Little Falls

by Elizabeth Lewes

  “Just let—” Darren grabbed my wrist again. “Just let Moreno figure it out before you jump to any conclusions.”

  “Yeah?” I yanked my hand back. “And when he says my truck was bombed by some crazy-ass Mexican, what are you going to do then?”

  Darren’s eyes narrowed. “Who?”

  Shit.

  “What else?” I said quickly, frantically redirecting. “What else could this be?”

  “It could be anything, Camille.” But his eyes were still narrowed, his brow still creased. “Anything. It could have been a kid you wouldn’t sell beer to.”

  I shook my head, rolled my eyes. “Yeah, right.”

  “It could have been an electrical problem.”

  I clenched my teeth.

  “Or maybe you pissed off someone else, someone completely unrelated to this investigation.” Darren ran his hand through his short black hair. “I mean, Christ, you’ve got a talent for it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I mean you need to stop asking questions, stop going where you shouldn’t. I told you—” he said angrily, then relaxed his jaw. “I asked you to stop.”

  I stiffened, said too loudly, “Have you been following me?”

  Darren snorted. “You think I’ve got those kinds of resources?”

  “No, I guess not. Look,” I said. “I found his body. He showed up on my videotape. I found that trailer and that … stuff. I feel responsible, like I’ve got to do something about it. And I can’t let some motherfucking pyromaniac stop me.”

  “Innocent bystander,” Darren said calmly, but he was watching me, waiting for yesterday’s panic and fury to reappear. “That’s all you are.”

  “No,” I said savagely. “No.”

  A spark of frustration flashed across Darren’s eyes. “It’s not like you killed him.”

  Surprised, offended at his dismissal, I spat out, “Neither did you.”

  But the look on his face, the stony, grim determination there, made me pause. It made me wonder if this was how all cops worked a case, even the grisly ones, even the ones that involved a tortured nineteen-year-old kid. It made me wonder what else was going on in the background, what was going through his head. But then, faster than it appeared, the look was gone.

  Darren sighed. “So, why aren’t you just an innocent bystander?” he asked, calmer, but the edge was still there.

  “I’ve been doing some research.”

  Darren breathed out, his face tense again. I steeled myself for a fight, for the fight that would start when he told me again to stop investigating. But all he said was “Research.”

  “Yeah. That barn where I found Patrick isn’t on Leamon’s land. It’s across the property line. It’s on the land where that house was burned down.”

  “So Leamon was trespassing.”

  I shook my head impatiently. “That doesn’t matter. The land is owned by this company, Gorgon Six LLC. It doesn’t own any other properties in the state, but I found some other companies that I think are related.”

  “Gorgon Six?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And there are others.”

  “Okay. What do they have to do with the kid?”

  “There might be a marijuana grow at one—”

  “Where?” Darren said, suddenly all business.

  “Place just north of the Res, out east. But there’s nothing there yet. Probably won’t ever be now.”

  Darren frowned.

  “There was a crew up there. They were building a fence. One of them said there was a crop that had to be behind an electric fence.”

  “How do you know it has anything to do with Beale?”

  “I looked up the property; it’s owned by another company, Gorgon Four. And the same lawyer is connected to that place and the one where Patrick was found. Jack C. Wyatt.”

  Darren’s lip curled. “He was Meredith’s lawyer in the divorce.”

  “What? But he’s a … I don’t know what he is, but he’s not a divorce lawyer.”

  His lip still curled, Darren nodded. “Yeah, he is. A real prick too, but my guy rolled over him. That’s why I got the house.”

  “But he’s involved. His name is all over the documents.”

  Darren shook his head. “No, he’s small time. Maybe he filed some stuff, but that’s it.”

  I clenched my jaw, ground my teeth. “You think the meth is small time too?”

  Darren’s face instantly went blank. “We still talking about Wyatt?”

  I said, “Maybe,” but that didn’t interest him. “Patrick Beale, anyway.”

  Darren picked another piece of gravel out of the dirt, flicked his wrist, skipped the gravel shallowly like a flat rock across the surface of a pond.

  “Patrick was into it, Darren,” I said in a low voice. “I’m not making this up. He had cash. And he had plans to leave.”

  “Everybody’s gotta have a dream.”

  I shook my head. “No one knows where he got the money, who he was working for, what he was doing. Not his parents, not his brother. No one.”

  Darren shrugged.

  “His dad, Darren,” I said, even quieter. “Ed Beale’s blaming himself. He thinks he made the kid stay. He thinks he got his son killed because he made him stay in the Okanogan.”

  “Survivor’s guilt.”

  “Survivor’s guilt?” I snapped.

  Darren’s jaw tightened.

  “Fuck you,” I said with a sneer, and he finally turned his head, finally looked at me. “Fuck you,” I said again, too loudly. And then I stood up too quickly, and all the blood in my body rushed to my head.

  “You don’t have the right to say that. You don’t have the right to just throw that away,” I shouted, and then a black halo clouded my vision, obliterated the blue sky and the fried trees and the gravel, everything except Darren’s face, hard and dry and fierce.

  And then the halo closed and I stumbled forward. Darren caught my wrist with one hand and the other wrapped around my waist, holding me up.

  “Hey,” he said quietly. “Hey, you okay?”

  “There’s something big here …” The halo was fading, but stars were still bursting. “Something huge.”

  “You’re tired, Camille. You’ve had a shock.” Darren’s left hand was warm and wide on the small of my back, his right hand strong and gentle on my arm. His lips were dry, cracked, just inches from mine …

  “Just trust me,” he said. “Let me do my job.”

  I closed my eyes, shook my head to clear it. “I’m fine.” I opened my eyes, pushed him away. “I’m fine,” I said again, but I swayed like grass in a gale.

  Darren put one arm around me, and then both his arms were around me and I leaned into him, pressed my cheek against the rough cloth of his uniform, my forehead into the soft skin of his neck.

  At that moment, I wanted to tell him about the night before, about the explosion, about how I was back there, back in Iraq, with the noise and the fire and the black, acrid smoke. I wanted to tell him about how I took up my weapon and almost fired. Wanted to tell him about Sophie, how I’d aimed my rifle at her, how I didn’t see her—didn’t really see her—until it was almost too late. But I knew how that would turn out. So I told him what happened after.

  “I sent her away, Darren.”

  “Who?”

  “Sophie,” I whispered.

  “Where is she?”

  “Michigan, with my aunt, Mom’s sister. Lyle took her. He’s taking her to Seattle, to the airport.”

  Darren held me more tightly then, pressed his cheek against my head and waited for me to breathe again. “She’ll be fine,” he said. “It’s better this way. We’ll figure it out and then she’ll come home.”

  I looked up, looked him in the eye. And for a moment … for a moment, there was something there, something for me. But all I could think of was what I had done.

  * * *

  Rhonda’s fiancé loaned me a truck, an ancient Bronco he could spare from the orchards for a c
ouple of weeks. Its springs creaked and its old four-cylinder whined the second the speedometer hit forty miles an hour, but it was transportation.

  Darren had told me to stay home, to keep my head down and let him do his job. Instead, I took the Bronco back into the hills, through the orchards that climbed their flanks, all the way to an unnamed back road, and then onto a pressed gravel driveway. At the end, I parked it behind an old shed with peeling yellow paint, and sat there until the cloud of road dust had blown away. I sat a while longer and stared up at a house with white siding and dust-streaked windows and a porch that sagged a little on the north side. In the yard behind it, the silver leaves of aspens fluttered like ghosts.

  I slammed the truck door behind me, padded across the dirt drive, and walked up the creaking front steps. Like I’d done a million times before, I slotted my key into the lock, then pushed open the door. In the front hall, the air was hot and dry and smelled of old clothes and old food and fresh paint, just like it always had. And when I pushed the door shut behind me, the glass rattled in a way that was so familiar my blood ran cold.

  Home.

  My parents’ home, and then my father’s home and Sophie’s home, and then no one’s home. But if I listened carefully, if I closed my eyes, I could still feel them all like there was only a moment, only a shred of space and time, between us. If I only listened hard enough, I’d hear my mother’s fingers tapping on the keyboard of her computer in the back room, where it was so cold in the winter that she wore fingerless gloves while she typed her manifestos. I’d hear the tractor’s engine rumbling outside, and then the sudden silence when it shut off. I’d hear my father’s footsteps on the back porch, the thwack of the old wooden screen door slapping shut behind him, his footsteps on the hall floor, and his voice humming something soft and country. I’d smell the dirt and the fertilizer and that fleeting scent of green leaves and ripe apples as he walked past me into the kitchen. And if I waited just a moment longer, I’d hear little footsteps above me, then running down the stairs, pounding with joy and excitement. My heart would quicken and I’d smile, grin with joy, and Sophie would dart down the hall, and there’d be a little squeal of delight and a whiff of the Johnson & Johnson’s that my little girl always smelled like back then, back before everything broke.

  But everything did.

  And in the space of a moment, I wasn’t there anymore: I was standing in an old house that smelled like time.

  I sucked up the snot streaming down my nose and wiped away the tears. Then I turned into the kitchen, went to the door by the old electric stove, and opened it, then pulled the chain on the bare lightbulb screwed into the wall. But the electricity had been switched off since May, since Dad’s funeral, so I climbed down the stairs in the half-light that seeped in through the narrow window above the washer and dryer.

  By the light of my cell phone, I wove my way through the racks of stuff in the basement. My mother’s books, her articles and research, copies of all the crap she wrote for all the campaigns she waged: farmer’s rights, worker’s rights, clean water rights. Everything. And I kept going, past the racks full of Dad’s fishing gear and our old tent and the tidy row of sleeping bags. It got darker the farther in I went, but I knew exactly where I was going. I knew exactly which box of supplies I needed from the shelves lining the north wall. Which weapons I needed from the heavy gun safe to replace the Glock that had gone up with my truck. How the smooth wooden stock of the shotgun Dad had used in the orchards felt under my fingers; how the butt of the Beretta M9 I’d bought at a pawn shop when I was fresh from the field settled comfortingly into the palm of my hand.

  When I had packed it all into my old duffel, when I had raided the ammunition that Dad wouldn’t need for hunting season that year, wouldn’t need ever again, I pulled the last box, a small one, off the top shelf. Inside, my medals rested on black velvet: red, white, blue. Yellow. Purple. I pushed them aside, pulled out my dog tags. At first, the chain was cold on my neck, but moments later the metal was warm, warm as blood.

  * * *

  Sophie called me from the airport in Seattle. Flight announcements and chatter buzzed in the background, but her voice was loud and clear and fearless. Icy, angry, accusatory. Hours later, she had gone far enough to hate me again.

  I understood.

  * * *

  Late that night, I sat in the kitchen with a glass of ice water, my work laptop open on the table, flipping through the photos I had downloaded from Sophie’s phone the week before and the ones I had paid some shady friend of Lyle’s two hundred bucks to pull off the wreckage that afternoon. Most were the same, but in the thirty-six hours after I’d given the phone back and before it was crushed, she had taken several more: a melancholy shot of Patrick Beale’s coffin on the fifty-yard line, the midmorning sun harsh and glaring on the white lilies piled on top; candid glimpses of teenagers embracing on the field, their clothes pressed, their hair glossy, their eyes puffy and red. Then silly shots of girls in black, sitting at a diner, pulling ridiculous faces, boys in blue buttondowns drinking milkshakes.

  And the last two. First, through a dusty plate-glass window, a window in the same diner maybe, a black Suburban with a red stripe through its belly and a dark-haired man with a tattoo on his neck in the driver’s seat. Nick. And the last shot from inside the Suburban, the photo that turned the blood in my veins into rivers of ice: Nick behind the wheel, his brown skin dark against upholstery that was red like dried blood. He was facing the camera, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, his hand reaching out toward the phone. And through his fingers, glimpsed through a sliver of air, another man in the back seat, blond stubble and shiny skin stretched tight over his tanned skull. The lieutenant.

  But who was he?

  He had been at the party, at that lawyer’s office, in the video. But he wasn’t eating ice cream at Hank’s the week before. And here he was again, in a position of power—chauffeured by Nick. And my daughter. My daughter. Suspicious enough to take photos. Worthless enough to let go after flipping off the lieutenant at the party. Threat enough to crush her phone. And daring enough to get into the Suburban. My daughter.

  On another screen, I checked the arrival time of her flight. There was another forty minutes before she would text me to say she had arrived, that my aunt had met her at the airport in Detroit. That she was safe. From them. From me. From herself.

  I closed the window. I closed the files from her phone. I closed my notes and my maps and my video feed. Then I logged into Facebook.

  Mike Havers hadn’t sent any more messages. Then again, I hadn’t responded to his.

  It made sense for him to ignore me. I was just somebody on the internet, picking at his old wounds. He had asked if I was a journalist. Maybe he thought I was going to do some exposé that made his brother look stupid or wrong or guilty. Maybe he’d been burned that way before. I didn’t know. But I had this suspicion that Mike Havers knew something that would help me. So I bluffed.

  On the screen of my laptop, in the Facebook messenger conversation I had started days before, I typed, I have more information.

  But Mike Havers wasn’t stirring.

  So, I waited. For the next breath of breeze to filter in through the window and dry the sweat on my neck. For Mike Havers to come online, to tell me I was right, to validate my dreams and my suspicions about his brother and Patrick Beale, about how similarly, how uniquely, they had both died. For Sophie to tell me she was okay, that despite everything I had done and left undone, she still loved me. But there was nothing, not even a whisper.

  Until.

  Around 11 PM, I woke, startled, lifted my head up from the table where it had rested for too long. My left arm was numb, my neck was stiff and screaming, but on the screen of my laptop was the message I had been waiting for: This had better be good.

  With my right hand, I dashed off a response. Someone blew up my truck last night.

  Breathlessly, I watched the message window, hopeful that Mike Havers was still online
. He was. That sucks.

  Then, a few moments later. What does that have to do with my brother?

  It means I’m getting closer.

  To what? Then, the little prick added, You’re wasting my time.

  I started to respond angrily, then stopped myself. I had to give him something to get something.

  Someone else was killed just like your brother.

  Mike’s response was immediate. Who?

  A kid. About his age.

  Where? Iraq?

  No. Washington. Out in the hills.

  So what?

  It was the same. Look, I know, okay? I typed that fast, then hesitated. The images of Paul Havers and Patrick Beale rotting at the end of the rope surged in my head. The putrid smell swept into my nostrils. The buzzing of the flies …

  “No,” I said aloud. “No,” I said again as I stood quickly, my left arm still stinging while the blood surged and the nerve endings reconnected.

  Mike’s response appeared. I don’t think you know shit.

  “Oh yeah?” I shouted to my silent apartment, then bent forward and pounded out a response.

  I know how your brother died. I found his body.

  I hit “Enter” before I could second-guess myself.

  Outside, a coyote howled. On the screen, my cursor blinked lazily.

  You’re lying.

  I wasn’t lying, but I might have been manufacturing the story. I screwed my eyes shut, pressed my fingers into the ridge of my brow. Stars burst behind my eyelids. I opened them, squinted, groping for the memories I needed to get what I wanted from Mike Havers. There was nothing there except my dreams. Everything else was a blank slate. But I had to start somewhere. Had to get him comfortable enough to tell me what I needed to know.

  I did recoveries, I typed on the screen.

  Recoveries of what?

  Bodies, I typed, then added, Soldiers.

  Bits and pieces, I didn’t say. Torn limbs and bloody stumps and holes blown clean through their chests. But sometimes … sometimes there would be a guy slumped over against a building or in a Humvee, a soldier who looked perfect, his helmet on, his hands ready on his weapon. Like he was asleep. Until you pulled him away and saw the blood that trickled from his nose, his eyes that stared at nothing.