Where the Truth Lies

by Anna Bailey

  Those were the days when she carried a little white-hot ball of fury deep in her chest wherever she went and knew it could flare up at any moment. She wonders what happened to that little ball of anger. Melted now, all slumped out of shape, like the figurines she used to make from colorless dental wax, forgotten in the summer heat by her mother, trampled by her father.

  Yes, the anger felt good, just for that moment, when she’d slammed down the receiver. But after that, when the cracks began appearing in her own life, there was no escape plan. She couldn’t very well go crawling back to her parents. What would they think of her, after she’d made such a fuss? They would never take her seriously again.

  She’d barely been married a year when Dolly discovered she was pregnant. Samuel didn’t say much when she told him, but a few days later he informed her that he’d taken a new job with a logging firm up in Colorado, and that it would pay better. That, Dolly told her friends, was his way of showing he cared. It was the last time she spoke to any of them.

  Whistling Ridge was named after the winds that came down from the mountains, and Dolly thought it sounded very romantic. Perhaps it was this that helped her take up her role as modern-day New Frontier Wife with such vigor. For that too-short while, she had relished the task of cooking dinner, or setting the table, or doing her husband’s laundry. These were the sorts of things that happened in a family. In her proud round belly, she was shaping this family, sculpting this new little person as if he were one of her wax figures—forgetting, in the process, that she had not made anything of her own since before she and Samuel were married.

  Perhaps Samuel could have helped around the house a bit more, she conceded. Maybe he could have picked up the groceries once in a while, instead of waiting until he was home from work, sprawled out on the couch with brisket on a tray in his lap, saying, “Oh, we’re out of barbecue sauce. Run down to the store and get some more, will you?”

  That first time, when she’d been only a few months along, she’d felt the familiar ball of anger in her chest, and had snapped, “Why don’t you get it yourself? God knows you never do anything for me.” Samuel hadn’t answered her at first, but his eyelids had started twitching, and he raised his arms up around himself, his fingers stiff and claw-like, while his mouth opened so wide she thought it might rip his face in half. The air in the living room suddenly seemed pulled taut, and Dolly felt herself rise up on the balls of her feet, as if some primal instinct was telling her to run. Then Samuel began to scream. It wasn’t like anything she’d ever heard come out of a human being before. He listed to one side and fell off the couch, and before she could stop him, he was on all fours, just wailing like some animal on fire. After that, she did as she was told.

  * * *

  Sometimes, in the brief moments of vulnerability between waking and sunrise when he allowed her to hold him, he would talk in mumbled half sentences about Vietnam. About rivers of mud and crawling over bodies of men he knew. Dolly felt sorry for Samuel then, although now she can see she confused that feeling with love. She was vaguely certain, however, that the screaming wasn’t just something he’d brought back with him from the war. He would get agitated anytime his mother called, and while Dolly lied and told Constance he was at work, he’d stalk into the bedroom and knock things off the shelves. Dolly would clutch her belly, then, and send a silent prayer up to God: Please don’t let my baby be like him.

  But when he was born, Noah Isaac Blake wouldn’t stop crying. Dolly was convinced this was abnormal, even for a baby. She tried everything that the books suggested, but Noah just kept on screaming—and she felt, with a certainty she could not fully comprehend, that he was screaming at her in particular. Samuel started drinking, and then he would scream at her too.

  “Can’t you shut that little bastard up for one minute?” He would slam the flat of his hand down on the table when he said this, making the gravy leap off his dinner plate. “I’m at work all day, and this is what I have to come home to? I hate that noise, Dolly, I really do.”

  I, on the other hand, just love it, Dolly thought.

  The worst thing was that she really wanted to love it. From the moment the midwife placed Noah in her arms, and he looked up at her, eyes wide open, like he couldn’t wait to get started with life, she had thought that here, finally, was a friend. An ally. They were going to look after each other. You and me against the world, kid. But all he did was cry and throw up and do all the regular crap that babies do, which just made Samuel angrier—as if it was her fault his son hadn’t come out of the womb a fully formed all-American brat that he could take hunting or shoot beer cans with. An unnameable sense of loss overtook Dolly whenever she looked at her squalling son, and she started smoking just to have something to do with her hands, which should have been holding her baby.

  And, of course, now any plans to escape had receded. Everything had changed. She had a baby. What was she going to do? Pack him into her suitcase? Once—in fact it was the first time that Samuel kicked her in the back of the ankles, when they had to leave church early because Noah wouldn’t stop wailing—Dolly had locked herself in the bathroom, and stuffed a towel into her mouth so that she wouldn’t have to hear herself say, I wish I’d never had the goddamn baby. If it wasn’t for Noah, she told herself, she’d be worlds away from Samuel Blake by now.

  That was when she started to imagine her husband getting so drunk he would drive himself off the road. Or perhaps be crushed by a falling tree at work. Or electrocuted by his bathroom razor in the morning. She used to lie in the cool indigo of predawn, staring at the dark, solid shape of him snoring in bed beside her, and think: One day I am going to leave you. I am. I am.

  * * *

  She did try. More than once she’d started packing a bag while Samuel was at work. One night, she even managed to get all the way to Longmont, when Noah was still small, and booked herself into a motel before the gravity of her situation really sank in. “How do you do this?” she’d asked a man at the bar, who’d told her he was leaving his wife. “How do you decide which parts of your life you want to keep and which parts you want to leave behind forever?” He’d said when it got real bad, you just took anything you couldn’t replace. Dolly thought about Noah crying, and Samuel turning up the volume on the TV so he wouldn’t have to hear it, and she drove home the following morning.

  She told him some story about Debbie Weaver having a breakdown, and that was why she’d been gone all night. He was not very understanding.

  After that, whenever the urge to escape rose in her again, she would get down on her knees and try to reason it out with God. Always she came to the same conclusion: she was being unreasonable. Samuel had his demons, but then who wouldn’t, after everything he’d been through? Although what he had been through, she wasn’t quite sure—all she had were his occasional mutterings, and a vague concept of the Vietnam War as something dark and ugly in the national consciousness. Still, a good wife would be more supportive. And what did she have to complain about, really? Sure, he yelled sometimes, got a little crazy, drank himself to heaven and back, a slap here and there, a kick in the back of the ankles, but at least he never beat her black and blue. That was something, wasn’t it? Some women had it worse. He never beat any of them badly until the night he put his fist through the wall, the night everything went wrong.

  She knows they all still carry bits of that night with them, and for all her singing around the house, Abigail is no exception.

  And now her daughter has vanished. Maybe she has done the one thing Dolly never could.

  20

  It has been three weeks since Abigail Blake disappeared, and the sheriff’s deputies are wading through black water, turning over the riverbed. Only a few days before, about a mile upstream, where the banks are steeper and the water flows faster, they had found the shell casing. Now the calls of the crows nesting in the pines sound like human voices, and the deputies keep glancing at one another, unsure whether the person standing beside them was speaking
or not. They bury their hands in the grooves of withered bulrushes, trailing their sleeves over moss-covered rocks, trying not to lose their concentration. Finally, one of them sticks her hand in the air, and calls out, “Hey, Chief, I think we’ve got something over here!”

  Gains makes his way down to the edge of the water with Deputy Saidi in tow. Deputy Moore, submerged up to her knees, holds out something stained and shapeless.

  “I think it’s a cardigan, sir,” says Moore, as she drops it into Saidi’s evidence bag.

  Gains nods. The waterlogged wool is still pale in patches, hinting at some original color, but for the most part the fabric is scrunched up and torn, blotted with a brownish red. It is hard to say how long it’s been in the water, but there is still the slight whiff of copper about it that makes Gains grit his teeth.

  “Come on,” he says, starting back toward the car. “We’d better go tell them.”

  * * *

  “Yes.” Dolly Blake reaches for the evidence bag, smoothing her thumbs over the creases in the clear plastic. “That’s Abigail’s cardigan, I’m sure of it.”

  “Is that blood?” Samuel asks, gesturing to the cardigan. It’s a Friday morning and he is not at the mill. Gains doesn’t mention this, but he does note the Lone Star cans lying crushed around the foot of his armchair.

  “We’ll have to send it to the lab in Denver to be sure, but it’s a possibility, considering we found it not far from where we found the shell casing.”

  “So what are you saying?” Dolly glares at him, raw-faced. “Are you telling us… Is she dead? Is that it?”

  “I’m not in a position to confirm or deny that right now, Mrs. Blake. I’m sorry.”

  Dolly doesn’t show him to the door this time, but Gains is surprised to find Samuel following as he makes his way out.

  “Eli,” Samuel says, his voice low. “If that…” He drags his hand down over his face. “If that is Abigail’s blood, I mean, do you think there’s any chance she could have survived?”

  Gains rubs the stumps of his missing fingers. He does not care to be cornered by this hard man. “I meant what I said back there. Without a body, it wouldn’t do any good to speculate at this point.”

  “Come on, Eli, we’re talking about my daughter. I need to know.”

  “Samuel, I’m sorry, there are just too many factors here: whereabouts she took the bullet, her competency with first aid, whether or not the shooter followed her. And that’s all supposing this is even her blood. I mean, okay, sure”—he holds up his hands, as if trying to contain something large—“if this is her blood, but it was only a grazing wound, if she knew how to apply pressure and clean it up proper, then it’s possible she could have walked away from this. But this is a teenage girl we’re talking about: if she was shot, then it’s much more likely she just panicked.”

  Samuel nods slowly. “All right,” he says at last, turning back toward the living-room door. “I would prefer it, in the future, if you didn’t bother my wife with this kind of thing until you’re certain. She has problems with…” He twirls his finger around in a circle by his temple. “If Abigail really is dead, Eli, you just tell us that. Don’t mess around with bits and pieces here and there.”

  Eli Gains has never had to tell anybody their child is dead before, but tonight he will practice saying it in front of his bathroom mirror.

  * * *

  “Just where in hell were you last night?” Melissa shakes her head at her daughter, who is slouched against the kitchen counter eating dry cereal straight out of the box. “I can’t have you running off and not telling me where you are or when you’re coming home. A girl has disappeared. It isn’t safe out there at the moment.”

  An image of her husband, his lip bust open, his eyes black and swollen as overripe plums, flickers briefly in her mind. She can almost hear him, spitting blood as he says: When has it ever been safe here?

  “I’m sorry, Mom.” Emma sounds tired. She looks it, too, with her hair unbrushed and last night’s eyeliner still smeared around her eyes. Melissa wants to put her arms around her, to believe she really means it, but perhaps that has always been her problem, with her daughter, with her husband, even with God—she can never really bring herself to believe all the way.

  “I don’t want to see you in Sheriff Gains’s car again.” She holds up a hand to silence Emma before she can open her mouth. “I don’t expect you’ll tell me why he was driving you home last night, but I want you to promise me you won’t let yourself be alone with him.”

  “My ride fell through. He was just being nice. What’s the problem with that?”

  “This isn’t supposed to be a one-to-one ratio, Em. There’s supposed to be someone else here who can help me steer you in the right direction, but there isn’t, there’s just me, so when I tell you I want you to do something, I need you to work with me, okay?”

  “Mom, you’re being weird. What is it with you and the sheriff?” Emma puts the cereal box down. “Did he… do something to you?”

  “No.” Melissa rubs her arms, feeling the raised skin there. “Not to me.”

  “Mom? What’re you talking about, do you know something? Is this about Abi?”

  Melissa squeezes her eyes shut for a moment. Why did she say that? It just slipped out, but she can’t afford to let things slip out, not at a time like this. “It’s nothing, Em. Forget I said anything.”

  “It’s not nothing, you’re clearly upset, so what happened? Did Sheriff Gains do something to Abi? You have to tell me.”

  “I said it’s nothing, Em. Come on.” She clears her throat. “Did you see those books I left on the table? I asked Principal Handel what the senior English class was doing this year. I know you’re taking some time out, but you need to keep up with the reading if you want to graduate on time.”

  She’s not sure if Emma’s really hearing her, as she watches her across the kitchen with that black-eyed stare. She knows you know something. Knowing is too strong a word, perhaps. But Melissa does remember Abigail standing in the doorway at the clinic, twisting a coil of long red hair around her finger, a faint gleam of sweat on her pale forehead. It was early April then, and there were still patches of snow on the ground. The toe of Abigail’s sock was visible through a hole in the end of her sneaker. “Please, Melissa,” she’d said. Her cheeks were pink from the cold, but one had that sore kind of look, as though she’d been slapped. “You’re the only one who can help me.”

  It had bothered Melissa at the time, not being sure. But then July had rolled around, and she’d seen Gains put his hand on Abigail’s back. Now the story about what happened to that poor girl seems to change from week to week, depending on what the sheriff says.

  * * *

  Jude needs to get away, just for a little while. He limps down to the bus stop and catches the shuttle that takes tourists up to the national park. It’s mostly empty at this time of year, and if there is conversation on board, he doesn’t really hear it. He stares out of the window and thinks about his mother, how he came home from school to find her sitting in Abigail’s room, doing up the buttons on one of Abi’s old cardigans. He digs his fingers into his palms, trying to still the shaking thing that has started to grow inside him. In a sudden panic, Jude asks the driver to let him off.

  They had only been driving for twenty minutes or so, and Jude remembers seeing the sign for the Maddoxes’ trailer park a little while back, so he decides to cut across the forest and head in that direction. At some point he will have to call his mother to come and collect him, but he tells himself this will be okay. I will walk to the trailer park, he thinks, and by the time I get there, Mom will be okay again.

  Jude walks with his head down, paying attention to where he puts his stick so that it doesn’t sink too deep into the soft earth. When he eventually looks up, the Winslow ruin is looming ahead of him. He gives a small sigh of relief, glad to find that he has been walking in the right direction, but then he stops at the sound of voices coming from within the black
, broken walls.

  “Or else by stealth in some wood for trial, or back of a rock in the open air… But just possibly with you on a high hill…”

  That is his brother’s voice, although he has never heard Noah talk like that before.

  “Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea or some quiet island, Here to put your lips upon mine I… I permit you.”

  Jude limps to the side of the house, peering through the ferns and the missing bricks, and sure enough, there is the Romanian boy leaning against the stonework, his whole body like some giant question mark. And there is his brother, with his grazed face and his hair askew, holding a dog-eared book close to his chest. But the way he stands straight-backed with his chin in the air—it reminds Jude of the Noah from years ago, before the hole in the wall. It seems like an act of rebellion now, the way his brother is standing. Proud, almost. Then he takes the Romanian boy by the waist like he owns the space between them, and it has been a long time since Jude saw that kind of certainty in him.

  He is not watching them, he is watching his brother, but it quickly becomes apparent that he shouldn’t be doing either. The Romanian boy gets down on his knees. Jude feels sweat forming over himself so completely that he can sense it in the strangest places, like the backs of his knees. He adjusts his grip on his stick, preparing to push away from the wall, but then something catches his eye and he cannot look away. Noah unbuckles his belt and slides it out of the loops of his jeans in one quick, sharp motion, and Jude feels sick. He has seen somebody do that before.

  Noah arches his back and makes an oddly primal sound, and Jude has heard a sound like that before too.

  21