Maggie and the Empty Noose

by Barbara Cool Lee

  "You asked why," he said softly.

  The road they took led out past a few scattered houses. Maggie drove the pickup until they came to a tiny little field, enclosed by weeping willows, and with nicely mowed green grass contrasting with the dusty hills in the distance.

  Marble and granite headstones jutted up from the grass.

  "Oh," she said quietly. She parked the car in the gravel near a footpath that led into the graveyard.

  "David?" she asked.

  Reese nodded.

  They got out.

  Reese picked up a small stone from the gravel. He motioned for her to pick up one, too, so she did.

  They walked into the graveyard, past the headstones and plaques and memorials.

  "I didn't realize he was buried here," she said.

  "Nobody does. Did you know over a million people visit Jim Morrison's grave every year in Paris?"

  She looked around at the quiet space. She couldn't imagine a million people trampling this peaceful little field.

  Reese spoke softly, conscious of the holiness of the place. "Nora had a big memorial stone put up at Mount Sinai in LA, and the fans think he's there. They leave flowers, guitar picks, all that stuff. It gave them a place to go, to remember him."

  Him. David Zimmer, nicknamed The Zim by Deep Creek fans. Reese's best friend in high school. And like the rest of the band, a talented musician, a small town boy, and a drug-addicted rock star.

  Reese stopped at a headstone.

  This one wasn't marked. It was a blank piece of black granite, with an arched top, and a finish smooth and glossy enough to reflect the blue sky and green grass. There was nothing about it to give away that one of the most famous guitarists of all time was buried here.

  There was a shrub growing at the base of the stone, covered in flowers. White daisies with black centers. Somehow the perfect choice with the lush grass and the dark granite and the high, dry hills all around.

  Reese knelt down and placed the small stone he'd been carrying on the grave, on top of a pile of other stones. It was a large pile, recording many visits.

  She bent down to add her stone to the pile as well.

  He was still kneeling. Then he picked up something half-buried under the flowers.

  He straightened up and she saw it was a carved wooden teddy bear.

  "I remember this," Reese said softly. "It was on his dresser when he was a kid."

  "I'm sorry," she said, at a loss.

  "No," he said. "I am. This is what I did when I was on drugs. This is why I can't ever become an addict again."

  Her mind flashed back to that image of the car and the palm tree and the golden lightning bolt.

  "I'm glad I don't remember that day," he whispered. He ran a finger across the curved top of the headstone.

  Then he bent down again and replaced the little carved bear where he'd found it.

  What could she say? It's not your fault? But it was his fault. And somehow he had to live with that. He had tried to commit suicide right after it happened, too overcome with shame to go on. But luckily he'd been found in time by Nora. She'd gotten him to the hospital, and then to rehab, and he'd crawled back to life from there. He had seemed to be over it. It was in the distant past.

  He brushed away the dust that had settled on the grave marker.

  "He was only twenty-seven years old."

  "So were you, Reese."

  "But now I'm not. I got to grow old, and he didn't. I have to stay sober. I have to."

  Frank had his flying. Eddie had his yoga and philosophy. What did Reese have to bring him peace?

  She put her hand on his back, rubbing it to comfort him. But he shied away from her touch. Ashamed.

  "I need a drink," he whispered. He glanced her way. "I'm not going to. But I wish I could."

  "I know," she said.

  "You wondered why I never visit."

  "Yes. Why this place looks like paradise, yet you don't want to be here."

  "Now you know. It's not home anymore."

  "But your parents can visit you, can't they?"

  "Yeah. I suppose. They do occasionally. But leaving the farm is tough."

  "Maybe Frank could fly down to Carita."

  He said nothing.

  "There's no reason to be estranged from your family like this."

  "Estranged," he whispered. "I don't feel estranged. I just don't fit here. Not anymore. None of us fit in here after things blew up so big for us. It was always weird to come back. To try to be normal again."

  She nodded. "Where can we get some flowers to put on the grave?"

  He shook his head. "No."

  "You don't want to?"

  "It would show we've been here," he said.

  "It would show respect. Like the pebbles. What's wrong with that?"

  She saw another pickup truck pull onto the gravel shoulder near where they had parked.

  Reese went stiff. "Let's go," he said.

  They walked back to the truck. She wasn't moving quickly enough for Reese, so he took her by the arm and hurried her along.

  They got back to the truck and he handed her up into the cab.

  The other truck was parked less than ten feet away.

  There were two people in it. A man and a woman. About the age of Reese's parents. The truck had a sign painted on the door: ZIMMER HARDWARE STORE.

  The people sat there. Not moving. Not getting out. Not even seeming to see her as she passed by so close.

  But when she put the truck into reverse and headed back to the main road, she glanced back at them, and saw white-hot hatred in the woman's eyes as she watched them leave.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The sun set late in the high desert, and it was twilight when they gathered in the Tibbets's yard. The sky was showing the last remnants of the orange sunset before night fell completely, and the mountains all around loomed up as shadows in the distance.

  Frank and Jenny were there, and Eddie and Paige and the girls had come, too, and they all clustered around the grill as Reese's dad made the burgers as well as veggie kabobs for the vegetarians. There were big bowls of potato salad, bean salad, and green salad as well. There would be leftovers for days.

  Eddie had started to say something to Reese, to apologize for his parents' behavior at the cemetery. But Reese had quickly hushed him, not wanting the rest of the family to hear. "I understand how they feel," was all he said. "Drop it." So Eddie had patted him on the back and they'd gone back to the grill.

  When Reese had gotten off the jet at the airport, Reese's mom had said her boys had finally come home, and with Eddie there, too, the whole band was together for the first time since they broke up. It was a celebration. Of making peace with each other. Of Reese surviving the attack. Of everyone being alive, and healthy, and as happy as they could be after all they'd been through.

  It had cooled off with the dusk, and Maggie went in the house to fetch a sweater from her room before heading back out to the picnic table in the yard.

  She came upon Shane in the living room, sitting there alone with all the lights off. "Hey," she said. "You're going to miss the burgers."

  She could see the golden hair in the dusk as he turned his head away from her. He was sitting on the sofa, and she came over and sat next to him, Jasper, as always, right at her heel.

  The dog sat in front of Shane and put his long snout on the boy's lap.

  Shane petted Jasper's nose. "It's hard," he said, looking down at the dog.

  "I know," Maggie said. "It must be very hard to deal with all this."

  "My mom was a jerk," he said softly. "Everyone said that. But she was still my mom, you know?"

  Maggie realized she had been wrong to be so indifferent about Olivia's death. There was one person who was devastated by the loss. "You loved her," she said.

  "Nobody else misses her," he whispered. "It's like I can't even say it."

  "Hey," she said, leaning toward him. "Just because your mother had faults, it doesn't me
an you aren't supposed to grieve her. I'm sorry, Shane. I don't have the right words to say. But what happened is terrible. It's wrong. And no matter what mistakes she made, she didn't deserve to die."

  "Now that my dad's safe, no one even cares that she died."

  "That's not true." Maggie clasped her hands together in her lap. "The police are working on some ideas. They haven't stopped looking. I'm going home soon, and I'm going to search for clues, too. Somebody had to have heard something or seen something. And we'll figure it out. I promise. I won't stop looking until I figure it out."

  She stood up and slapped her hands together. "Now, let's go get those burgers before they're all gone, okay?"

  He stood up, and she could see the glisten of moisture in his eyes in the fading light through the windows. "Okay."

  Eddie caught up with her when she was walking back out.

  "I was coming in to use the bathroom and I heard what you said to Shane," he said quietly, glancing back at the group by the picnic table. "You're in touch with that cop, right?"

  "Lieutenant Ibarra? Yes, why?"

  "I didn't think about it before. But I might have heard something that night."

  "What do you mean? What did you hear?"

  He looked off at the sky, trying to remember. "I was standing at the sink, filling the kettle to make tea. The kitchen window was open, and I thought I heard a seagull cry. I didn't think anything of it. But when you said that, about somebody might have heard something, it made me wonder…."

  Maggie felt a shiver. "You think it could have been a person calling out?"

  He lifted his shoulders. "I don't know. I hate to think so. If I actually heard the—the—"

  "—the murder?" she finished.

  He shook his head. "I hate to think I might have heard it, and not realized. Maybe I could have done something."

  "What time was it?"

  Again he shrugged. "Around midnight, maybe? What time did she die, do you know?"

  "Midnight," she said.

  He looked at the group again. "Wow. I don't want to ruin the party. But what do you think?"

  Maggie pulled out her phone. "Let me give you Lieutenant Ibarra's number. I think you should call him and tell him what you heard. It might help solve this."

  As she was downing the last bite of her burger, Reese gave her a skeptical look. "What are you eating?"

  "A bacon cheeseburger with vine ripened tomato and home grown lettuce," she said.

  He leaned in close and whispered, "you do know that hamburgers are made of beef, right?"

  She shrugged. "It was the bacon. Do you know the smell of frying bacon can make the strongest person break down and eat meat? I think they did a study on it."

  He laughed, that big, hearty laugh he was famous for. It was good to hear after all this time. "You're like an addict," he said, but he was smiling.

  "I guess," she confessed. "I need a twelve-step program."

  "Join the club," he said, lighting a cigarette. But he was still smiling.

  Reese's dad put another log in the fire pit, and the sparks flew up like fireflies in the night, rising toward the immense bowl of black sky overhead.

  She'd never seen so many stars, way out here in the clear air, away from city lights.

  "Do you see more stars up there when you fly at night?" Maggie asked Frank.

  He was sitting on the other side of the fire, with his arm around his wife, staring up into the darkness. "Yup," he said. "You're not racing through the sky like in a jet. There's glass all around and it's totally dark and it's just you and the night. You get above the lights in town and everything's peaceful and quiet. It's like you're flying in space."

  "Like an astronaut," she said. She tilted her head back to rest on the top of the adirondack chair she was sitting in, and she could see the whole bowl of the sky, from horizon to horizon, almost white with stars.

  Reese was sitting next to Shane. He had his arm around the boy, and they were staring up, too. "I'd like to see that," Reese said softly. "Someday."

  "I go flying almost every night," Frank said. "It's better to crop dust at night during the summer, after things cool off. It's also good for the honeybees. They're home in the hive at night and don't get hit by the spray that way."

  "Yay, honeybees," said little Lotus. Serenity was already asleep in her dad's arms, and Lotus crawled up on him, too. Paige smiled at the sight, and leaned her head on his shoulder.

  Eddie had nodded to her when he'd come back to the group, and then Ibarra had texted her, confirming that they'd taken Eddie's report, and thought it could help nail down the exact time of death. He thanked her for her help, and then told her to stop thinking about the case and mind her own business. But he added a smile emoji at the end to let her know it was his usual banter and not a real scolding.

  There was a companionable silence by the fire for a while, with the crackle of the logs and the hoot of an owl somewhere nearby the only sounds.

  "I can take you up with me tomorrow," Frank said quietly, out of the blue. He could have been speaking to anyone there, but he wasn't. He was speaking to one man.

  Reese didn't look at his brother, but he said, "I'd like that," and Maggie saw their parents smile at each other. It was a start.

  After a while the others left, Eddie and Paige taking the kids home, then Frank and Jenny heading off. Mr. and Mrs. Tibbets went into the house.

  Shane fell asleep in his chair, and Reese stood up and put another log on the fire, watching it crackle and burn.

  He stood there in the dark, watching his son sleep, and smoking. Always smoking. Still not quite ready to let go of that last crutch holding his sanity together.

  Maggie sat and watched him watch Shane. She could see the anguish there, but couldn't think of a thing to do to help.

  So she just watched this impossibly beautiful man staring at his impossibly beautiful son, feeling his pain and being helpless to do anything to ease it.

  The whole family was good looking. All tall and lean and healthy. But with the rest of them it was the look of normal, handsome people, the kind of attractiveness that made someone the pretty beauty queen or the cute boy next door all the girls in town wanted to marry.

  Somehow in Reese it had come together to make magic. The features exactly right. The physical form possessing just that extra, indefinable something. The way he moved, the way he spoke, the look in his eyes, all somehow creating the exactly perfect combination that drew all attention to him, without him even trying.

  It was what they called star quality. Or charisma. Or the It Factor.

  Whatever it was, Reese Stevens had it. It was that certain something that crossed the line from being the nicest-looking kid in town to the biggest star in the world.

  And Shane had it, too. And that was not a gift. It was a curse.

  She noticed the people in Deep Creek looked at Reese's fame like it was a disease he'd somehow contracted, and needed to be cured of. They looked sadly at him when they saw him, like he'd been stricken with some dreadful illness that had stripped him of his small town values and robbed him of his humanity.

  She wanted to shout at them, to explain that Reese was still himself. That he was a good person, despite the mirrored sunglasses, and the cynical aloofness, and the air of endless patience he got when people asked for autographs and fawned over him.

  He was still Stanley Tibbets. Somewhere under it all. But they couldn't see it. To them that boy they'd known was gone. And this was some other person. Not even a person. A Star. A Hollywood Star who didn't have the same feelings and hopes and dreams they had.

  He would never be Stanley Tibbets again. She saw that now.

  And for the first time she truly felt in her gut the dread Reese had experienced when Olivia had threatened to set their son on the same path. This was what he most feared for Shane—this Otherness, this setting apart from the world that came with the surreal experience of stardom. This was why he'd threatened to kill her—because he knew th
at fame would forever mark Shane as Not One Of Us.

  He used to joke about wanting Shane to become an accountant, and now she saw those were not jokes at all. He pictured his son living a normal life. Somehow. As if the disease of fame was something hereditary, a curse he would pass down to his descendants if he didn't find a cure now, before it was too late.

  So he stood there, and smoked, and stared at the boy, and felt completely and utterly alone in the world.

  And she could do nothing to help him.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Late the next afternoon, Maggie watched as Frank's plane buzzed over the big barn.

  Reese was in the co-pilot seat, presumably trying out the controls. It was good to see the brothers at least trying to reconnect after all these years. She hoped by the time they landed they would be feeling at least a little less awkward around each other.

  She sat on the porch next to Mary Tibbets and worked on her bracelet. Or whatever it was.

  After the plane flew off, they watched Shane and Jasper run around in the field in front of them for a while. Eventually they got tired and came up on the porch.

  Shane plopped down in the rocking chair opposite his grandma and Maggie. Jasper lay down nearby, and gazed adoringly at his boy.

  Shane rocked and watched Maggie work, scuffing his checkerboard Vans back and forth on the porch. "Is that how long a necklace is?" he eventually asked her.

  Maggie looked down at the spiraling peyote rope. It had started as a bracelet. Outgrown that the first day to become a necklace. Now?

  "I don't know," she told Shane. She held it up. "You take one end and we'll see how long it is."

  He stood up and grabbed the end she held out to him. Pulled it out straight while she held onto the end she was working on.

  "That's a pretty long necklace," his grandmother noted.

  "A belt?" Shane suggested.

  "Maybe," she said. "Or maybe your grandpa needs a lasso for wrangling cattle."

  He smiled faintly, then perked up when they heard the sound of a truck pulling in.