Where the Truth Lies

by Anna Bailey

  “Your dad and I are going to go out back now,” she says, not taking her eyes off Samuel. “There are some things I need to talk to him about.”

  “Mom,” says Jude, “I don’t think—”

  “I want you and your brother to stay inside, you understand? Stay right here in this room until I say so.”

  It could not be called a march, how they make their way through the kitchen and out into the yard, she moving slowly with the rifle poised, the butt resting on her hip, while he glances over his shoulder with that wry sort of look that makes her fingers itch. She takes care to keep her distance: she has no doubt he knows how to disarm someone if they’re close enough.

  Outside, she points the gun barrel at the shed. “Tell me what happened with Abigail, in the shed,” she says. “I have to hear you say it first.”

  “First?” Samuel snorts. “What’s second? You’re really going to shoot me?”

  Dolly grits her teeth. “You’ve benefited from your children’s silence long enough. If Jude had to go through the horror of repeating it to me, then so do you.”

  “Dolly, you don’t understand.”

  “She was your daughter, Sam.”

  “No, no—she was yours. You whored yourself out to some stranger, and then you brought that cuckoo into my nest.”

  “She had your hair, Sam, the shape of your fingernails—she had your spite too. Were you so angry with me you couldn’t even see that? I didn’t do anything in Longmont. I only wanted to get away from you, just like Abi did.” Dolly squeezes the rifle butt under her arm. “Where is she? I know you killed her. I knew it as soon as I read what she’d written. Where’s our daughter’s body?”

  “She’s gone. The river carried her away.”

  “I don’t believe you. Christ, Sam, you… Your own child! At least let her have the dignity of a coffin and a headstone.”

  Samuel shakes his head, his face reddening. “No. I had to save her. She was growing away from me and I couldn’t understand why, not until Noah told me what you’d done, and then it all made sense. That girl was all I had, Dolly. She was the only good thing I’d ever had a hand in, but then she wasn’t even mine? I had to bring her back into the family, don’t you see that? Don’t you see that, Dolly? No, of course you don’t. You’ve never understood a thing about me, but Abi, she was the only one who ever made it better, Dolly. Abi forgave me, she always did.”

  “Abigail was a real person, Sam! She wasn’t something your mother wheeled out to get you to do as you’re told, she didn’t exist just to ease your guilty conscience. She was our daughter, our only daughter, and she can’t forgive you, Sam, because she’s dead. Because you killed her.”

  Samuel turns up his hands, palms open to her. “God forgives me, Dolly.” A fly settles on his wrist where the blood is drying and begins rubbing its legs together. “I am the way the Lord made me. He understands why I’ve done the things I’ve done. And if He can grant me forgiveness, then so can you.”

  “Don’t pull that one on me.” Dolly raises the rifle. “God is always on hand to forgive men the things they do to women. But the women still have to go through those things first.”

  “What’s done is done, Dolly. It’s done, and now all I ask is that my wife does her God-given duty and keeps her mouth shut.” Samuel scratches at his chin, leaving a smear of blood across his jaw. “Come on now, woman. Put the gun down before you hurt yourself.”

  * * *

  At first Noah and Jude do not react. The sound is a lot like the fall of their father’s axe when he’s out chopping wood. Then Jude says, “Oh my God,” and Noah helps him stumble to the kitchen window. Their mother is standing there with the rifle, her whole body one stiff line, unmoving. Their father is lying on the ground with a hole in his face. Without really thinking about it, Noah pulls his brother against his chest so that Jude won’t have to see.

  There has always been some small part of him that, seeing his father shouting at the sky, and waving his Bible around, had assumed Samuel Blake was God Himself. What Samuel hated God also hated because they were one and the same; the certainty with which his father punished them could surely only be the Lord’s own wrath. Now, looking at the blood and the meat that is left, Noah understands.

  My father was just a man all along.

  49

  Emma leans against her car in the gravel driveway, her sleeves still gummy with Hunter Maddox’s blood. She watches the lights of the emergency vehicles washing the Blake house in blue and red, more vivid now in the gathering dusk, as the sheriff’s deputies mill about the yard.

  The Blakes are standing out front. Dolly has a blanket around her shoulders. It is supposed to help with shock; the people in the ambulance tried to give one to Emma when they were taking Hunter away. Now she wishes she’d accepted it.

  “He came at me with the knife,” Dolly is telling Sheriff Gains. “I was just lucky I could get my hands on the rifle in time. I didn’t mean to shoot him, honest to God, but I panicked and it just went off.”

  Gains gives her a slow nod, writing it all down in his notebook. “And your sons, they saw this happen?”

  Dolly looks up then, stark-faced, and Emma is certain she is looking at her.

  Noah says, “Yes, sir.”

  “Jesus,” says Gains, and he repeats this several times, reading a handful of crumpled pieces of paper that Dolly has given him. Then he says something about sending someone round later in the week to speak to Jude, and Dolly just stares at the ground all the while. The sheriff touches her briefly on the arm and says, “I’m very sorry for your loss, Mrs. Blake.”

  Emma watches Noah clap Jude on the shoulder. Then he breaks away from his family and walks over to her. His bottom lip looks well chewed, but there is a kind of weary grace about him.

  “God, Noah.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  She thinks about the things Hunter murmured to her as he lay there bleeding out on his parents’ rug before the ambulance arrived. The things he’d whispered about what had happened in the woods.

  “Did your dad say anything about Abi before he…? Sorry, that’s probably really insensitive.”

  Noah glances over to where the sheriff is talking with one of his deputies. Lowering his voice, he says, “I’m going to send you something. Abi wrote some stuff down, and I managed to get some photos on my phone before Mom noticed. It’s real messed up, and I don’t know if it’ll answer any of your questions, but Jude and I agreed, if you want, you should probably see what she wrote. You know, since you’re the only person who cared enough to ask questions in the first place.”

  Emma reaches for her phone, still patterned with bloody fingerprints, but Noah puts his hand over hers. “Not here. Read it when you’re alone sometime.”

  “Is it true what they’re saying? Your dad attacked you?”

  Noah looks as though he is trying to swallow something large. “Plenty of times.”

  Over by the door, Dolly puts her arm around Jude, and he closes his eyes and leans up against her. Both look as though they have finally let go of some deep breath. Gains tips his hat and says, “We’ll be in touch.” Emma tucks her phone back into her jacket and does not say anything.

  * * *

  Three days later, Emma drives over to Estes to visit Hunter in the hospital.

  “They had to give me a blood transfusion,” he says. “It was so metal.”

  “How’re you feeling?”

  “Oh, like I want to die, for sure. I’m living on a diet of bananas and toast right now—you know, while my stomach heals up—and the doctor said I can’t have any nicotine or coffee. Zero out of ten. I would not recommend getting shanked in the gut.”

  Emma smiles and sits down on the edge of the bed. “I was going to text you, but then I realized you didn’t have your phone. Did you hear what happened to Samuel?”

  The watery sun dips behind a cloud, and without the sheer brightness, Emma can now see that Hunter
’s face is quite gray.

  “Heard he got himself shot.” He adds: “My parents were here yesterday. They told the police some story about how Samuel was mad at my dad because of work or whatever, and that’s why he came over to the house and carved me up. It avoids any awkward questions about Abi, and it makes Dad look good. Jerry Maddox, intended victim of brutal stabbing, sheds tears for innocent son clinging to life in intensive care.”

  “Catchy.”

  “You know it.” He lets out a deep sigh and rocks his head back against the big pillow propped up behind him. “At least he’s dead, I guess. Am I allowed to say that? I’m saying it. I’m glad he got his face blown off.”

  “Yeah,” says Emma. Then after a little silence, which seems to know it is on the brink of something, she asks, “Why did you help me? I mean, you knew it was Samuel who shot her, so why did you help me go after your dad?”

  “Jeez, my dad.” Hunter groans. “I wasn’t lying about that, I really did see him in the woods that night. But I mean, he kept her ChapStick, for Christ’s sake. He was real weird with Abi, and then you said that thing about her cardigan, and I knew she’d been wearing it when she… I guess I figured maybe she’d made it, and then my dad had come along and, you know… finished her off.” He punches his mattress weakly. “I don’t know. It’s all so screwed up, what happened to her. I was just trying to help.”

  Emma fiddles with the zipper on her jacket. She thinks about the pictures Noah sent her of gently crinkled pages, how after she’d finished reading them, she’d dug out their last high-school yearbook and filled it with all the photographs and keepsakes of Abigail she had left, pressing them between the pages as if they were wildflowers, before placing the book under her bed. A little funeral that nobody else attended. The only coffin Abigail would ever know.

  “I wish she’d told me what was going on.”

  “Abi worried about you all the time. She said you had enough crap to put up with already. You know.”

  Hunter looks her up and down, and Emma is suddenly uncomfortable with herself in a way she cannot fully articulate.

  “I didn’t ask her to be some kind of savior.”

  “I don’t think she meant it like that. She was just trying to look out for you.”

  “But I was her friend—I should have been looking out for her. Jesus, how come she could trust you but not me?”

  “Honestly, Emma, I think it was shame. She didn’t want anyone looking at her differently, especially not you. She loved you. And in her defense, she didn’t trust me—not at first, anyway. I was just some asshole who’d read her diary.” He sighs and flicks idly at the tube snaking out of his arm. “She did trust you, I promise; she just figured you had enough to deal with and didn’t want to drag you into her mess.”

  Emma thinks about the things the pastor’s son said to her at junior prom, about the way Andie Maddox looked at her that night at Hunter’s house, about Jerry setting up his Americans Only sign outside the trailer park. A little lifetime of words and glances that have made her feel sometimes as though she were trapped like a spider under a glass, watching Abigail on the outside living fearlessly. But it’s one thing to think about yourself like that. It’s something else entirely to realize that others may have seen you that way as well. If Abigail had chosen to suffer in silence because she thought her best friend was just too busy being bullied, it feels like pity. And Emma feels like it’s her fault all over again.

  Would I have to have been somebody else, Emma thinks, in order to have saved her?

  * * *

  She catches the strap of her purse on the door handle as she’s leaving the hospital, and it jerks her back sharply. Perhaps if she hadn’t sworn so loudly, the people at the front desk wouldn’t have looked up, and perhaps Jerry Maddox wouldn’t have noticed her.

  “What are you doing here?” He strides across the lobby, turning a few heads as if they can see his anger hovering around him. “Haven’t you caused my son enough trouble?”

  Emma takes a deep breath as she tries to unhook her purse from the door. Not now, she thinks, please not now, not when Abi is—But her strap is all tangled and she can’t get it free.

  “It’s your antics that landed Hunter in here, I hope you know that,” Jerry says. “Now he’s going to be benched for state playoffs, and he may never be able to play—Are you even listening to me?”

  Emma feels as though her scalp is suddenly too small for her head.

  “You leave my son alone, Miss Alvarez, or you’ll end up just like your father.”

  She looks up at him then, looks him right in the eye, and there is something almost gleeful there that makes her want to run. “What did you do to my dad?”

  “I just pointed out what can happen to people like you when you stick your nose in my business. But, you know, maybe you should ask your mother about that. I always did wonder where he disappeared to.”

  Jerry rolls his shoulders and suddenly he seems to take up twice as much room. Run! Emma thinks.

  “I don’t want to catch you lurking around my son again. You’ve ruined his life, do you understand? I see you here again, I’ll—”

  Run! So she does, tearing the strap of her purse clean off as she makes a break for the parking lot.

  * * *

  Dolly is in the front yard when Melissa pulls up. She has her arms full of things from her husband’s shed, and is tossing them onto a bonfire at the far end of the driveway.

  “Are you burning Jesus as well?” Melissa says.

  “It’s all got to go.”

  Plastic Jesus’s mouth stretches wider and wider as the flames gather Him up.

  “I never liked that one anyway.” Dolly wipes her hands on her thighs. “Come to see where it all happened? Half the town must have driven by these last few days.”

  The look Melissa gives her is almost fond. “I’ve come to see you, of course,” she says. “How’re you holding up?”

  “I don’t know. I think I should know, but I don’t.”

  “Are you sleeping okay?”

  “Are you here as my doctor?”

  “No. My friend just shot her own husband in self-defense. I’m worried about her, is all.”

  Dolly nods. “How’s Emma? I heard about what happened, her and that Maddox boy. And then she was here, you know, after Samuel. That’s a lot for her in one day.”

  Emma had had blood all over her sleeves, Dolly recalls, and she remembers thinking it was particularly striking because the girl’s hands were mostly clean. The paramedics had probably wiped them off in the ambulance, but there was nothing anyone could do about the stains on the fabric. She imagines Melissa trying to scrub it out, the way she’d once had to scrub her sons’ blood from the hallway floorboards, the night they found those pictures on Noah’s computer. Even if they live, she thinks, we all end up with our children’s blood on our hands, one way or another.

  Melissa says, “Emma’s okay, I think,” and Dolly feels sorry for her, because that is what she says when people ask her about the boys.

  Dolly rubs her eyes. “It’s the fire,” she says. Burning plastic makes her eyes water. She knows she should probably invite Melissa inside, but the house is a giant article of clothing that doesn’t fit right, and she can’t make up her mind how she wants to be in it yet. It feels important to get it right with Melissa, if she doesn’t want her friend to slip away again.

  “I enjoyed it,” she says at last. “Shooting him, I mean.”

  “God, Dolly.”

  “God’s got nothing to do with it.”

  Melissa laughs, short and sudden, and Dolly joins her, both glad of some way of releasing the tension in their throats.

  Then Melissa says, “I’ve heard what people are saying about Abigail. A little, anyway. About what… he did.”

  It must have been one of the sheriff’s deputies who started it, Dolly figures. It wouldn’t surprise her, after they’d seen what Abigail had written. Who could look at that and not have something to
say? Or maybe it was Bill Tucker’s wife, Maggie, who does the department’s catering. All of them gossiping like they did when Noah showed up to give Rat an alibi. Perhaps they don’t even mean to be unkind. If you’re far enough removed from an event, it just becomes a story, and stories make things easier sometimes, Dolly understands that.

  “What are people saying?” she asks.

  “That he…” Melissa swallows. “And then he shot her. Up there in the woods, where they found the shell casing.”

  Dolly nods.

  “It’s not your fault. Oh, Dolly. You couldn’t have known.”

  “Abi tried to tell me once. I think that’s what she was doing. One morning she asked me to help her get the morning-after pill, and I… That’s the terrible thing, I didn’t want to hear about it, so I smacked her.”

  Dolly did not mean to tell her. Melissa looks uncomfortable, and Dolly can feel that discomfort beginning to take shape between them, something solid that will drive them apart again, but she can’t seem to stop herself now that she’s started. Just like Ann Traxler with the dead woman in her chair.

  “Noah hates me. He’s been so good about all of this, but he hates me. Do you know what he said to me at the hospital yesterday? I told him I’d sorted out the insurance for his boyfriend, and he said, ‘Where was all this when Dad tried to take me to conversion therapy?’ ” She shudders. “Oh, it was horrible, Melissa. He said it like that, right in front of the nurse. And then I tried to say I didn’t know about that—because I didn’t—and he said, ‘You always knew exactly what he was going to do, and you just sat back and let him do it.’ ”

  “Well, I don’t think he should have said those things.”

  “But he was right!”

  That’s what she’s really upset about. Until yesterday, until Noah had yelled at her in front of that nurse and that poor burned-up boy, she had thought that what she’d done with Samuel would be enough. That they could all agree on a clean slate now. But she was the one who’d fired the gun, she’d got to blast all her pent-up anger into Samuel Blake’s face, not either of her sons. And anger has to go somewhere.