Where the Truth Lies

by Anna Bailey

  At least when she drinks, time seems to loosen its hold over her. When she drinks, Emma feels that maybe she could be a day closer to… what? It’s been two weeks now, and Abigail is still gone.

  I just want to live a little. That was what Abigail had said.

  Emma flops back into the nest of throws and quilts. The shadows of the rain rolling down the windowpanes make it feel as if the whole RV is melting around them. Rat perches beside her and they pass the bottle back and forth between them. Emma’s head feels large and heavy, and she wonders if she’ll ever be able to get it to stand back up again, or if she even cares. She gazes up at the ceiling: a mosaic of eclectic nonsense, some of which Rat points out to her; other parts he discreetly ignores. There are sections of maps, almost entirely Europe, and some have towns and cities ringed in colored pencil. The twinkle in his grandmother’s eyes and the heavy slope of his father’s brow are preserved forever in various photographs. Postcards of the Colosseum, stony English villages, and Romanian castles with their Gothic towers intersect with yellowing pages of classic novels, torn out and staked to the ceiling like dead butterflies.

  “Who are you?” Emma asks him.

  “I’m like you, drăgută.” He runs a finger around the rim of the bottle. “I’m on the outside.”

  She considers this for a moment. “Is that why you let me drink with you?”

  “So many questions.”

  “I saw you, you know. That night at the Tall Bones.”

  Rat’s so close she can feel the warmth of him in the air between them, can smell the trace of cigarette smoke and incense that clings to his clothes. The thing she remembers most about her father is his legs, walking past her, always past her, and it occurs to her now, nestled against this warm, musty body, that this is the closest she has ever really been to a man. In the silence, she hears her heartbeat keeping time with the rain clamoring on the metal roof.

  At last Rat says, “I know.”

  The taste of alcohol on her tongue makes Emma bold. “And we’re just never going to talk about it?”

  He sighs, fishing a battered pack of Marlboros from the pocket of his jeans. “It’s not for me to talk about.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Emma watches him light up a cigarette like they’re having any old conversation. “You know”—she leans on her elbow, jabbing a finger at him—“you’ve got no family, no friends, no job, as far as anyone can tell. Nobody knows anything about you except what they’ve heard from someone else. And you’re only, what, twenty-five? Twenty-six? You don’t think you’re going to turn heads in a place like this? You just happen to show up here and then a few months later my best friend goes missing, and you don’t think people are going to ask questions?”

  Rat drags lazily on his Marlboro, the light glinting off the rings on his fingers.

  “I think,” Emma says, “that maybe you should have some answers ready, just in case things get ugly.”

  “Do things usually get ugly around here?”

  “I’ve seen it get bad for some people.” In the back of her mind she catches glimpses of her father again, of burly brown arms and fresh bruises, of blood on broken glass. “It’s like you said, we’re on the outside.”

  Rat sighs and shuffles around to face her. He takes hold of her shoulders in both hands, and for one terrifying moment she thinks he’s about to start shaking her, but instead he leans forward and presses a kiss to her forehead.

  There’s nothing romantic about it—it feels almost parental—but it makes her catch her breath.

  “I like you,” he says, very matter-of-fact. “But let’s get something straight: if we’re going to do this, if you’re going to keep coming here, then the questions have to stop. You have to stop, or I’ll cut you off, you understand? I’m allowed my secrets, drăgută, just like you have yours.”

  Emma watches his pale throat bobbing as he takes a long swallow from the bottle. When he’s finished, he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and gives the whiskey back to her.

  “I don’t have any secrets.” She thinks she could get cut just meeting his gaze.

  “Yes, you do.”

  He reaches for his grandmother’s guitar once more, as if he has to fill the silence left by all the things they haven’t said.

  5

  Sheriff Gains looks as though he’s been carved from wood and then left out in the rain. He is not an old man—Jude knows he is barely forty—but he smells like the forest, all pine resin and woodsmoke, and somehow that makes him seem ancient. Standing in the Blakes’ living room, he flips through his notebook with his bear-trap-mangled hand, and picks at the scab of Abigail’s absence.

  “Now, you said before that you didn’t know she was planning on going to the Tall Bones.” His vowels have a nasal Kansas drag, and maybe that’s why God made him so tall, Jude thinks. So that he could stand in the middle of some great cornfield and still see over the top. “Are you boys absolutely sure about that?”

  Jude glances at Noah, but his brother just shrugs, two fingers buried in the pages of Thomas Mann to mark his place, as if to reassure himself that he can return to that world anytime. Noah shakes his head, so Jude does the same.

  “Abigail doesn’t normally go to parties,” Noah adds. “Sir.”

  From his balding armchair, Samuel Blake snorts loudly. “Haven’t we already been over this, Chief?”

  Gains’s face gives nothing away, but he ignores Samuel, talking gently to Jude and Noah instead. “I know last week you were all in a state of shock, and sometimes it can be difficult to remember the details. We’re just following up, in case there’s anything new that’s come to you in the last few days. For instance…” He turns over another page in his notebook. “Do you know if she was meeting anyone at the party?”

  “She’s friends with that little Mexican brat,” says Samuel. “Always following Abi around. She’s the one you ought to be questioning, not my boys.”

  Jude watches his mother nibble at her fingernails. She is staring at a framed square of embroidery on the mantelpiece that reads: Proverbs 14:25: A true witness delivereth souls, but a deceitful witness speaketh lies.

  “That’d be Emma Alvarez, would it?” says Gains.

  “Who else? Ain’t too many Mexicans in Whistling Ridge.”

  Jude’s face feels heavy. It’s been only a day, and the bruise around his eye shows no sign of fading, but he wishes his mother had let him go to school all the same. As lonely as school can be for Jude Blake, son of a drunk, anywhere is better than this house.

  His mother didn’t have time to daub him with concealer before Gains knocked on the door, but her hasty explanation of “He fell down the stairs, would you believe!” seems to pass, even though it’s the standard excuse. One of the accompanying deputies even laughed, and why wouldn’t he? Falling down the stairs. It’s the sort of thing that only happens in cartoons.

  “I’ve already spoken to Miss Alvarez,” says Gains. “She said Abigail went into the woods with a boy, but she’s not too clear about who it was. Would you know anything about that? Has Abigail been seeing someone?”

  He looks at them all in turn: Jude and Noah together on the couch, Samuel slouched in his chair, Dolly propped up in the doorway, every now and then casting her eyes toward the hall and the big gemstone cross.

  Overhead Jude can hear the floorboards creaking as officers search Abigail’s room for the second time. Every so often he forgets it’s them and his heart picks up at the familiar sound of someone moving around in his sister’s space. Then he remembers, and his fingernails leave little crescents in the meat of his palms.

  “Seeing someone?” Samuel sits up straighter. “Our Abi? The hell she has.”

  Dolly frowns. “I think what my husband’s trying to say is that Abigail is a little young to have a boyfriend.”

  “I know what I’m trying to say, woman. Abi’s a good girl, a God-fearing girl, doesn’t go messing around with boys.”

  “Mr. Blake,” s
ays Gains, “your daughter is almost eighteen.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” Samuel narrows his eyes, but the sheriff turns his attention to Dolly.

  “Are any of your daughter’s things missing? I know we had a look at her room before, but I expect you have a better sense of her belongings than we do. Anything you’ve noticed in the last couple of weeks? Any of her clothes gone, perhaps?”

  “What’s this?” Dolly stares at him. “Why would any of Abigail’s clothes be missing?”

  Jude watches the sheriff rub the stumps of his fingers on his disfigured hand.

  “Well now, in cases like these, kids of this age… it’s possible that Abigail left town of her own accord.”

  “Not a chance,” says Samuel. “I hope to hell that’s not the best you’ve got, Gains.”

  Jude hopes it is. He hopes that, if she has to be gone, then Abigail has just run away. The two of them used to watch cop shows on her computer, so he knows what they say: after seventy-two hours, the chances of finding a missing person alive go way down. In two weeks there are 336 hours. Jude knows this because he looked it up. He also looked up how long it takes for a dead body to decay. The website he found had a timeline, so now he knows that in 336 hours—if she really is dead—his sister’s internal organs will have begun to rot, her body will have bloated, and foam will have leaked from her mouth and nose. In a few more weeks, her nails and teeth will fall out. In a month, she will begin to turn into liquid. Jude desperately wants to know if this is all some lie spread by the internet, but he doesn’t have the heart to ask his mother.

  Footsteps on the stairs seem to give the whole living room the excuse they need to let go of a collective breath. A deputy with a big mustache appears at the door beside Dolly, wearing latex gloves, brandishing a beat-up notebook.

  “We found the girl’s diary, sir,” he announces.

  Jude doesn’t like the hint of a smile curling under that mustache, or the way he called Abigail “the girl,” as if this is all some game at which they have managed to beat her.

  “But Abigail doesn’t have a diary.” Dolly’s eyes dart from Gains to her husband.

  Wincing, Jude hauls himself up on his stick and hobbles over to try to comfort his mother. She does not look at him, but she grips his hand so tight it starts to hurt. Samuel gives the slightest roll of his eyes and mutters something under his breath. The deputy doesn’t even look at them as he brushes past, handing the notebook to Gains. “Found it jammed between the slats in the bed frame,” he says. “Thought it might be an old one, but there are dates from this summer.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Jude sees his brother’s jaw clench.

  The sheriff nods, already leafing through the dog-eared pages. Jude has never seen the book before.

  “Some of the pages have been torn out here,” says Gains. “And again, later on. Looks like they would have been the last entries. Know anything about that?”

  Samuel scratches at the whiskers on his chin. “Teenagers get mad, tear shit up all the time.”

  “Any reason why your daughter might be particularly angry, Mr. Blake?”

  “No,” Dolly answers instead. Jude feels her wedding ring pressing its shape into his knuckles. “Abi has always been a happy girl.”

  He sees her glance at the embroidery on the mantelpiece again. A deceitful witness…

  “Well, then.” Gains tucks the notebook under his arm. “I’ll hang on to this for the time being, if you folks don’t mind. You let me know if those missing pages turn up.”

  Samuel doesn’t get up to show Gains and the other officers out, but Noah at least does them the courtesy of accompanying them to the door, followed by Jude and his mother. Perhaps, in his own sulky way, he understands it will go easier for them if they can at least pretend to be a normal family.

  Halfway out of the door, however, Gains turns back. “One last thing, Mrs. Blake. We found a shell casing up near the Tall Bones, 9mm semiautomatic, by the look of it.”

  He pauses, like he’s expecting something, but Dolly seems confused.

  “A gun? My daughter doesn’t know how to use a gun.”

  She sounds so convincing, Jude almost believes her.

  “You don’t have a handgun on the property? Perhaps your husband, or your son here.” Gains gestures to Noah, who tenses all over again.

  Dolly juts out her chin. “No, we certainly do not.”

  “Our dad has an old rifle,” Jude offers. “It’s a souvenir from ’Nam, but he keeps it locked up.”

  “Very wise.” Gains nods. “Ah, well. I’m just covering my bases, Mrs. Blake.” He puts on his hat, which is shaped too much like a cowboy hat for Jude to take him seriously anymore. “Soon as we hear anything, you’ll be the first to know.”

  The moment they close the door on Gains, Noah is already reaching for his boots and shrugging into his big corduroy jacket.

  Dolly stares at him. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Out.”

  “Just like you were out the night your sister disappeared? Where do you keep running off to, Noah? Don’t think we haven’t noticed.”

  “Mom, I’m twenty-two, I can go out if I want.”

  Jude looks pleadingly at them both, willing them, as hard as he can, not to fight. Not now. Not today, when Abigail’s teeth and nails could be falling out.

  Noah reaches for the door handle. “What do you even want me here for, Mom? What fun family activity did you have planned?”

  Their mother’s little shoulders sag slightly. Don’t talk to her like that, Jude wants to say. Don’t talk to her like Dad does. But he wants Noah to be friends with him again, like he was when they were younger, like he was before, so he says nothing.

  “I thought we could pray for Abi,” Dolly says hopefully.

  Noah is looking at the shoes piled up under the coat rack—Abigail’s cowgirl boots, Abigail’s sandals, Abigail’s real leather brogues that she wears to church. His face grows harder the longer he stares, and Jude thinks he looks like their father. “Do whatever you want,” he mutters, and slams the door on his way out.

  Back in the living room, their mother sighs as she braces herself against the mantelpiece, eyeing the embroidery once again. A true witness delivereth souls. It was something Abi made at Sunday School. Jude settles back onto the couch and closes his eyes, blocking out the stitching. He has indeed witnessed something, but it will be many days before he realizes what it means.

  6

  THEN

  Why don’t you go back to Mexico like your dad?”

  In some ways, it is almost a relief. All through school Emma has whittled herself down, shaving off the thick dark hair on her arms until her skin is chafed and scabby, coating her face in foundation just a shade too light, puking up meals in the hope of shedding the weight on her thighs, trying to reshape herself into something they might find less objectionable, but it has never made any difference. Standing in her junior prom dress on this May evening, the hair that Abigail tenderly curled for her coming undone in the crowded heat of the school gym, it is both a punch to the gut and a weight off her shoulders to finally hear them come out and say it: this is why they have always hated her.

  “Dalton Lewis, what the hell did you just say?” Abigail steps up beside her, and Emma almost feels as if she’s watching the scene unfold from outside her body. She must look very small, hunched inward trying to make her arms look skinnier, while Abigail towers next to her, straight and stiff as a preacher’s finger.

  “Relax, Ginger, I wasn’t talking to you.” Dalton Lewis, the pastor’s son, leans back on his heels, a grin stretching his big face like someone put two fishhooks in the corners of his mouth. “You girls got your period or something?” Behind him, Cole Weaver and Bryce Long snicker.

  Emma looks around for a teacher or a chaperone, but the gym is a sea of sweaty faces and crushed plastic cups. She catches sight of the Orozco twins in their matching white dresses, like a pair of stone pillars
, and she begs them with her eyes: Please say something. But she already knows they will stick their noses in the air and whisper something in Spanish, a language they know she cannot speak because her white mother never taught her.

  Her own dress is damp under the armpits already, and suddenly she’s worried that they can see. The clammy feeling makes her stomach turn over. She puts a hand on Abigail’s arm. “Come on, let’s just go.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Dalton sneers. “What time does the last bus out of town leave? You might just make it.”

  “I think it goes at eight,” says blunt-faced Beau Dukes helpfully.

  Dalton ignores him, leaning in closer to Emma as he whispers, “My daddy knows all sorts about what happened to your daddy.”

  His breath smells like hot tarmac, and now she definitely thinks she’s going to hurl. It must show in her face, because Dalton straightens up, his cloak of friends gathering tighter around him. “What’s the matter, Brownie?” he whines, and that’s when Abigail throws her drink in his face.

  By the time any of the teachers notice (“Oh, fruit punch,” laments Carla Paterson, “your mom will have a hell of a time getting those stains out, Dalton.”), Emma and Abigail are already running down the hall, fingers intertwined. They are breathless with laughter and adrenaline and an urge to cry so hard they might pop their eyeballs out of their sockets.

  Out in the parking lot, catching their breath against the cool metal of Emma’s car, they hold each other very close, and in that moment, Emma thinks she loves Abigail more than anything in the world. Not because she threw punch all over Dalton Lewis (although she will recount this story many times to Melissa in the days to come), but because even here, where there is no audience to impress, Abigail lets her sob against her shoulder. She says nothing as Emma’s mascara leaves ugly tracks like black veins all over her prom dress. She has never said a word, over the years, whenever Emma has come to curl against her. Just rubs Emma’s bare arms and kisses the top of her head, leaving sweet notes of strawberry lip balm in her hair.