Where the Truth Lies

by Anna Bailey

  * * *

  Dolly pulls over on Seventeenth Street and kills the engine, leaning back against the headrest for a moment as she tries to gather her thoughts. It was an effort just to keep her eyes open on the drive home from Estes, but she still has to figure out what to do about these pages from Abigail’s diary.

  The police have given up looking for her daughter, she can sense it. When was the last time she heard about them interviewing a witness? The blood on the cardigan was encouragement enough for them to hang up their hats on a case that was proving too tough. Even the town will have lost interest now, after what happened last night. She wouldn’t take the diary to the police anyhow—especially after she saw those deputies standing in the crowd all shameless in their uniforms as the RV burned—but she has to show it to someone. Someone who can help her decide what she should do next.

  Dolly looks out the car window at the clinic. Melissa is sensible; she’s a good mother. Always had the measure of things, back in the day, when she still came around. Always sensed Dolly’s unhappiness and Samuel’s black presence in the house, even if she knew better than to try to do anything about it. And Melissa understands—that’s the most important thing, the diary being what it is. She understands the mistakes that mothers can make. She will know the right thing to do.

  A sudden knock on the glass makes Dolly start. Ann Traxler is out on the sidewalk, scrunching up her face as she peers inside the car.

  Dolly rolls down the window. “Can I help you?”

  “Dolly,” she says, “you will not believe what happened to me this morning. I’ve never known anything like it.”

  “Can this wait? I have to speak to the doctor.”

  “I’m sure you do, but just listen to this, Dolly Blake. Your husband has a lot to answer for!”

  Dolly swallows. “What’s he done now?”

  “Only nearly blew my head off! I wanted to ask about the gypsy boy, you see, wanted to know what happened to him, so there I was calling by your place, only obviously you weren’t there, you were at the hospital, except that didn’t occur to me until I noticed your car wasn’t there, but by that point I’d already rung the bell and then your husband opens the door with a rifle pointed in my face, demands to know where the heck you are, says he’s going to blow me away if I don’t tell him—”

  Ann has to stop to take a breath, but Dolly has already turned the engine back on.

  “Did you tell him I was at the hospital?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “Oh hell, Ann. Did you see Jude?”

  “What?”

  “While you were at the house, did you see if Jude was there?”

  “Believe it or not, Dolly, I was more concerned about the gun in my face. Really, there is something very wrong with that man of yours.”

  Don’t I know it, Dolly thinks, and she hits the gas.

  * * *

  There is no sign of Samuel or Jude when she gets home. Dolly feels an awful sense of déjà vu as she moves through the house, calling for her son, and this time she checks all the closets, all the storage spaces, but her youngest is nowhere to be found.

  She runs out into the front yard, calling his name until the wind pushes the air back down her throat. Then, as she stands there, digging her nails into her scalp, she hears a dull banging, something hard striking against wood. She follows the sound, hurrying around the side of the house, and there is the shed, the door jumping in its frame as though being battered from the inside.

  “Jude! Jude, it’s me!”

  “Mom!”

  The door is fastened with a thick padlock and there is no sign of the key. She circles around the shed to see if there are any tools outside, something she could use to cut the lock, but there are only splinters of bone and antler discarded in the long grass.

  “Can you hear me, Jude?” She presses her fingers to the sliver of space between the door and the frame. “I don’t know what to do.”

  She feels his fingertips cold against hers.

  “I thought he was going to kill you, Mom. He had his old gun and he was waiting by the door. I thought he was going to shoot you.”

  “Are you okay? Did he hurt you?”

  Her son goes quiet then, but in the absence of his voice an idea comes to her.

  “Did he take the rifle with him?”

  “I don’t know. He put me in here so I couldn’t see. I just heard him take off in the truck.”

  “Right.” Dolly squares her shoulders. “You hold on in there. I’ll be right back.”

  She finds Samuel’s old M-16 in the hallway, propped up between their winter coats to conceal it. She had feared he might have taken it with him to the hospital, but he is angry, not stupid: he wouldn’t risk bringing a gun into a building with armed security guards—they would shoot him on sight. There’s a box of cartridges, too, but the rifle is already loaded. He really wasn’t bluffing about shooting Ann Traxler, she thinks. Or shooting me.

  At first Dolly tries hammering the lock with the rifle butt, but she hasn’t got the kind of brute strength her husband has, and it barely even makes a dent in the metal.

  “All right.” It’s been a long time since she fired a gun. Samuel tried to teach her a couple of times, before they were married, but she never had the same knack for it that he had, or their daughter. “All right, Jude, stay as far back from the door as you can.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just do as I say.”

  It takes her five messy shots to shatter the padlock enough for Jude to push the door open. He is on his hands and knees, his cane snapped in two in the corner behind him; she doesn’t need to ask who’s responsible, as she kneels down in the grass and puts her arms around her son. He feels sort of stiff, but that could be her too. It will take them time to find the way they’re supposed to go together.

  “Jude, I’m so sorry I left you alone with him. Noah was in trouble—I just didn’t think. I was trying to help your brother, but… I can’t seem to help any of you, can I?” She squeezes him tighter. “Christ, I couldn’t help any of you.”

  “Mom.” Jude pulls back, and his face seems suddenly older. “Do you know?”

  “Do I know what?”

  He glances back at the shadowy recess of the shed, just as the door bangs shut.

  “Do you know?”

  45

  While Dolly is still talking to Ann Traxler on the street, Emma arrives at the Estes Park medical center. Her hand hesitates on the big blue curtain around the bed, afraid she will have the wrong reaction to the person on the other side. She has never seen anyone all burned up before. “He’s real sensitive about how he looks,” Noah had told her on the phone. “I mean, obviously he’s cut up about everything, but you know what he’s like. He could do with a friend.” Great, in theory, but what if she’s grossed out and just makes it worse?

  Noah pulls the curtain back before she has the chance to turn around and walk back the way she came.

  “Hey, Rat, look who it is.”

  The figure sitting in the bed raises a hand that looks like part of a child’s Halloween costume, all wrapped in white. He has only half of Rat’s face, only one of those sharp blue eyes, and the rest is hidden beneath gauze. What skin she can see below the neck is patterned with thick red welts, and everything in between is puckered, like newly plucked chicken flesh.

  “Drăgută,” he says, very faintly, but the word gets its hook in her, and she feels on the verge of tearing up.

  “How’s it going?” Emma sits down on the edge of the bed. Her instinct is to put her arms around Rat, but she’s worried part of him might peel off and come away with her. The burning had nothing to do with her, she knows that, but looking at him she can’t help this feeling of guilt, like a hot cloth over her cheeks. We’re your friends, and this happened on our watch. Just like Abi.

  “Been better,” Rat replies.

  “Well, you look great. I mean, I’d still date you, if you weren’t gay. And a drug de
aler.”

  Emma grins and the corner of Rat’s mouth twitches.

  The three of them sit together for a while, trying to forget there is any more to the world than the space contained by this big curtain pulled around them. Rat, she learns, gets tired easily from the pain medication, and eventually he drifts off. Emma watches Noah watching him, and asks, “What do the doctors say? Is he going to be all right?”

  Noah nods, still looking at Rat. “They’re talking about doing a skin graft on his arms. It sounds horrible, but apparently it only takes a few weeks to heal. They reckon he’ll be out of here within a month.”

  “Noah, what you said on the phone, about what those people did, I’m so sorry.”

  “Did you know it was my mom who…?” He rubs his eyes. “She drove behind the ambulance the whole way here. My mom. Can you believe that? She’s been so weird and nice, said she was even going to call our insurance people, try and sort something out for Rat. I got kind of mad at her about it.”

  It has never occurred to Emma until now that Noah might dislike his mother as much as he does his father. She has always seen Dolly Blake from the perspective of a woman and has felt sorry for her for marrying that kind of man. She’s never really thought about what it must be like for the boys, to have your father treat you that way, and for your mother to just stand there watching it happen.

  “I think it’s okay to be mad at her, a little bit.”

  Noah shakes his head. “Nothing good ever comes of me getting mad at her. Either I get hurt or she gets hurt, or we both do, and then… I don’t know. It’s no good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like, I used to try and make Dad angry with her. I thought maybe if she knew what it felt like, then she’d do something about it. This one time…” He looks up at her suddenly.

  “Go on?”

  “No, never mind.” He bites his lip. “Jude was telling me yesterday how you’ve been trying to figure out what happened to Abi.”

  Emma picks at a thread unraveling on her denim jacket. “To be honest, I’m more confused about the whole thing now than when I started.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s Abi for you.”

  “It’s funny you mention your brother, though—I got the weirdest call from him last night. He said he had something to tell me, about Abi, and then the line just went dead.”

  Noah frowns. “Did you try calling him back?”

  “Sure, but it just went to voice mail. That’s been happening to me a lot these last couple of days, though, so I don’t know. Boys, right?”

  THEN

  On the last day of March, the snow still lies thick over the Rockies, and the people of Whistling Ridge are up early to shovel it from their driveways and grit the roads and sidewalks after yesterday’s slush has frozen.

  Noah and his father are clearing Hickory Lane, since nobody else will do it. The rising sun makes the snow a sort of peachy color and Noah remembers how, when they were all much younger, he used to carve it out with an ice-cream scoop and serve it to his brother and sister. This summer it will be four years since the hole in the wall. Sometimes he misses Jude, the way they used to be together. He is so much younger, Noah used to pretend, just to himself, that Jude was his son, and he would take great pride in looking after him better than their dad did. It’s different with Abigail, though. Perhaps they’ll outgrow this grudge—Noah sort of hopes they will: it is exhausting sometimes, being angry. But it is difficult to really miss somebody when they’re forever being shoved in your face.

  “I should get your sister out here,” his father says. “She’d clear this faster than you.”

  Then why don’t you? Noah thinks. He wants to curl back up in bed, where his hands and feet will be warm, and he can bury himself in a book until he forgets about his sister, his father, all of them.

  “How’s that make you feel, boy? Knowing a girl could do a man’s job better than you?”

  “She’s not even yours,” he mutters.

  Samuel stops, and looks at him with surprise. “What’d you say?”

  Emboldened by his father’s hesitance, Noah says, louder, “Abi isn’t even your daughter. Mom had an affair.”

  “You watch what you’re saying about your mother.”

  “All those years ago, when she ran away to Longmont.”

  “Shut your mouth.”

  Noah takes a step back, out of reach of his father’s hands. “She told me.”

  “You’re lying… You’re lying to me, boy, and he that speaketh lies shall not go unpunished.”

  Noah adjusts his grip on his shovel, possessed by the short-lived notion of clubbing his father. Then Samuel, heavy breath white and cloudy in the air, makes a sudden lunge for him, and Noah drops the shovel and takes off running up the lane, his father’s cries muted by the snow.

  To this day, he doesn’t really know why he said it. He’d wanted to hurt the man, but why that particular line? His mother had run off to Longmont once, that was true. Back when she was drinking gin by the pint, trying very hard not to be pregnant with Jude, she had told Noah all sorts of strange stories like that. She said there had been a nice man who’d helped her with her suitcase, who’d bought her a drink at a nearby bar, but nobody who’d taken her to bed. Noah remembers because, moments later, he’d had to hold her hair back while she vomited, and he’d thought any man would be crazy to want to be around his mother.

  But that morning, shoveling snow on Hickory Lane, it was the worst thing Noah could think of saying—because Samuel Blake took such pride in his daughter, even more than he took pride in his service in Vietnam, or in crying “Hallelujah” louder than anyone else in church, and because Noah was not permitted to take pride in anything.

  His father was right, of course: neither Noah nor his mother would go unpunished. Samuel took off his belt and beat them with the buckle, which left deep welts across their shoulders. The sad thing was hearing his mother admit to it—at least the part about staying in a motel in Longmont—like she thought maybe that would make him stop, even as the buckle swung around and caught her jaw. She lost a tooth that evening, but she never demanded any explanation from Noah, and he thought she was probably embarrassed that he remembered the motel story and holding back her hair.

  Their punishment was a given. Noah had known that the moment he opened his mouth, but the need to hit back at his father had been too strong. He never imagined Abigail might be punished for it too.

  NOW

  Emma, leaving the hospital, barely registers Samuel Blake standing in the lobby, until he calls her name.

  “Hey, you,” he says, beckoning her over. “Why is it every time I turn around, I run into you?”

  Emma never much likes the look of him, but this morning he appears especially rough, like he’s been sleeping inside out on the floor for the past couple of days.

  “I’m talking to you, girl. Have you seen Dolly? Is she here?”

  “I think she went home.”

  Emma doesn’t want to look him in the eye, so she stares at his hands instead as he picks at his cuticles, like it’s some nervous tic. It is then that she notices the bracelet. It’s nothing special, just a few tarnished shell casings threaded on a leather thong, exactly the sort of thing Emma can imagine Samuel wearing, except that the loop is far too small and it strains around his wrist, carving a red groove into his skin.

  Samuel looks at her, and then at the bracelet, and then he turns around and strides out of the hospital.

  “Hey, wait, where did you—?”

  He moves fast on his long legs, much faster than her, and Emma only reaches the front doors in time to see his pickup tearing out of the parking lot, almost swerving into another truck at the exit.

  As she hurries to her own car, she tries calling Hunter again. He doesn’t answer, and in the end, she just leaves him a message.

  “Listen, do you still have those photos from that night at the Tall Bones? That one of me and Abi? I’m coming over. There’s somet
hing I need to check.”

  She can’t help feeling she has seen that bracelet before.

  46

  THEN

  After spitting out her tooth in a mouthful of blood into the bathroom sink, Jude’s mother takes half a Valium and goes to bed. Jude creeps out to the bathroom and stares at the tooth for what feels like a long time, marveling at the way the blood slowly slips toward the plughole, red against the white porcelain, like a candy cane. Eventually Noah shoulders him out of the way to get some painkillers from the cabinet, and then they both retreat to their rooms.

  As Jude lies awake, listening to the sounds of the house settling down, he thinks he feels like that blood in the sink—slipping away toward something.

  At a quarter past midnight, he is woken by the sound of feet descending the stairs. When he hears the back door, he scrambles to the end of his bed to look out of the window. Everything is lit up by the moon gleaming off the snow and he can clearly see his father hauling his sister across the yard, his hand over her mouth as she struggles.

  Jude doesn’t understand: Dad never hurts Abigail. He doesn’t know what it is he thinks he can do by going down there, but for some reason Jude feels he must. He couldn’t help Noah or his mother, but maybe this time… Edging his way down the stairs and out through the kitchen, he tells himself that the right moment will come, that he will step in and stop it.

  There is a light in the shed, bleeding out into the night from between the clapboards, and Jude creeps closer and peers through one of the gaps. He sees his father take off his belt—one quick, sharp motion—and the fear on his sister’s face as she shrinks back against the opposite wall. Jude remembers how his father beat Noah and their mother with that same belt earlier that evening, how his mother had looked that same shade of frightened, how the buckle had left wet red scores across his brother’s back. And Jude is only twelve, so he puts his knuckles into his mouth and limps back toward the house because he doesn’t want to see that again.