Where the Truth Lies

by Anna Bailey

  A police car pulls into the parking lot outside the window, and Sheriff Gains emerges, turning up the collar of his jacket and holding his Stetson to his head as the wind assaults him.

  Melissa sits up a little straighter, muttering into her coffee mug, “Well, look who it is.”

  Gains’s jaw is dark with stubble, but Emma remembers that he was clean-shaven when he interviewed her the week before last. He’d put his hand on her shoulder—the hand with three fingers missing—and said: “I know this must be a hell of a time for you.” Now, in the parking lot, he props a cigarette between the stumps of those same fingers and uses his other hand to shield it from the wind. He smokes quickly, hungrily, like it’s a thing of need rather than an aesthetic point (not like Rat), and Emma thinks, He is what a man ought to be.

  Melissa puts down her cup and begins winding her scarf around her neck. “Come on. We can go out through the other door.”

  “Are you avoiding the cops?”

  Melissa makes a low humming sound as she shuffles into her big parka. “Of course I’m not.” She pauses, one arm in the air as she prepares to shake it through her coat sleeve. “I just don’t think he’s… Oh, Em, I’m trapped. Pull my arm through, will you?”

  Emma obliges, still unsure what her mother has to be so nervous about. She is wary of Gains in her own way—the way young women are always wary of older men, the way women of color are wary of police—but he is sort of slow and gentle, like a river. His big dark eyes remind her of a donkey’s, and donkeys always have such sad faces. The sight of the stumpy fingers on his hand opens up some deep well of fondness within her that she doesn’t quite understand. But Melissa’s anxiety is tangible, something in the air that Emma can’t help but inhale, so she finds that she, too, is casting hasty glances out of the window as Gains finishes off his cigarette and flicks the butt away.

  “Mom, why don’t you like Sheriff Gains?”

  Melissa tucks her thick yellow hair up under her hat. “I don’t have an opinion of him.”

  “You didn’t, like, hook up with him, did you?” Emma wrinkles her nose. “Mom, that’s gross.”

  “Not so loud, Em.” Melissa looks around, but the diner is mostly empty. Just big Mo Dukes counting change at the bar, and his daughter Chrissy wiping down tables, working around an unfamiliar couple in anoraks and hiking boots.

  Melissa squares her shoulders, dignity spared for the moment. “No, Em. Certainly not. I just don’t trust him, is all.”

  They head for the other door, the one that leads out onto the little cobbled promenade running alongside the river.

  “How come?” asks Emma.

  “How come what?”

  “How come you don’t trust him?”

  Melissa pulls her coat closer around her throat as they turn into the wind. “Doctor-patient confidentiality. Forget I said anything.”

  THEN

  One day in July, the summer before Abigail vanishes, Melissa is watching the main drag from the clinic break room, trying to catch a little breeze from the open window. The bohemian clothing store on the corner is having a sale—lots of knockoff Native American jewelry, and T-shirts with the town’s elevation printed across a big marijuana leaf along with the slogan “This whole town is high.” Yellow streamers from one of its promotional banners have come loose and now roll down the street, like bright tumbleweed. Melissa sighs. Summer drags, she thinks, but it’s better than fall, when the kids bring animal bones out of the woods, and the valley feels like a mouth full of blood and rainwater, poised on the brink of a question it knows she cannot answer: What are you still doing here?

  An eighteen-wheeler pulls up at the crossroads, stacked high with logs from the lumber mill. The driver’s hairy arm lolls out of the window, his fingers tapping idly on the door to the tune on the radio, which declares that everybody is in love.

  Folded up between Melissa’s loyalty cards and crumpled dollar bills is her husband’s smiling face—smiling because it was their runaway wedding day, and how simple it had all seemed back then. Just pack a bag and hit the road. Drive through the night until daylight emerges with the moon still caught in its teeth, and suddenly you’re in another town, another world, where your parents can’t find you and tear the love of your life right out of your arms. Oh, Miguel. The ache in her chest is too familiar. Can we ever forgive each other?

  She pulls her hair back into a ponytail, tugging hard at the roots to distract herself. She’s about to turn away from the window when something catches her eye. Abigail Blake, wandering expressionless along the sidewalk, bends down to pluck the tumbleweed of yellow streamers from the road. As she does so, Sheriff Gains walks right into her. Melissa watches their mouths move, each laughing slightly, apologizing to the other, and as Abigail turns to go, Gains puts his hand on the small of her back.

  11

  NOW

  If they had met in the wintertime, Noah thinks, things might have been different. By first snow, everyone is already starting to unravel, all wind-bitten and tired. It’s hard to think of anyone erotically when they’re bundled up in layers of scarves, thermals, and fleece jackets. It’s hard to think of yourself in any way at all, when your clothes are soaked through with melted snow, and your hands are pink and raw. In the winter, people just put their heads down and try to keep going until spring. If it had happened in the winter, Noah is certain it wouldn’t have happened at all.

  But summer nights are sensual. They are slow and easy and so very private. You can act out desire among the trees, behind barns, in the shadows, and only the stars will be watching. Night is made for unspeakable longings. Night is made for not speaking at all, but for furtive glances under streetlamps on dusty back roads, for the scent of a lover’s hair, for fingers brushing past fingers in the darkness.

  Now Rat and Noah stand in the remains of the old Winslow property, rooting through the ferns and moss-kissed debris, trying to undo the summer.

  Noah sweeps an assortment of candles—which have melted together to form an unnameable color—into a trash bag, then pauses for a moment to knuckle the small of his back. The Winslow house is the kind of place that seems like it has always been in ruins. Storms and ivy have gotten in through the skeleton roof and torn away great chunks of the walls. Blackened support beams that must have fallen inward during the fire now reach into the open air, while wildflowers spring from the crumbling mortar where some nineteenth-century housewife might once have trained roses.

  Rat straightens up, too, bored of deflating an old air mattress. “This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.”

  Noah sighs, pushing his hair back out of his eyes. “I doubt that.”

  “No, you’re right. One time, when I lived in England, I pissed in the school’s air vents to get back at my PE teacher. Took them a whole week to get rid of the smell.” He grins and retrieves his pack of Marlboros from his jacket pocket. “But this is a pretty close second.”

  “I told you, there are cops in these woods now. We can’t leave all this shit lying around.” Noah stretches his arms up over his head until he hears his shoulders pop. “How come you were so mad at your PE teacher?”

  “He wanted me to cut my hair. Said he’d make me play netball with the girls if I didn’t.”

  “That’s not so bad.”

  “You would say that, Mr. High School Basketball Team.”

  For a moment, things are almost like they used to be, and Noah offers him half a smile. “That was for one year and then they dropped me. I was going to be an English major, though. UCLA. Even you’re a little impressed by that.”

  “Sure am. I didn’t know the Bible counted as literature. So what are you still doing in this dump?”

  As if on cue, the sun slips behind a wall of thick white cloud and the Winslow house suddenly grows gloomy. Noah clears his throat. “Family stuff.”

  Rat leans against a charred wall and lights a cigarette, taking a long, slow drag. “Do you think we’d have carried on coming up here if your siste
r hadn’t gone missing?”

  Noah frowns, but Rat just waves him away.

  “You can drop the act, Blake. You told me they found a shell casing in the woods, and your first thought was someone might find out we were fucking, not whether your sister might have been shot.”

  “That’s not true.” Noah can feel his sister’s absence like a stone in his chest, as though all the things he’s never said to her are piling up inside him now. He keeps thinking back to that day at the river—how, climbing back into his truck, she had put her hand on his shoulder and he had let her. What might they have said to each other if the drive home had been just a little longer? Now, it seems, they are out of time.

  Noah sniffs, and crouches back down to scrape old wax off the lichen-spotted hearth with his fingernails. He tries to breathe steadily, but the air is thick with the smell of cigarettes.

  Rat says, “If you say so. You just seem more concerned about those damn candles than about your sister.”

  “You don’t know this town like I do. If people find out about this, it’ll be bad for you too.”

  They finish packing the summer away in silence, until the sky begins to simmer with the first signs of sunset. The evening is sweet and damp with the prospect of rain; Noah notices the way Rat’s hair is starting to curl from the moisture in the air.

  “That’s that, I guess.” Rat looks around, nodding to himself.

  “I guess.” Noah, leaning against the old chimney stack, chews his lip and says, “See you round.”

  They stand there, looking at one another in the raw evening light, only half listening to the rattling aspens and the crows calling overhead. Rat’s eyes wander over Noah’s face like he’s trying to memorize it.

  “In Europe, I’d kiss you on the cheek to say goodbye.”

  “Don’t.” Noah rubs his nose and feels its crooked outline. “It’s not worth it.”

  “Maybe it’s worth it to me.”

  Noah wants to touch the places where the light falls on him—his hair, his cheekbones, the tips of his ears—but the distance is too far, and there is so much more between them than just the curling ferns and charcoal timbers of the Winslow ruin. He feels it again, that tapping on his arm, and he wants to say something, he really does, but he also feels the places where the bruises were, hears his father’s voice in his head, sees the hole in the wall behind the cross. When bad things happen, people turn their faces upward and ask, Why? Why?, but Noah already knows. His father’s fist was the right hand of God that night he put the hole in the plaster, and God said unto him: I didn’t raise no faggot.

  “Blake, are you okay?”

  Rat takes a step toward him. Noah slams his own hand hard against the musty stone behind him, and something drops out of the chimney.

  * * *

  Later, when the Blake family holds hands around the dinner table to give thanks to the Almighty for their microwaved lasagne leftovers, Dolly opens one eye and looks at her eldest son. Perhaps to make sure he is still there. At some point in the last ten years, these features he now wears have assembled themselves into a final arrangement, and she feels late in noticing this. He has been this person for some time, yet she has been none the wiser.

  But there is something else, and it feels as though some hard little ball in her chest has suddenly dropped to her stomach, as she realizes it is fear she sees in her son’s face. And that same night, as Emma Alvarez lies awake listening to the coyotes howl, missing the taste of whiskey; as Jude dreams of his sister decomposing; as Samuel remembers how he once cradled a dead woman among black trees and soldiers’ voices, Dolly Blake lies in bed feeling flattened by the weight of her own guilt.

  On the other side of town, Rat Lăcustă strums his grandmother’s guitar, and stares at the bag that fell out of the Winslow chimney.

  12

  There was always something odd about them, though,” says Ann Traxler, as she snips off Debbie Weaver’s split ends. “And now the girl’s disappeared—well, you can’t help but wonder.”

  Emma pretends to be engrossed in her magazine, but she can see their reflections at the edge of her vision, and so far they haven’t thought to moderate their voices for her.

  Eleanor Lewis, sitting with her foil highlights under a heat lamp, gives a sage nod. “Always something off. The father, for one thing—oh, Debbie, tell us about that awful birthday party.”

  Debbie, whose youngest son, Cole, once called Emma “the daughter of a no-good wetback,” slings one massive leg over the other, gearing up for the long haul. She smiles at them both in the mirror, pleased at having been given the floor by the pastor’s wife.

  “It was back when Luke was in the youth league with the son—what’s his name? Noah?”

  “Don’t even get me started on him,” says Eleanor.

  “Well, he invited Luke to some birthday thing over at their house once—and this was before, you know, so how was I to know any different?”

  “Of course.”

  “So I go to pick Luke up at the end of the afternoon, and he starts crying in the car, says Samuel Blake told them about how one time he shot a woman in the back while she was running away.”

  “You’re kidding,” says Ann.

  “It was in some place called So’n Tnh, I think. Vietnam. He just gunned her right down. Naturally, Luke never wanted to go back there.”

  Emma had heard rumors, the way you always do in a small town, and Abigail had often told her about how Samuel used to scare friends away, but she had never mentioned any dead woman.

  The haircut had been Melissa’s idea: “You could do with some pampering,” she’d said. But then she’d had to duck back into the clinic, leaving Emma in a gown with a towel around her shoulders, completely on the periphery of Ann Traxler’s attention. It suits Emma just fine, though, now that they’re really getting to the meat of things. Even Melissa has avoided mentioning Abigail to her face, and she had begun to feel as if Abi were just one long dream in the coma of her youth. But these women couldn’t care less about Emma’s feelings, and it feels good to hear the familiar names spoken aloud again.

  “That’s the other thing, of course,” says Ann. “You’ve got to wonder why Dolly married him in the first place, that Samuel. He’s so much older, after all, and he comes with all that baggage.”

  “She was pregnant, that’s what I heard,” Debbie puts in.

  Ann raises her eyebrows. “You think he got her knocked up? That’s why she married him?”

  “Not Dolly. The woman he shot; she was pregnant. That’s what Luke said.”

  Eleanor Lewis frowns. “He’s a dreadful man. Comes to church smelling of beer and thinks that just because he says ‘amen’ the loudest, that makes it all right. Besides,” she adds, lowering her voice, “I’ve seen his children’s knees, all rubbed raw, and the younger boy once told me that sometimes he makes them get down to pray on the gravel in their driveway.” She shakes her head. “Now, I’m a Christian woman and that kind of thing’s their own business, but it’s just the wrong shade of devout for me.”

  Emma doesn’t much care what they think about Samuel. Or even Dolly, for that matter. Dolly just makes her feel worse. The other day, they ran into her at Safeway, and she was stooped over her shopping cart, following it around rather than pushing it. She stared at Emma the whole time, barely seeming to register Melissa, and Emma knew she was picturing Abigail standing next to her.

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t have much sympathy for Dolly Blake,” Eleanor continues. “Women like that are so dramatic. She used to be on the church committee, and you could see her lazy attempts at covering up the marks on her arms and face. It made everyone uncomfortable.”

  Ann rolls her eyes. “It’s the internet and all that; it’s created a bad culture. People think they’ve got to share everything.”

  “Exactly.” Eleanor points at her. “And if it was really so terrible, she’d just leave him.”

  “Is that why you let her go in the end?” Debbie asks. “
I always thought her hymn choices were real nice. She brought a bit of East Coast class.”

  “She looked down her nose at us, is what she did,” says Ann.

  “I let her go because she stopped showing up. After that whole strange business a few years ago—you remember?”

  “Oh yes.” Debbie nods. “The business with the son. That was strange.”

  “Well, that’s what I mean,” says Ann. “Now the daughter’s disappeared, you can’t help but wonder.”

  She looks down at Debbie’s hair, but as she does, she catches Emma’s eye in the mirror. “Oh, you want a glass of water, hon?”

  Eleanor peers at her over Debbie’s shoulder, her little rosebud mouth creasing along familiar lines as she scrunches it up in disapproval. Debbie blinks with bovine slowness and waves a chubby hand in Emma’s direction.

  “You just ignore us, sweetie,” she says, forcing out a little giggle, like trapped wind. “Just a bunch of old chickens clucking away.”

  * * *

  On the way home, Emma asks if they can drive past the Blakes’ place, and Melissa reaches across the car and rubs her shoulder, before taking the turn off onto Hickory Lane.

  With pale drapes drawn over every window, the house looks almost blind. Yet Jesus watches from the porch, His plastic face a little melted from the heat of summer, wailing silently for their sins. An angel crouches in the branches of the blue spruce that pushes against the second storey, its hands glued together in prayer. An elk skull on the fence post, one antler broken, fixes its hollow stare on Emma and her mother, and she feels that, if it could talk, it would tell them to turn the car around and drive away.

  None of the family cars—Samuel’s rusted pickup, Dolly’s little hatchback, or Noah’s truck with the engine like a bone saw—are parked in the driveway. He makes them get down to pray on the gravel… Picking little stones out of the cuts in Abigail’s knees, rubbing antibacterial cream into the grazes to stave off infection, squeezing Abi gently around the shoulders as she mumbled about wickedness—Emma remembers these things just as well as she remembers the two of them boiling deer bones to get them clean for art projects, or wearing matching dresses, or sprinting through Emma’s backyard with grassy feet, shivering and reeking of chlorine from the neighbor’s pool.