Where the Truth Lies

by Anna Bailey

  “Mom, that thing you mentioned yesterday, about Abi? Was it a medical thing?”

  Melissa frowns. “I didn’t say anything about Abi. I thought we’d agreed to leave this alone.”

  “Did she come to see you at the clinic? Did she have a problem?”

  “Em, come on. You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “So she did?”

  Her mother looks into her coffee mug, like she’s going to find the answer there. “I didn’t say that.”

  Emma leans forward, lowering her voice: “Does it have anything to do with Sheriff Gains?” As soon as she’s said it, she feels something cold settle over her. “Oh, Mom. Did he hurt her?” She searches her mother’s face for some reassurance, but Melissa is looking out the window at the squat adobe building of her clinic across the street.

  “He was funny with her,” she says at last. “That’s all I know. I saw him talking to her once and he was funny with her.”

  “Jesus, Mom. You have to tell someone, if that’s really what you think.”

  Melissa shakes her head. “Who can I tell? And besides, Emma, I don’t know what I think. There was just something odd about the way he was with her, that’s all.” She looks over her shoulder quickly to where Noah Blake is wiping down the counter. “You mustn’t repeat any of this to anyone.”

  Emma feels guilty now, for being privately mad at Abigail. Oh, Abi. Why didn’t you tell me? Melissa didn’t deny it, didn’t say: No, it was some other reason that Abi came to see me. But Sheriff Gains? Perhaps it’s those sad donkey eyes of his, but Emma can’t really believe it. Abi wasn’t interested in older men—she was barely interested in boys, period, or her parents would have given her hell for it—so she would never have hung around trying to get attention from a man like Gains.

  No. Emma taps her foot under the table. If anyone hurt Abigail, wasn’t it more likely to be the boy who’s sleeping next to a photograph of her every night? You hear about these guys, she thinks, guys who obsess over girls they can’t have, and they work themselves up so bad that one day they show up at school and shoot them. Happens all the time, these days. She still can’t get around it—Hunter sleeping next to that Polaroid. It makes her shudder. But if he had forced himself on Abigail—God, if he had, then he’d be afraid she might tell someone, wouldn’t he? And if he found out she’d gone to see a doctor, then that would definitely put him on edge. Maybe enough to want to silence her for good.

  When Sheriff Gains enters, he does so through the back door that Melissa once used to avoid him, so it’s too late for that now. He makes a beeline for their table, and despite her suspicions about Hunter, Emma still finds herself crossing her legs as he approaches.

  “Both Ms. Alvarezes.” He takes off his Stetson and tucks it under his arm. “My lucky day.”

  Melissa becomes fascinated with the contents of her coffee mug again. “Do you need something?”

  Under the table, Emma feels her mother’s leg bounce.

  “Actually, Emma, it’s you I was hoping to speak to.” He retrieves his notepad from his breast pocket and thumbs through it. “Here we go—Emma, when you were first questioned a couple of weeks back, you said something to one of my deputies about seeing a strange light in the woods. You remember saying that?”

  “Sure. It was over by the Winslow house. As I was driving home.”

  “You have any idea what that might have been?”

  “It looked sort of like a flashlight.” She adds, “More toward the place where the Maddoxes live than the Tall Bones.” She shifts a little in her chair, as if she can sit on the memory of the Maddox house and squash it.

  From the corner of her eye, she sees her mother glance at her. Gains nods slowly.

  “Is this about what happened Thursday night between you and the Maddoxes?” Gains asks.

  Emma taps her fingernail against the handle of her mug and shakes her head. “No. But is there any news? About the investigation?”

  Gains rubs the stumps of his missing fingers. “You know I can’t really talk about that.”

  “But there is something.” Melissa looks at his twitching hands. “Clearly there’s something. Emma has a right to know. Abigail’s her best friend.”

  Gains eyes them both carefully, then lowers his shoulders. “Look, it’s nothing definite, but one of my deputies found a cardigan in the river, not far from the Tall Bones. Her mother says it’s hers, but the blood—”

  “The blood?” Emma can feel her hands growing clammy. “What blood? Is it Abi’s?”

  “We’re still waiting to hear back.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “We can’t jump to any conclusions.”

  “But she could still be out there—why are you wasting your time here? It’s been three weeks! You should be out in the woods looking for her.”

  “Em.” Her mother reaches across and puts a hand gently on her arm. A family two tables over is looking at them.

  Gains shakes his head. “Emma, we’ve been looking. We must have combed every inch of those woods these last three weeks. All we can do now is wait for the DNA results from Denver and follow up on any leads in the meantime.” He sighs. “Listen, I’ll look into your Winslow thing myself. But I don’t want you going up there, trying to figure this out on your own. In fact, Melissa, I’d appreciate it if you’d make sure she stays out of the woods altogether. Church committee’s even asking me to enforce some sort of curfew, but then I suppose they’re right this time. Got to keep an eye on our children until we figure out what happened to that poor girl.”

  Emma doesn’t like the way he’s speaking about Abi in the past tense. She says this to her mother, but Melissa seems preoccupied as she watches the back door swing closed behind Gains.

  “Wait here a moment, Em,” she says.

  * * *

  Outside on the little promenade behind the diner, with the river frantic from recent rain, Melissa has to raise her voice to be heard.

  “What did you think you were doing?”

  Gains stops, and he has the gall, she thinks, to look genuinely confused.

  “Something the matter, Ms. Alvarez?”

  “I know the sort of man you are, getting too close to teenage girls. You stay away from Emma.”

  “Hey.” He holds his hands up as if he’s guilty, or mocking her with the idea of it. “I have to question any witnesses. I can’t not do my job.”

  “You know that’s not what I’m talking about. What were you doing driving Emma home the other night? You should have called me. I’d have come and got her.”

  “I was just helping your daughter out.”

  “The same way you helped out my husband all those years ago?”

  Gains snorts and shakes his head. “Well, maybe we could have done something about that if Miguel had stuck around to testify. Strange how he just disappeared like that, don’t you think?”

  She stares at him. Fear manifests as an ache under her breastbone. And when he tips his hat, saying, “Be seeing you, Ms. Alvarez,” she does not follow him.

  23

  THEN

  The night Samuel Blake punched the hole through the wall was the same night he threw Jude down the stairs. Jude was only eight at the time, but he remembers it all very clearly. You don’t forget a thing like that.

  Noah had just walked through the door. It was a humid night in the middle of the summer, the threat of a thunderstorm hung in the air, and he had come home from seeing his girlfriend, Sabrina McArthur (come home from breaking up with her, Jude would later learn). Jude was a child, but he thought his brother, standing there at the bottom of the stairs, seemed very grown-up. Especially when Noah looked their father dead in the eye and said, “I’m going to study English at the University of California Los Angeles,” and even though he didn’t say it, Jude heard, And I’m not coming back.

  Noah was not grown-up then, of course. He was only eighteen, and the bones in his nose still sat straight.

  What it all came down to—as i
t still does, even now—was Abigail. She had gone into Noah’s room to use his computer while he was out, and she had seen pictures she was not supposed to see. Afterward, when Noah would hardly speak to them and they had only each other, she told Jude about those pictures.

  “I’ve never seen a man’s thing standing straight up like that,” she said.

  Jude had to admit he hadn’t either, and then he felt like Abigail, at thirteen, was very grown-up as well, because she knew something about boys that he did not.

  Abigail was upset by the pictures. She explained this to Jude later as well. In her rush to get out of Noah’s room, she had knocked over his desk chair, which had roused their father, who was sleeping off a pack of Lone Star in the bedroom next door. There was no hiding it from him then. He did not say anything for a while, just went and stood on the stairs, staring at the front door.

  When Noah came in and curled his lip at him, said he was going to the University of California Los Angeles, their father had said, “The hell you are. I know what goes on in goddamn California, and let me tell you something, son, that is not the freedom I thought I was fighting for when I—”

  “Oh, screw your war stories, Dad. Screw Vietnam. It was a million years ago, no one cares anymore.”

  Their father had leveled a finger at him. “You say that again, you little faggot, and I’ll—”

  “No one. Gives. A. Good. God. Damn.”

  Their mother stood on the landing, one arm around Abigail. Jude was standing next to them and watched her put her hand over her mouth when Noah said those things, as if somehow she knew what happened next would be as bad as it was. That night was the first time that Jude could remember her ever trying to hold their father back, and, really, it was the last time as well.

  He got very quiet, their father did. Very quiet while the veins in his arms and neck grew big and horrible, and then suddenly he just started screaming.

  Jude has hung on to that sound ever since. He unpacks it in his mind sometimes and plays it over again when things get difficult, just to remind himself that he has been through worse. They all have. But the thing that slammed their mother’s face into the banister, the thing that picked Jude up by his shirtfront and hurled him down the stairs, that thing was not their father. Jude—the only one of them who will cling to God right up until the end—thinks it was the devil himself that night, howling on the stairs.

  Abigail did not cry. She never cried at the things their father said or did, and when he threw Jude down the stairs, she just pressed herself against the wall as if she wanted to make herself as small as possible. Jude, on the other hand, couldn’t stop crying, not when his shinbone was poking through his pants leg all sharp and bloody. His father came loping down the stairs like some huge creature, and would probably have dashed Jude’s head against the wall if Noah hadn’t tackled him when he did.

  Jude likes to imagine that his brother said something heroic, like “Don’t you touch him!” It would have made them feel better, him and Abi, in the years to follow, if they had been able to pretend that Noah really did like them still. But Jude knows his brother probably didn’t say anything at all.

  He gave as good as he got that night, poor Noah. Almost. But Samuel Blake had never beaten them with so much rage before, and it was as if he had been saving it up since the day they’d choppered him out of Saigon. He beat the shape right out of Noah’s face, and probably would have killed him if Abigail hadn’t screamed at him to stop.

  “Daddy, don’t! Please don’t!”

  Instead he had punched right through the wall next to Noah’s head.

  Noah wasn’t seen around town for some time after that—except by Emma Alvarez, who glimpsed him on the landing, black with bruises, his nose held together by a couple of Band-Aids. He told people afterward that he’d broken it playing basketball. Emma was not allowed at the house again.

  Their mother put on lots of makeup and held Jude’s hand in the ambulance on the way to the hospital over in Estes Park, but she didn’t speak, except to tell the doctors he’d fallen out of the blue spruce in their front yard. It took her a long time to start talking to any of them again.

  A few days later, she had dug out the gemstone cross that Grandma had given her on her wedding day and used it to cover the hole in the wall. She said, “They’ll take you away if anyone finds out.” Jude had only a vague sense of who “they” were, but he knew he didn’t want them to take him.

  Jude would later learn that his parents paid his medical bill with the only substantial money they had to hand. Noah had to write and tell UCLA that he would not be accepting their offer. Financial issues, he explained.

  Jude remembers standing with his sister in Noah’s doorway as he pressed Send on the email, and Abigail’s eyes were all red and wet when she said, “I’m sorry, Noah, I’m so sorry. I didn’t think—”

  Silently their brother got up and closed the door in her face.

  24

  THEN

  Three nights Dolly stayed up trying to figure out what in hell she should do next. Three nights since Samuel had broken her son’s leg and put his fist through the wall. She had been to visit Jude in the hospital every day. Not because she wanted to, but because the long drive from Whistling Ridge to Estes Park, the roads clogged with tourist traffic, felt like penance. As did the awful antiseptic smell of the children’s ward, and the muggy heat of the car as she waited for the AC to kick in.

  She spent the third night curled in on herself like a dying insect, eyes squeezed shut, begging God to tell her what to do next. She promised Him everything she had to offer: she’d volunteer for more mission trips, she’d get the kids involved with the give-back schemes, she’d try to help Noah with his sexual confusion, she’d quit smoking, she’d call her parents, she’d stop wearing lace panties… All night she prayed, wondering if His answer would come as a voice inside her head, or a white light, or an angel with many eyes and a burning sword, who would speak to her in a language she did not recognize but would understand all the same. Dolly waited, her limbs stiff from lying in the same position for so many hours, her face still tender from the shiner Samuel had given her. In the end, hollowed out by her long, sleepless vigil, she felt as if God was the one who had hit her instead.

  * * *

  “Dolly.” Pastor Lewis stood up when he saw her. “What can I do for you?” He gave her a brilliant smile, and she thought: Thank you, God. This is going to be okay. This man is going to help me.

  “It’s about… well, it’s about Samuel.”

  “Come sit down,” he said, clearing some space for her on his little office couch. “Why don’t you tell me all about it?”

  Dolly folded her hands neatly in her lap and hoped the pastor wouldn’t see the cigarette stains on her fingernails. “He’s been hitting my sons.” She had to pause then, surprised at having actually said it. Somehow she didn’t think she’d be able to say it, not after all this time.

  “Go on,” he replied.

  “He…” Dolly cleared her throat. Her mouth felt very dry. “Three nights ago, he just lost it. I mean, you’ve never seen anything like this, Ed, it was…” She kneaded her forehead. “Jude’s in the hospital, Samuel pushed him down the stairs. And Noah, I mean I know he shouldn’t have been… But that was no excuse.” She rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand.

  “That’s very troubling to hear, Dolly. The Bible makes it very clear that when a man punishes his children it should be with the sole purpose of teaching them a lesson and instilling respect.” Pastor Lewis held up his hands as if he was expecting to receive something. “Fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord. Ephesians,” he added. “It sounds to me like Samuel has lost sight of the duty that the Lord has laid out for him. I would recommend you direct him to me so that I can discuss the matter with him.”

  “Well, sure, but what should I do? Should I call the police?”

  Pastor Lewis scratched
the little cleft in his chin. “State law protects a man’s right to punish his children in whatever way he sees fit.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Dolly, I really think you should refer your husband to me. He may have lost his way, which is unsurprising for a man who’s had his faith tested in the ways that Samuel has. The best thing you can do for him is pray that he finds his way back to the right path. You just leave the rest to me and the man upstairs.”

  Dolly couldn’t believe what she was hearing. He threw my boy down the stairs! She rubbed furiously at the makeup on the bridge of her nose. “It wasn’t just the boys. He hit me first.”

  “Ah, now that’s a different matter altogether, Dolly, and one that we can figure out together, I’m certain.”

  “Yes.” She took a deep, grateful breath. “Thank you.”

  “Think back now, what did you do to make Samuel so angry?”

  The question felt like a thump in the sternum. “Excuse me?”

  “You know, what did you do that ticked him off to start with?”

  “I didn’t do anything. He just lost it, like I said.”

  “Dolly.” Pastor Lewis cocked his head to one side and smiled strangely at her. “It sounds to me like you need to go away and pray on this. Then, when you’ve figured out how the argument started, you’ll know how to avoid it in the future. Do you see what I mean?”

  “But…” She stared at him. “But he punched me.”

  “Dolly, your husband has been through a lot. Things you and I can’t even imagine. I’m sure you knew this when you married him, but there are bound to be times when he needs you to help him be the man that God intended. How can he lead the house without the support of his wife? I don’t know where I’d be without Eleanor sometimes. Pray on it, Dolly. When you figure it out, you’ll understand why he hit you.”

  * * *