Where the Truth Lies

by Anna Bailey

  “Look,” she says, “whoever you think Rat is, he isn’t. I don’t think I’ve gotten one straight answer out of him the whole time I’ve known him.”

  “You been up here drinking his liquor a lot, then?”

  “Sometimes.” Emma looks at the peeling label on the bottle. “Not a lot.”

  “He didn’t do it.” Noah is staring hard at the rain on the windowpanes. “He’s not like everyone says he is. He’s a good person.”

  “Who sells drugs and buys alcohol for minors and keeps a secret gun he never told us about, sure. He was at the Tall Bones the night Abi disappeared. Did he tell you that?”

  “Why don’t you climb down off that high horse if you’re going to keep drinking what he paid for?”

  “This is the guy who might have shot your sister, Noah. Why the hell are you defending him?”

  “Because he didn’t do it.”

  It occurs to Emma that she’d had a similar conversation with Hunter Maddox not so long ago, the night he drove her to his house. He’s my friend, she’d said, and Hunter had laughed like he felt sorry for her.

  “You sound pretty sure about that,” she says, not unkindly, because she feels a little sorry for Noah too.

  He crosses his arms tightly. “Yeah, well. I was with him, wasn’t I?”

  “Like… with him with him?”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t act like Abi never told you.”

  The way he looks at her then, she can see him as he was four years ago: standing on the stairs with his face all split and bruised, everything swollen out of proportion so that he looked like a surrealist painting, and she can hear Abigail saying, Daddy says you can’t come over to the house anymore.

  “Hell, Noah. I had no idea.”

  “Well, goddamn. Guess she was about as proud of what happened as I was, then.” Noah takes another swig from the bottle. “I can’t believe she never told you that.”

  It seems there’s a lot that Abi never told her.

  * * *

  The lumber mill is still on Sundays. The rich scent of timber still saturates the air, but without the smoke rising from the chimney stack, the thrum of moving bodies, or the constant snarl of machinery, it feels unfamiliar to Hunter.

  His father shuts the top drawer of his desk when he spots him in the office doorway. “What’re you doing here?”

  “Came to see the king in his court.”

  Jerry stands up, one hand still held over the seam of the drawer. “You should be at home. You’re still grounded until tomorrow.”

  “Did you get Rat Lăcustă arrested?”

  “Is that what this is about? I don’t have time to talk about that waster. Believe it or not, Hunter, some of us have jobs to do.”

  “Rat didn’t do anything.”

  “That’s not what Ed Lewis says, and I’ll believe a man of God over some damn gypsy any day. Besides, what do you think his gun was doing up in the woods? You think he just happened to leave it there by accident and never went back to find it?”

  Hunter stuffs his hands into the pockets of his letterman jacket. “Someone could have stolen it.”

  “Well, that’d be very convenient for him, I’m sure, but it really doesn’t change anything. It’s not like any of those cheap trailer kids are going to come forward to save him.” Jerry rearranges some papers on the desk. “Now, how about those brochures your mom got, Hunter? Have you taken a look yet? Time’s running out, you know.”

  “How can you even think about stuff like that when there’s a girl missing?”

  “Hunter, you’ve got a bright future ahead of you. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t get into a decent college, if you can just knock this drugs thing on the head. Your mom and I, well, we don’t want to see you end up like Noah Blake, waiting tables for the rest of your life because you flunked out.” Jerry scratches the back of his head. “The Blakes are that kind of people, son. I saw the way that girl hung around the trailer park. She was exactly the same. You’re best just putting her out of your mind. She was asking for trouble.”

  Hunter hates him. Hates the big bulk of him and how it takes up so much room in this little office, in this little town. “What if I stole it?”

  “What?”

  “What if I’d stolen Rat’s gun? Should I come forward?”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Tell me you didn’t steal that gun.”

  “What should I do, Dad? What’s the proper Christian thing to do?”

  Jerry grips his son by the arm and marches him out of the office, all the way across the main saw room, and out to his car. “Get in,” he says, thrusting Hunter forward so that he stumbles. “I said get in. I’m taking you home. What the hell’s wrong with you? What kind of college do you think will take you if you go around stealing people’s firearms? And what about me and your mom? How do you think this makes us look? I will not let you flush your future down the drain over some delinquent, do you hear me? I’m not letting you out of my sight until that boy’s been charged, and he will be, Hunter. You heard what Ed Lewis said this morning: we’re ready to cast out the evil in this town. Blood and fire. You can bet everything you’ve got on that.”

  * * *

  Gains leans back against the desk and crosses his arms. “You speak very good English, Mr. Lăcustă. You pick all that up in America?”

  The kid’s a strange one, he thinks. Laughs like a buzz saw even though he’s got a bag full of evidence sitting right across from him, and he’s not even wearing shoes.

  “We had Cartoon Network in Romania,” Rat says, like he’s sucking on something sour.

  “Is that right? And you learned it all watching Powerpuff Girls, did you? Now that is impressive.”

  “Why does it matter where I learned English? I thought you wanted to ask me about the gun.”

  “Son, we don’t get a lot of strangers settling in Whistling Ridge, but this spring you roll into town and a short while later your gun turns out to be a match for the shell casing we found at the scene of a young girl’s disappearance. Nobody knows anything about you. That makes people nervous, you understand? Folks are going to find something to pin on you one way or another. That’s just how it works around here. But see, me, I don’t think you have much of a motive to shoot Abigail Blake, whether the gun’s yours or not, and I’m willing to run with that, so help me out. Who are you, kid? What’re you doing here?”

  Rat toys absently with the wolf fang dangling from his earlobe. “My parents lived under Ceauşescu. You can play Good Cop all you want, but I know about police.”

  Gains sighs. “Well, that’s a start, I guess.”

  Rat’s fingers relocate to the tabletop, drumming in a restless way that Gains recognizes.

  “Look, kid, the sooner you start being up front with me, the sooner you can get out of here, and the sooner we can both have a smoke.”

  The whole room feels like the underside of a bandage, and the prospect of nicotine seems to do the trick.

  “I learned English in England.” Rat doesn’t look at Gains but stares at the wood grain on the table, tracing it with a bitten-down thumbnail. “I used to live there. For a while.”

  “How did you end up in America?”

  “I just did, la naiba. It’s all we ever heard about growing up—America this, America that. Figured it was worth a look, to see if it lived up to the hype.”

  “And does it?”

  “It’s about what I expected, sure. Full of little men who think they’re the real shit because they talk above a certain decibel and carry a gun.” Rat looks up at him from under his eyelashes. “Scenery’s not bad, though.”

  “You carry a gun, Mr. Lăcustă.”

  “Well, there you go. Just trying to fit in.”

  “Tell me about the gun.” Gains circles around the desk so that he can sit opposite him. “When we picked you up, you told us it had been stolen. If that’s the case, why didn’t you report it missing?”

  “I don’t know, stuff came up, I got d
istracted. There’s a lot of distractions up here. And, like I said, I don’t set too much store by law enforcement.”

  “You have any idea who could have taken it?”

  Rat shrugs. “One of the kids from the trailer park, probably. It was way back in May. We all used to hang out together then, shoot bottles and get high and stuff. Listen”—he digs his nails into the tabletop—“I didn’t shoot Abigail Blake. I didn’t even know the girl.”

  “You know her brother, though. He was up at your RV when we came to bring you in.”

  Rat just stares at him with those cut-glass eyes that make Gains feel like someone’s pouring cold water down the back of his shirt.

  “Well, look.” He rubs the stump of one of his fingers. “Can you at least tell me where you were the night Miss Blake disappeared, the night of that particular party?”

  “No.”

  “Jesus, kid. Temperature’s getting pretty hot around here—people have a lot of questions about what happened to that girl, and as far as they’re concerned, you’re as good an answer as any. Do yourself a favor and be honest with me.”

  “I am being honest. I can’t tell you where I was.”

  “Come on, what do you mean you can’t?”

  Rat leans back in his chair, stretches one arm back behind him, and then shrugs at the sheriff. “It’s not my secret to tell.”

  * * *

  At first Jude thinks Abigail’s room looks the same. Things are a little messy, but in a way that feels familiar, like his sister might still walk in at any moment and pick her hairband up off the floor or throw her sweater over the back of her chair. But the longer he sits there on the bed, the more he can see how much everything has begun to change. Three weeks she’s been gone—504 hours. By now her teeth could be falling out. Her room, too, is gradually coming apart. Pencils have rolled off the desk and disappeared; her books are covered with dust; everything is cold and faintly clammy to the touch. Jude can’t bear it.

  He knows what his mother believes: that if they leave the room just as it is, they’ll keep Abigail with them. But a room needs life, or the dust will settle and settle until it buries his sister completely. So Jude moves her hairbrush, plumps her pillow, rearranges the clothes in her closet. It isn’t much, but it’s enough to make him feel she’s still alive, as if perhaps he’ll walk past her open door later, see all these little changes and think: Abi is home.

  He still isn’t sure about what he saw in the woods, between his brother and the Romanian boy. Or, rather, Jude knows what he saw, he just isn’t sure what it means. The sound Noah made, the way he took off his belt—it reminded Jude of something else, something from months ago, which hadn’t seemed so strange then, but now… He doesn’t know much about sex, so he doesn’t know how to explain it, but this is probably one of those things where, if he had a normal mother, he would ask her about it. He will look for a sign instead, he decides. Just like Pastor Lewis said: It is our job to recognize when God is seeking to work through our actions. If what he saw really was what he thinks it was, then God will find a way to tell him. God will give Jude the words to tell his mother.

  In the bottom of Abigail’s closet is a shoebox, and Jude already knows he’s going to open it, even as he tells himself not to. The girl in the Polaroids looks like his sister, has her same bright red hair, that pointy face, those long limbs, but he has never seen his sister laugh like that, has never seen her look so wild. He sifts through photographs of Abigail dancing, head tossed back and hands in the air, of her arms around trailer-park kids, her bare legs splashing through the river while she beams at the photographer.

  And then, at the bottom of the pile, there she is with a cigarette between her lips, wearing some green-and-black letterman jacket that is too long for her in the sleeves. Standing next to her is the Romanian boy, and he has his arm around her shoulders.

  27

  Dolly Blake, standing in the police station lobby, can’t remember the last time her husband wanted to hold her hand. But then this afternoon he said, “Dolly, they’re saying the cops got the guy, they got the gypsy boy that took Abi,” and now here he is, rubbing his thumb against her knuckles, like this is something they always do. And here she is, waiting for him to stop.

  “We want to see him,” Samuel tells the deputy at the front desk. She’s a young woman with a rather austere face but clearly not the personality to match, because she shrinks away as Samuel leans toward her.

  “We want to see the son of a bitch who shot our daughter.”

  “Please, sir, nobody has been formally charged. No one’s even been arrested.”

  “Well, then, get on it. We want to see the boy you’re holding, don’t we, Dolly?”

  Dolly nods once. She doesn’t really know what she feels. They told her Abigail was a missing person and now people are saying she was shot, and all Dolly wants to do is shake somebody by the shoulders until they give her an answer—the right answer: Is her daughter dead or not? Is this finally the end of the sentence?

  She hears a door opening around the corner of the adjoining corridor, and the approaching footsteps sound far too loud to Dolly, who hasn’t had a cigarette all day because “It will set off one of my migraines, woman.” She squeezes Samuel’s hand because her fingers are restless, but he must take that to mean something else, because he says, “My wife wants to see who shot her baby girl,” calling her my wife like he’s proud of it.

  “Sir, I’m sorry,” says the clerk, “but we don’t…”

  Dolly doesn’t hear the rest, and Samuel probably doesn’t either, because around the corner comes Sheriff Gains, a little pink in the face, with the Romanian boy, who is wearing a curler in his hair and no shoes. Walking between them, shoulders hunched and lip well chewed, is their very own Noah.

  “What the hell is this?”

  Samuel lets go of Dolly’s hand at once, and somehow, although she can’t say why, she gets the sense he is embarrassed at Noah having seen such an intimate gesture between them.

  “Gains, you’re letting that little gypsy go? What in God’s name is going on here?”

  Gains raises his eyebrows, as if the entire concept of what’s going on is too large for him to look at properly. “I’ve no reason to continue holding Mr. Lăcustă.”

  “That’s not what I heard.” Samuel sucks on the inside of his cheek, making one side of his face look especially gaunt. “I had it from Jerry Maddox himself. This kid did away with my baby girl.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d lower your voice, Mr. Blake.”

  Gains rolls his shoulders back, and Dolly wants to thump him. It’s all very well and good if you want to play the big man here, she thinks, but I’m the one who’ll have to deal with the fallout of you pissing off my husband.

  “Lower my—What the hell does that matter? You’re letting the boy who took my daughter just walk out of here!”

  Dolly glances at Samuel, who is flaring his nostrils as he breathes, and then she tries to catch Noah’s eye, but he is staring pointedly at the police station carpet. The Romanian boy, she realizes, hasn’t taken his eyes off Noah the whole time. It almost hurts to see that now. Nobody has ever looked at her that way.

  When Gains replies, “Sir, your son has provided him with an alibi,” Dolly has a sinking feeling she knows exactly what he means.

  * * *

  Emma has almost finished the bottle by the time Rat gets home. She watches him from the window as he walks barefoot through the chain-link shadows cast by the sinking sun. The storm has left things feeling rusted around the edges, and the news about Noah Blake didn’t help.

  “So, you’re sleeping with him,” she says, dropsy on her vowels.

  Rat closes the door and leans against the table, like a ship taking on water.

  “You’re a real son of a bitch.”

  “Drăgută—”

  “No.” She shakes her head. “No, you don’t get to call me that, don’t act like I mean something to you. It was him, wasn’t it? T
hat night you left me at the Tall Bones with Hunter… you went to meet him?”

  “You’ve seen the mess his dad made of his face. I had to go.”

  “Yeah, well, the Maddoxes made a mess of me.”

  “Emma—”

  “You were supposed to help me figure out what happened to Abigail, and maybe she doesn’t matter to you, but she is the only friend who’s ever mattered to me, so you don’t get to dismiss her like she’s not worthy of your time.”

  His whole face stiffens, and for a moment she can see the age between them.

  “You know,” he says, “I was glad when I saw your car out on the road. I wanted to thank you. Noah told me you were the one who encouraged him to come give his statement and get me out of there.”

  “That was half a bottle ago, when I still loved you.”

  There is no incense burning in the RV, and suddenly Emma can smell the lack of it—a sort of coldness, mingled with artificial peaches and the earthy smell of mud caked to the bottom of Rat’s bare feet.

  He sinks into the seat beside the table. “I never asked you to love me.”

  From the window, Emma can see a group gathering outside, a mix of fraying flannel, faded blue jeans, and creased blouses and blazers. They’re talking loud enough that she can hear the general buzz of their voices, but not so that she can make out any particular word. She recognizes one of the men as Shana Tyson’s hollowed-out father.

  “I think I’m going to leave,” she says, heaving herself to her feet. “I would like to go home.”

  “I don’t think you should be driving, drăgută. You’ve had a lot to—”

  “I said don’t call me that. Jesus, you think you can get away with anything because you’re pretty, and the worst thing is you just have. You’ve gotten off scot-free.”