Little Falls

by Elizabeth Lewes

  I retreated to the rear of the barn, then sidled along the side wall to the first of the windows. I crouched down, positioned the viewfinder of my phone’s camera in the corner where it wasn’t likely to be seen by anyone inside. The screen showed the view: roof beams strung with spider webs sagging under a thick layer of dirt, and below them, a black Dodge pickup and a black and red Chevy Suburban. In the corner of the screen, just barely visible, was a floor-to-ceiling cabinet. I tilted the phone to see more of the rear wall: more cabinets—a whole wall of them, in fact. But only one was locked tight with a shiny new padlock.

  I tested the window, but it was wedged tight. So were all the others on that wall. I skirted the backside of the barn, peered around the corner and—shit. The windows on that side of the barn were within view of the camera on the other building. Which meant that the front of the barn was also within view. I retreated, tested the windows again, and when that failed, snapped several photos through them. Better than nothing.

  That’s when I heard the familiar crackle of static on a CB radio, the familiar thump of a steel-toed boot on packed dirt.

  I halted, crouched. Waited.

  A male voice drawled on the radio, but the volume was too low to make out what was said. There was no response, just more footsteps. Then, a moment later, the jangling of keys.

  I darted to the other side of the barn, the one within camera range, threw myself to the ground, and squinted through a clump of tall, brown grass out into the clearing.

  A tall kid in jeans that billowed around his bony legs and a dirty yellow T-shirt that hung loose off his shoulders stood at the door to the metal building. He selected a key, slid it into the lock. He looked right, looked left. I lay in the dirt perfectly still, perfectly motionless; his eyes slid right over the barn and I risked adjusting my phone to try to get a photo. He turned the key, opened the door outward, and paused. There was another transmission over the radio, this one clearer, though I still heard only two words: “county” and “visitor.” I held my breath.

  The guy in yellow lifted the radio to his mouth and said, “This is Donovan. I’ll take care of it—gimme a minute.”

  Like hell I would.

  I ran.

  * * *

  Closer. I was getting closer.

  On my phone, I had photos of the truck and the Suburban, even a few of the guy called Donovan. But time was short. I had been careful to take Rhonda’s car and I had worn a ball cap pulled down low, but someone would recognize me. Maybe not immediately, but they would. I said I was paranoid. I was—still am—paranoid. But I felt this in my bones, knew in the pit of my stomach that this was personal and that someone was determined to shut me down. I didn’t know why they hadn’t already killed me, but I knew I had a target on my back now.

  Omak.

  The brakes squealed when I tapped them on the hill on the way in and again at every stop sign on the shady residential streets on the west side of downtown. Kids in new clothes for the new school year strolled down the streets in threes and twos and on their own. They were mostly young, twelve or thirteen. A dirty, dented brown hatchback passed, a couple of older kids in the front seat. The girl in the passenger seat looked like Sophie—long black hair, creamy brown skin—but her face was clean, glowing, her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. And instead of a skimpy top, she wore a soccer jersey.

  A crossing guard in an orange reflective vest held up a limp yellow flag, carelessly entered the crosswalk. I slammed on the brakes and felt them give way before they grabbed. The guard—a pimply, skinny kid who probably waved a flag around just to feel important—shot me a dirty look. But I was busy watching the kids loitering outside the high school across the street. They were just kids, flirting and talking and carrying on. Glad to be back after the summer break, gladder to be done for the day. I had been there once—there, standing right where they were standing now, under that tree, next to that bike rack. And my daughter—

  The crossing guard was shouting. The horn of the car behind me blared. I lifted my foot from the brake; the car behind me jumped, swerved around me. A kid with scruffy blond hair and a football jersey leaned out the window, shouting. A couple of girls on the other side of the intersection jumped back onto the curb, yelled after him.

  I coasted through the intersection, took it slow past the high school, then punched the gas and beat it out of town.

  Forty minutes later, I pulled into the back lot of my mart in Little Falls. Rhonda was waiting for me on a plastic green and white folding chair set in the middle of the gravel lot, her face glowing like coal. She started yelling at me before I stopped the car, closed the distance to the driver’s door before I had it open, and held her hand out for the keys. I dropped them into her palm.

  She threw the keys of the Bronco against the wall of the building while chewing me out for stealing her car. “Borrow for a couple of hours doesn’t mean a couple of days, Camille!”

  I closed the driver’s door of her little red sedan and walked to the building, stooped to retrieve the keys to the truck. She kept screaming about how I was supposed to call and tell her when she’d get her car back. How I was supposed to at least tell someone that I was still alive.

  I nodded as I got to my feet and said, “Alright, I will. Next time.”

  She sputtered, declared that there would be no next time, that I had a kid to think of, demanded to know where Sophie was, anyway.

  At the door to the apartment, my shoulders tensed as I inserted the key into the deadbolt. Quietly, I said, “In Michigan. With my aunt.”

  That shut Rhonda up, at least for a moment. But as I slipped inside the door, she called after me.

  “Your boss has called three times this week. He wants to know if you’re ever gonna do any more inspections. He wants to know if you quit or he should fire you.”

  I stopped just long enough to say, “Tell him I’ll call him back.” Then I shut the door.

  Upstairs in the apartment, I dropped my keys on the table, opened the windows, and collapsed onto the sofa. I don’t know how long I sat there, head in my hands, staring at the cheap, fuzzed carpet, but when I looked up, it was almost dark.

  Snatches of television—some sitcom with a manic laugh track—drifted through the open windows with the smoky, thick scent of burgers grilling over charcoal. My stomach growled. But the apartment was empty. Silent. Stale. On the table, my notes were shoved into folders. In the kitchen, the counters were bare. There was just me, breathing in the dark. Just like it had always been. Before Sophie, anyway.

  The blank white door to her room was shut; I hadn’t gone in since she’d left. But now I crept inside, softly, tentatively, like it was a holy shrine. I picked up a T-shirt she’d tossed aside and held it to my chest. I sat down on her unmade bed and stared out the window and watched the shadows of the houses across the street lengthen. And then I pulled my phone out of my pocket and dialed.

  She answered on the last ring, out of breath, distracted. She wasn’t happy to hear my voice, not that she should have been. I’d abandoned her again, left her with an aunt she barely knew. Hell, I hadn’t even spoken to her since I’d sent her away. And before that … before that, she’d been at the wrong end of my rifle.

  “How are you?” I asked, hesitantly.

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Everything going okay with Aunt Martha?”

  “Yeah.”

  Silence. I listened to her breathe.

  “What do you want?” she said eventually. But she wasn’t angry, not even annoyed. She sounded bored, like she had much better things to do.

  “Nothing,” I said. Then, before she could say anything else, before she could hang up, “What do you, uh … what do you think of Ann Arbor?”

  “Oh, it’s,” Sophie said distantly, distractedly. “It’s nice, I guess.”

  “Have you met any other kids yet?”

  “Kids?” she said, like she was insulted by the very term. “Yeah, I’ve met lots of people.”


  “Oh. I didn’t realize classes had started.”

  Silence, but I could almost hear the wheels turning in her brain. “Well … maybe? The ones I’ve met are, like, eighteen. Maybe they start earlier?”

  “Tell me about them,” I prompted. “These kids you’ve met. Tell me about them.”

  “They’re just, you know, people.”

  “And they’re college students?”

  “Some of them,” she said defensively. “Yeah, one of them’s a history major.”

  “That’s a life skill.”

  She laughed a little. Back then, she had this laugh that was buoyant, but deep and strong. A laugh that didn’t hold back. It was a lot like her grandmother’s. My mother’s. But then there was other laughter, other voices in the background, indistinct, muffled, like a party someone was trying to keep quiet.

  “What’s going on? It sounds like there are people over.”

  “What? No, no one’s here. It’s just the TV,” she said, then shouted away from the phone, “Hey, can you turn it down?” There was another voice then, a male voice, gruff and angry. Sophie, her voice soft, submissive, answering, “Yeah, sure. I’ll just—I’ll just go outside.”

  A screen door opened, the metal latch clattering, then the door squeaked and shut with a bang. Her heels—bare, I would have guessed—thudded softly on wooden boards that whined even under her slight weight. A hush fell.

  “Who was that?” I said.

  “No one,” she snapped. But at least she didn’t tell me it was the TV.

  “Martha have a boyfriend?” I asked, laughing a little despite—or maybe because of—the growing tension.

  “What?” Sophie said, distracted. “Uh, yeah. Sure.”

  For a few seconds, I listened to the whoosh of her breath on the phone’s receiver. She was breathing fast, like I’d caught her in the middle of something. In the background, the wind sighed and a hawk screamed and—

  “Hey, what happened to all the numbers on your phone?” Sophie asked suddenly.

  “What do you mean?” I said, startled.

  “The numbers. You know, like my phone number and Grandpa’s.”

  “I don’t save them,” I said carefully. “Why?”

  “Oh,” Sophie said. “So you, um, you know everyone’s numbers by heart?”

  “Yeah, it helps me to remember,” I said. “Why?”

  “Oh, nothing,” she said dismissively. “It’s just that someone’s been calling today. It’s a local number, but I didn’t answer it.”

  “A local number?” I said, confused.

  “Yeah, I mean, local back home. You know, five-oh-nine—whatever.”

  “Oh,” I said. “But you answered when I called.”

  “Well, yeah. I recognize your work cell.”

  I frowned, glanced around her room. There were photos of her friends tacked to the walls. A few paperback books—pages splayed, spines bent beyond repair—were on the floor with her dirty clothes. Her ridiculous pink backpack sat open on the floor, a couple of glossy new spiral-bound notebooks spilling out of it. My frown deepened, my mind spun.

  “Who do you need to get ahold of?” I asked.

  “No one,” she said quickly. “I was just—I was just wondering who it was. They just kept calling and calling.”

  “Huh,” I said. “What was the number?”

  “Just a sec,” she said, then recited the number, her voice distant like she was reading it off the phone. Darren. It was his cell number. But he knew Sophie had my personal phone. He knew I only had my county cell. Why was he calling Sophie?

  I stood up, paced the room.

  “Do you recognize it?” Sophie asked.

  “No,” I lied. Then I halted, staring at the shelf above Sophie’s desk. The photo she had had on her phone—the phone that had been run over—was tacked to the edge of the shelf. Except it was bigger than it had been on her phone. In the copy on the shelf, Patrick and Sophie stared out, their eyes glazed—just drunk, I hoped—but in the background, other kids were laughing and drinking from red plastic cups. And far behind Patrick and Sophie, standing in the yellow pool of somebody’s back porch light, was a kid who looked very, very familiar.

  “I saw Todd Beale yesterday,” I said, interrupting Sophie’s attempt to hang up.

  Silence.

  “Who?” Sophie said, cautiously.

  “Todd Beale.”

  “Oh. Where?”

  “At the cemetery.”

  “Oh,” she said, like she was happy he was there.

  “You go to school with him, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. He, uh, he tutored me in Spanish last year.”

  “You ever hang out with him?” I took the photo off the shelf, studied it under the light. “Socially, I mean. Maybe when you were seeing Patrick.”

  Silence. Then Sophie said quietly, quiet as a mouse, “No.”

  Really.

  “What’s he like?” I said.

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “He and Patrick hang out a lot? Go to the same parties, maybe?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  Sure.

  “You know, I never asked you,” I said casually, “how did you meet Patrick anyway? Did Todd introduce you to him?”

  “No.” Then she added, irritably, “Anyway, why does it matter? Patrick’s dead.”

  “I thought—”

  “You thought what?”

  I had thought a lot of things. About how I was shocked that my daughter had been fucking a nineteen-year-old who had his own place, how she had been out partying all the time, with God knew what substances flowing through her bloodstream. How she had gotten so cold, so angry, and so wild. But at that moment, the only thing I was thinking was how messed up it was that she didn’t care that Patrick Beale was dead. That she had put his death into a box, tied it with a neat bow, and put it on the shelf with all her other memories and dreams. That she had taken so much after me.

  “Nothing,” I lied.

  The screen door on Sophie’s end of the line opened again, then she muffled the phone, exchanged a few words with a male. I strained to hear, to figure out if it was the same voice I had heard a few minutes before, but he was too quiet or too far from the phone. And again, Sophie’s voice was soft, submissive, like when she was little and she wanted something. But this time, I noticed the fear.

  “Who is that?” I demanded.

  Sophie didn’t respond, but then I heard all I needed to hear: from somewhere inside the building she had walked out of—a laugh, a unique laugh that was shrill and braying like a donkey that had been sucking down helium. A stoner’s laugh. A loser’s laugh. I knew that laugh. And it didn’t belong in Michigan.

  “So, tell me about Ann Arbor,” I said, careful in case I was wrong. “What do you like about the campus?”

  “Um …” She stalled, panic saturating her voice. “It’s, uh, really green.”

  Like every college campus in every photo everywhere.

  “What do you think about Weatherford Hall?” I said, baiting her. “Aunt Martha shows everyone Weatherford Hall. It’s her favorite building on campus.”

  “Yeah, it’s great,” Sophie said. “Really, um, classic and stuff. Great columns.”

  She was lying. There is no Weatherford Hall at the University of Michigan. At least there hadn’t been when I’d spent a semester there.

  “Where are you, Sophie?” I said, my voice low, threatening.

  “At Aunt Martha’s place,” she said quickly. “In Ann Arbor.”

  “Her house is in Milan.”

  “Yeah, I mean—I meant near Ann Arbor.”

  “Is she still up?” I said nicely, almost syrupy. “I’d like to say hello.”

  “No!” Sophie said. “No, she’s already in bed.”

  “So who was watching TV?”

  “She was. She was watching TV, but she went up to bed right after I went outside. That was her at the door a minute ago. That was her saying good night.”


  That, at least, was almost believable. Under other circumstances, anyway.

  “Alright.”

  “And I should go to bed too.” Sophie yawned dramatically. “It’s late.”

  “Alright,” I said again, squeezing the word through clenched teeth, thin lips.

  “So, good night.” Then as though she was asking permission—something she never did—she added, “Okay?”

  “Yeah. Good night.”

  I called my aunt, called her even though it was almost eleven in Michigan. She was surprised to hear my voice and still up, still watching the news. But Sophie wasn’t. And no one was laughing.

  * * *

  I got to the Beale house a little before ten. I had already called all of Sophie’s friends, the ones I knew about anyway. No one knew anything, or at least nothing they would tell me. Maybe Sophie had pulled the wool over their eyes as well, spun them a story just like she had for my aunt.

  I got it all from Martha that night. How Sophie had called a few hours after my panicked call the night my truck had gone up in flames. She’d told Martha I’d calmed down and changed my mind. We were both okay, but I was busy with the mart and finding a new truck, and Martha shouldn’t worry. How Sophie had even called her again the next day, sounding sweet and upbeat, and they had talked for fifteen minutes about nothing in particular, just like old friends. How Sophie reminded Martha so much of me, and I should be careful of her and keep her close. I should remember the choices my own mother had made and learn from them. I thanked her and hung up, her words ringing in my ears like a funeral bell.

  I called the airline, tried to pry out of them whether Sophie had ever even boarded the plane to Detroit. They wouldn’t tell me anything—privacy laws or some shit like that required a birth certificate and someone to review it, to check that I was really her mother. But there was no time for that, even if I had had a way to send it to them electronically. I called the cellular company, but the phone I had given Sophie was too old to track.