to talk to someone,” I said.
    “Does it have to do with that summer day?”
    It was that day and more. It was an accumulation of times and places and faces all crashing together.
    I pushed my hands through my hair. “My father drank Carling’s and watched sitcoms,” I said. “He seldom laughed. He