The sheriff spit, wiped his mouth with that bloody glove again, and picked up the sled’s nylon rope. “Now why on earth would you think that?”
• • •
The full report was done, being signed off on. Garrison would have it officially in a few days, but he’d been better than his word and got what Chris had wanted—needed, anyway—just before he’d set out with the sheriff. He’d taken the call with the sheriff’s truck still idling in his driveway, Garrison reading fast in that brutal early-morning hour from all the pages that had been e-mailed to him the night before.
The ulna is one of the two bones of the forearm. The injury on the remains from Indian Bluffs was an ulnar shaft, or nightstick, fracture—so called because it’s the sort of break common when someone gets hit with a nightstick, raising an arm up to defend himself, although Chris guessed that wasn’t the case. When it’s bad enough, displaced, it’s repaired through open reduction and internal fixation, basically the insertion of a strong metal rod—plates and screws. That was something Chris did know about: when his knee shattered, the bone below it had cracked, too. He’d gone through the same procedure. After all, ulnar fractures are a pretty common injury for athletes, especially football and basketball players. Soccer players, too—if they’re struck by the ball in just a certain way, kicked in just the right place.
According to what Garrison had read to him over the phone, this particular fracture had happened when the deceased was young and had been left to heal with only a cast. Not the best treatment, because the fracture was very serious, serious enough it was still evident in the adult bones—like a crack in a pane of glass—all these years later. Evident . . . evidence. Just the sort of thing that might identify the bones Chris had found at Indian Bluffs if you knew to look for it. And that treatment, shitty as it was, might have been all that someone without a lot of money or no medical insurance could ever get—someone who might have found it easier to cross the river to have it done in Mexico.
Someone like Rudy Reynosa.
• • •
They didn’t talk much more as they made their way back to the truck, getting there as night started to fall. Really, they didn’t talk at all. There was nothing more to say. They had a long drive back to Murfee in the dark, both of them covered in dried blood the whole way.
Who do you trust, Deputy Cherry? Can you trust everyone in your department? Can you trust anyone in Murfee at all? Chris couldn’t shake the memory of the sheriff’s big Sauer 303 pointed at him. For just a heartbeat, it had been pointed at him, not at the elk.
Just a heartbeat, but long enough.
22
CALEB
When I woke up, she was gone. I knew she would be. I rolled over, searching for the fading warmth of her body, the only thing to even hint she’d been with me at all.
Later I went into my father’s room and contemplated searching his dresser drawers, his nightstand, looking for clues. Secrets. But standing near his bed, I had images of traps, land mines: a feather or piece of fishing line falling to the floor; my breath hanging in the air, still visible, long after I’m gone—a thousand clues that might reveal my presence to him when he returned. It’s so goddamn funny that we both spend so much time hiding from each other, pretending.
Him, that he’s a loving father. Me, that I’m a loving son.
We’d traded numbers that night outside the school, so I texted Chris, asking him to tell me when they were on their way back. I had to check in and make sure he was okay. It was a risk, and I knew he wouldn’t even get it until they were well on the road from El Dorado. There are no cell towers out there, and phone service is nonexistent. It’s like a piece of the world that’s fallen off, a jigsaw puzzle piece lost on the floor. I wasn’t even sure he would answer me. I just wanted to know . . . something. No matter what I’d said the night before, I was worried.
I was afraid of my father’s room, but not of the attic. That’s where he’d put my mom’s stuff, and with him gone and still hours from home, I pulled down the ladder and crawled up there to look through those things one last time. Mostly I just wanted pictures—to see us together again. I wanted to see her face one more time, afraid I might not be remembering it right. That her hair was brown and not blond; that I had been dreaming her eyes were green when they were really blue. All these things I thought I knew and remembered, that I’d had wrong all along. That she never existed, was nothing but a dream.
But the boxes were there under the roof just where my father had put them that day he slapped me on the back, leaving a dusty handprint. They were neatly stacked, along with other things from other wives. I sat for a long time in the still and gloom before I opened up the first and looked through it. It didn’t hold my mom’s clothes or her old Christmas decorations or even the photos I’d been looking for. It took me a few moments to even figure out what I was looking at.
Then I dumped the box all over the attic floor.
• • •
I heard from Chris a little while later, two texts, both simple and to the point.
A warning: On our way. And the second as good as a promise: You were right.
23
MELISSA
She was outside smoking, listening to Dark Stars, when she realized Chris was home.
The shower was running hard.
She came in, still wrapped up in blankets, to find bloodstains on the edge of the sink, on the tub. Through the old shower-door glass, fogged and green and thick, all she could see was red. Her heart hurt and she pulled back the door fast to find him standing there, head down, water running over him, scrubbing at his bloody hands. She made a noise, half reached for him.
He told her: “It’s not mine, I’m okay.” They’d just shot an elk, a big one.
She asked if he’d done it, pulled the trigger himself, and he shook his head no. He was just the decoy, the dummy.
He turned away, leaned his head against the wall; held his huge bloody hands at his side. He said, “I think I’m in trouble, babe.” The water was so hot Mel could feel it from where she was standing, like Chris was trying to set himself on fire. Trying to burn all the blood away.
She slipped out of her blanket, out of her clothes, and got in the shower with him. She gasped at the scalding water, but it hurt less than her heart. She filled up her hands with soap; put it in his hair, all over his chest. She held his hands in hers and scrubbed them with her own. She washed all of him until the blood was all gone.
24
ANNE
He called and asked if they could meet outside Murfee, away from town. When she asked where, she heard him thinking on the line before he mentioned a place called the Lights. Wondering if she knew where that was. She said she did.
She came late after school and he was there before her, sitting in his truck, heater running. The little gravel lot was empty except for a few crushed beer cans, loose paper blowing across the ground. Also, two beer bottles standing upright like lonely sentries on the table under the pavilion, catching and then throwing a last bit of winter sunlight. If they talked for any length of time, night would find them, and maybe she’d see these mysterious lights after all.
As she got out of her car there was a train coming toward them, slow and lumbering, but it was too far away for any sound.
“Hey,” Chris said, surprised when she got in and handed him back his book. He turned it over in his hands, back and forth, like he’d never seen it before, and then placed it up on the dashboard.
“How did your hunting trip go?” she asked.
“Bloody.”
“Oh.” She glanced around the tight interior of the truck, at all the police gear, as if there might really be blood there.
“Thanks for coming all the way out here. I know it’s weird. I didn’t feel comfortable in town.”
She smiled. “Yeah, I know that feeling.”
<
br /> He shifted, facing her, and sitting this close to him in the car, she got a sense of how big he really was. He hadn’t shaved, not recently, and a fine line of hair ran along his jawline, pale, almost blond.
“I’m going to tell you some things and ask you a couple as well,” he said. “I hope you’ll hear me out first. And look, you don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to. I’m just trying to understand exactly what I’ve gotten myself into.”
“That sounds serious. Are you in trouble?” she asked.
He shook his head, but she didn’t quite believe him. “It’s not so much that I’m in trouble as that I’ve stumbled on some, if you get my distinction . . . if there really is one.” He paused, the train lumbering toward them. “And I think it involves you too, Anne.”
Anne held her breath. “God, I don’t need trouble, Chris. I came here to get away from it.”
“I know,” he said. “Or I guess I know now. Sheriff Ross told me all about it, his version anyway. How he met you before. And well, that other thing, with your husband and that student. I’m so sorry.”
Breath escaped her; she felt herself get small. There was no avoiding it. “I wish he hadn’t told you, not like that.”
“It’s okay. You can tell me here now, any way you want.”
Now she heard the train, felt it, as it went by. After the last car had passed—the last of the sun gleaming on its metal skin—she finally turned to him again. “His name was Lucas Neill.”
• • •
She told him about that day in her classroom, with the rain pounding outside and his very first texts. She didn’t leave anything out, right up to the day she’d gotten so worried and finally broke down and returned his messages. How they met outside a Big Lots and he’d tried to kiss her, and how she said no. How she hit him across the face and left him angry, frustrated. That was what she really wanted Chris to understand—that no matter what people thought, no matter what the news hoped to report (and went on ahead and suggested anyway, because it made a better story), she never had any sexual relationship with Lucas Neill.
She’d made mistakes—God knows that, a hundred of them—let Lucas get too close, listened too damn much, but she had never crossed that line. She told Chris how much she’d loved her husband, and how she sometimes wondered if she’d just gone ahead and slept with Lucas Neill, if he might still be alive. It was a silly thing to believe—to beat herself up over—but it haunted her anyway.
“A couple of days later the doorbell rang,” she said. “He rang the damn doorbell, like he’d been invited over.” She could still hear the cheap sound of that doorbell. She heard it all the time.
“It was this time of year, right around Murfee’s Fall Carnival, when you and I first met.” But that felt like forever ago. “Marc and I were talking about dinner, of all things, a simple conversation, like everyone does every day. It was late, but I wanted to go out and get something and he wanted to heat up hot dogs, scrounge around the kitchen for leftovers. There was a game on TV he wanted to watch. I can’t even remember what it was, who was playing.” She wondered for a moment if it was possible that Chris had been on TV that night.
“Anyway, I was irritated, because he knew I didn’t like fucking hot dogs and I just wanted to go out, someplace stupid like Olive Garden or Red Lobster, and we were bickering. And then I got even more irritated when the doorbell rang and he stopped in mid-sentence to go answer it and . . .”
It’s Lucas, she knows that, even though his face is dark inside the hood of his sweatshirt. He says something, but it doesn’t really matter because the gun is louder, oh so much louder, and she is screaming both Why? and No! at the same time and Lucas is both laughing and crying and all Marc is doing is reaching for her to protect her, to shield her, and then she’s trying to help him stand up because he just can’t do it anymore, as Lucas fires again into the back of Marc’s head and his knees buckle and his face turns pale while he dies in front of her. She feels the last breath he is going ever to take against her face and it makes her eyes blink as he passes through her and Lucas is still standing there aiming the gun at her and then finally thank God he puts it in his own mouth . . .
“He said later the plan was to shoot Marc and then himself. He had a moment’s thought about shooting me, but it didn’t matter anyway, because he didn’t shoot either of us. Only Marc, only my husband.”
She told him the rest, all about the trial and how it broke the remaining pieces of her life. Lucas Neill was convicted and sent to Austin State Hospital, a psychiatric facility. She admitted she read an article recently about a spike in patient-on-patient violence at Austin State, and how she hoped someone there was hurting Lucas Neill. She had dreams about that, hated herself for them. She tried a joke, how it often felt like Lucas wasn’t the only one sentenced to that place, but she was crying when she said it.
• • •
“I guess Sheriff Ross remembered me from that stupid awards ceremony and the dinner after, then all the news following Marc’s death. When there was an opening at Big Bend he helped make it happen. I don’t know how many strings he pulled, but enough. And I needed it, because I needed to get out of Austin. I needed to get away.” She wiped at her face. “You know, once I got here, a part of me suspected that he was waiting for me, just waiting for the right time to . . .”
Chris stopped her. “Anne, I understand. I do. Look, this thing with you and the sheriff? That’s all . . .” He was struggling, searching for the right words, if there were any. “Well, it’s fake, like the carnival . . . the Pandemonium Shadow Show from the book. With the sheriff, with everything he says and does, there’s always this smoke, right? It hides everything, and you have to feel your way through it slowly, to see the real thing at its heart.”
Chris shook his head, still not sure he’d said it right. “But my dad used to say, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
• • •
It was his turn. He told her about the body at Indian Bluffs. He told her that Caleb Ross and his friend, America Reynosa, believed that body was America’s brother, Rodolfo—a former Border Patrol agent—and how he believed that now, too. He thought he might even be able to prove it, all because of an old sports injury. Not his, Rudy’s, and if nothing else, it was a start. Pointing him in the right direction, so he could keep feeling his way ahead, searching for the real thing.
He told her it was also very possible that Chief Deputy Dupree was Rudy’s killer, and that it was done with the sheriff’s knowledge or on his orders.
“Caleb wouldn’t go quite that far, but he said America believed it, the part about Duane, anyway. And he’s convinced his dad is at the center of it all.”
“God, Chris, why?”
“Not sure, but it might also have something to do with those two federal agents that were attacked, their car set on fire.”
Anne remembered that.
Chris said, “You know, more smoke, this time for real.” Then he pointed out to her where he was parked the night he pulled over Darin Braccio and Morgan Emerson.
• • •
“Caleb is worried about you . . . for you. He didn’t quite come out and say it that way . . . but, you know the sheriff was married before, right?”
“Of course, his wife, Evelyn. Caleb’s mother.”
“Well, before Evelyn, there were others. Nellie died in the bathtub in their home, the house he and Caleb still live in. There was another one, early on, ran off to El Paso, I think.”
“I heard those things.” Her expression must have been clear even in the truck’s dark, as Chris smiled, cold.
“Yeah, the sheriff hasn’t been too lucky with love. All just coincidences, right? But between his wives and now Rudy Reynosa, we have a lot of people running away from Murfee. . . . You know, disappearing.”
“More smoke,” she said.
“Yeah, a lot m
ore.”
They both sat for a long time, silent. She understood now why Caleb had been trying to talk with her, following her around. He was keeping an eye out for her, trying to protect her. Her boy knight in shining armor.
She wasn’t sure whether she grabbed Chris’s hand or he grabbed hers.
• • •
“Okay, so what does it all mean? What now?” she asked.
Chris touched the badge on his shirt, a gold star. “I’m not sure. Not yet. It could be a whole lot of nothing.”
But she knew he didn’t believe that, not even close. “Are you upset I didn’t tell you about Sheriff Ross before . . . that I knew him? How I ended up here . . . about my husband?”
“No more than you’re upset that I haven’t told you about my girlfriend. Her name is Melissa.” He released her hand, pointed at the book on the dash. “But it’s about the books, right? We both just love talking about books.”
She laughed, and in that moment, he could have fallen forward to kiss her, his big hands finding hers again and pulling her to him, where he’d feel twice as warm as the car, his own gravity holding her close. Safe. She would have let him, wanted him to. But Deputy Cherry, with his girlfriend Melissa at home waiting for him, didn’t do that, and it meant twice as much to her.
He finally said, “Be careful, okay? Just do that. And I’ll let you know how things go.”
“I will. But you’re the one who needs to watch out.”
“Fair enough. Oh, and he invited you over for Thanksgiving, right?”
“Yes, he did.” She was hopeful. “Are you going too? I wasn’t sure how to get out of it. The sheriff isn’t an easy man to turn down.”
He pulled the book down from the dash, thumbed the pages, and then carefully slid it between the seats for the drive home, or wherever he was going. “No, I’m not. But you’ll be having elk for supper.”
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