“Are you going to tell her?”
Dru looked into the field across the road. The wind bent the hip-high grass, roughing it into dry waves. “I wish I could protect her.” Dru brought her gaze back to Lily.
They considered each other, and the understanding of how alike they were as mothers in their desire to shield their children—for they are always your children, regardless of age—arced between them.
Lily said, “You know she could hear it elsewhere—on the news, if they get around to it.”
“I’m going to tell her,” Dru said. “I wanted to do this for her, though, come with her here—to give her support, let her see for herself—” She looked off again, not saying the rest—that her fear was that once Shea knew of the pregnancy, she’d be angry at Dru. Shea would assume it made Dru happy having her low opinion of AJ confirmed when nothing could be further from the truth.
“Have they done a DNA test? They know for certain AJ is the father?”
“Not yet. Joy said it could be days, even weeks, before the test results are in.”
If Lily was relieved, she didn’t say. Instead, she mentioned the old railroad trestle. “It’s close by. Erik and AJ used to go there when they were kids.” She lowered her sunglasses, covering her eyes, and pulled the car keys from her pocket. “I’ll take you back to the house first. You can wait for Shea there. I think we’d both be more comfortable.”
Lily’s clipped tone as good as said she didn’t want Dru’s company any longer, and it rankled. “It’s not personal, you know.” Dru addressed Lily over the Jeep’s roof.
“What isn’t? Your dislike of my son, or your wish that he’s dead, as dead as Becca.”
“Oh my God! I never said—you can’t deny AJ has—” Dru hesitated. “Issues. He’s not the only one to come back from Afghanistan, from war, damaged, and it concerns me. Yes, it does, for my daughter, her well-being, her safety and happiness. It’s not AJ’s fault this happened to him. We’re not—the United States should do more to help our veterans.”
“Our veterans? What do you know about them, Dru? Shea didn’t enlist. She’s never risked her life to save others the way AJ did. Does that sound like the action of a murderer to you? Would someone who put his life on the line the way AJ did, time and again, come home only to kill someone, a pregnant woman?” Lily huffed a breath, agitated by disgust, the huskier undernote of withheld tears.
“I know you don’t want to believe it, but he could have suffered a break, a psychotic break. It happens.”
“AJ isn’t capable—”
“My ex-husband, Rob, Shea’s father, suffers from PTSD,” Dru said. She didn’t want to bring it up, not any part of her personal life, but she felt pushed to do it. “His experience wasn’t the result of going to war. He was assaulted and robbed. The thugs who attacked him beat him to within an inch of his life. As horrible as his physical injuries were, they were the least of it. He had night terrors. He was paranoid. He thought everyone was out to get him, even me. He bought several guns, one for every room of the house. He slept—when he did sleep, it was with a .357 under his pillow, one eye open, one foot—”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t have time—”
“One night he heard me in the kitchen.” Dru kept talking. “I’d gotten up because Shea wasn’t feeling good, and I’d been in to check on her, then came downstairs to make myself some warm milk and honey. My ex claimed he thought I was an intruder, that I’d broken into the house to rob him. He had a shotgun and threatened me with it. Shea heard us, and when she came downstairs, Rob didn’t know who she was, either. He could have killed us, he was that out of it. To this day I’m not sure why he didn’t.”
“My son is missing, Dru, possibly injured or worse.” Lily’s eyes on Dru’s were hard. “I need to keep looking for him.”
“I never would have believed Rob was capable of violence, if I hadn’t been there, seen it with my own eyes.” Dru paused, fighting a dirty wash of emotion. “I loved my husband with my whole heart,” she said softly. “I still do. He was the one for me. Our marriage wasn’t perfect; he wasn’t perfect, but up until the assault, he was—was a great guy. Maybe if after the assault he’d talked to me—to someone, but he didn’t. He withdrew, went into himself. When he looked at me, I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.” Dru sought Lily’s glance. “If one act of violence can so irrevocably change someone, I can’t begin to imagine the emotional effect of multiple acts of violence such as what soldiers experience during war.”
Lily averted her glance. It had gotten to her, though, Dru’s story. She could sense that Lily knew her point exactly. Lily wouldn’t admit it, though. She wasn’t going to come out and say AJ had PTSD, and that he may have, like Rob, lost touch with reality and become a danger to others and maybe to himself.
Dru got into the Jeep. “It’s not that I don’t feel compassion,” she said, “because I do.”
Lily keyed the ignition, not acknowledging if she’d even heard Dru.
“I’ll ride with you to the railroad trestle,” Dru said.
“All right, then,” Lily said. “The old well house is a few miles farther on. I’m going there, too.”
There were other buildings, Lily said, additional well houses, sheds, and the like; it would take days to search them, and Dru sensed that by talking, Lily was determined to ignore the rancor between them. Or possibly she was intent on drowning it out.
“AJ knows the ranch as well as my dad does,” Lily said. “He could be any number of places.”
“If he’s hiding, you mean.”
Lily didn’t respond.
Dru said, “You don’t like the idea of your son and my daughter marrying any better than I do—even before all this happened.”
“No, but like you, it’s not personal. Anyway, Shea is his choice.”
“So you’ll make the best of it.”
“I’ll do what I have to in support of my son.”
“Does he know how you feel?”
“No, and even if he did, my opinion isn’t that important to him.”
Dru looked at Lily, surprised by her admission, touched by it.
“We aren’t close.” Lily pushed her hand over her hair.
“I’m sorry,” Dru said, and she was, and when Lily asked about the wedding, whether there was a way to avoid canceling it, Dru said she didn’t think so.
“It’s going to be awful,” Lily said. “There are more than a hundred people invited between us, aren’t there?”
“It’s nothing in comparison to planning your child’s funeral,” Dru said.
“No.”
“Shea’s bridal attendants will help with sending regrets.”
“I can take care of our guest list and cancel the rehearsal dinner. Or if there’s some other way you’d like me to handle it . . .” Lily glanced at Dru.
“I was thinking we could each contact the guests we’ve invited.”
“And the vendors we’ve hired?”
“Yes. It feels horrible, doesn’t it? Impossible—like stopping a train.”
Lily started to answer, but her phone went off, and she pulled to the road’s edge, slamming on the brake, grabbing her purse.
Dru watched her, heart racing.
“It’s Paul.” Lily looked up from the caller ID.
“I’ll just stretch my legs,” Dru said, getting out of the car. She closed the Jeep’s door quietly and headed across the road, where a section of old cedar fencing supported the thick growth of a morning-glory vine, smothering it in cascades of sky-blue flowers. Still, she heard Lily’s voice, the ring of her anxiety: “But did anyone actually see him?” A beat. “It makes no sense that he would . . .” The wind took away the next bit. Then, “He might not have . . .” Dru lost the rest.
She didn’t turn around, though, until Lily called out, “Dru! We need to go now. I have to get back to Dallas.”
“What happened?” Dru got into the Jeep.
“The police found AJ’s cell phone and his
laptop.” Lily made a U-turn. “At the bus station in downtown Dallas, abandoned in the seat of a chair.”
“Did anyone see him?”
“A janitor said he saw AJ coming out of the men’s room at around three in the morning. He remembered him because he was wearing dark glasses, and it struck him as odd, given that it was the middle of the night.”
“So he got on a bus? He’s on the run?” Accusation cut through Dru’s voice, but her mind was on Shea, how terribly she was going to be hurt. She didn’t know Becca had been pregnant. Now this? “Do the police know where he was going?”
“I know how it looks, but no one they interviewed actually saw him get on a bus.” Lily glanced at Dru.
She shifted her glance. She was tired of hearing everyone say that—as if how it looked wasn’t the way it was. As if there could still be an explanation other than the obvious one for AJ’s actions.
Lily called her dad and arranged to meet him back at the house. After that, neither she nor Dru spoke for several miles, but then Lily said, “He’s my son, no matter what.”
Guilty or innocent, it didn’t matter.
Dru understood. She would feel the same if it were Shea. Your children are your children, and you love them regardless. But Dru understood something else as well: Lily wasn’t as certain about AJ as she sounded.
Lily had doubts.
The others weren’t back when they arrived at the house. Lily went inside to pack her things while Dru waited on the porch. A moment later she heard the screen door open, Shea’s voice.
“Mom?”
“Oh, Shea.” Dru took a step toward her daughter but stopped when Shea threw up her hands.
“I’m fine.” Stop. She might as well have shouted it. Her jaw was set, her eyes stubborn. She didn’t believe it, that AJ was on the run. How could she not believe it? But her faith in him would end. Once she knew about the baby.
Dru met Erik’s glance when he joined them on the porch.
“Hey,” he said, and that was all.
He seemed heartsick—a reaction more in keeping with what Dru had expected from Shea on hearing her betrothed, a wanted man, had hopped a bus and skipped town. Erik looked as if he’d begun to accept that his best buddy had done something pretty terrible, monstrous even.
Lily came out, a tote over her shoulder, followed by her dad. She didn’t look at Dru, but Jeb Axel did. His eyes, a shade of blue that had been faded by time and weather, were caught in a net of fine lines, but his gaze was piercing nevertheless. It was unapologetic. Talk around town was that back in the day, all the girls had crushes on him—Lily Axel’s daddy. They had compared him to Clint Eastwood. He was still a looker for an older man—age hadn’t thickened him. If anything, the years had pared away whatever softness he might have once had the way the wind chiseled the soil from the face of a rock. Dru hated it, but Jeb Axel intimidated her.
“Are you ready?” she asked Shea.
“No one saw AJ get on the bus, Mom.” It was a challenge. Shea, thinking she possessed all the facts, was throwing down the gauntlet.
Knowing what was ahead, the terrible hurt that lay in wait, Dru left it there. She wasn’t about to get into it here, not in front of Jeb and Lily, or even Erik, as good a friend as he was to Shea. No one needed to watch while Shea’s world was taken apart.
“He wouldn’t leave like that.” Shea was adamant. “He wouldn’t do that to me. Or to you.” Shea looked at Lily and then at Jeb.
Lily was searching in her purse—for her car keys, Dru guessed, but she paused now, and her eyes widened as if she found Shea’s pronouncement of AJ’s regard for her startling.
Erik said, “I wish I knew what to believe.”
Jeb, who’d been pacing, stopped and, thumping his palm with his fist, said Shea was right. “There’s no goddamn way in hell AJ got on a bus,” he declared.
And then he collapsed.
Dru watched it happen, the inharmonious dance of steps that first had him staggering, then dropping to his knees, then toppling sideways onto the porch floor. Because he was tall, well over six feet, rangy and hard boned, he made a lot of noise going down, but then he lay still, and there was only the sweet sound of a spring breeze through the live oaks and the full-throated call of a tiny wren that perched in that instant on the porch rail.
7
Lily was frozen in place, watching her dad fall. It was like watching a tree coming down in sections, one that had stood for an eon until it didn’t. Shrugging off her tote, she went to her knees beside him, cupped his cheek with her hand, smoothed scraps of white hair from his brow. He was cool but not cold to the touch, and damp with sweat. She could see his pulse beating, a tiny piston, hammering inside his temple. His chest rose and fell, a series of shallow dips. “Dad?” she whispered, and his eyelids fluttered.
Behind her, she heard Erik talking; he had his phone out, trying to call 911. When he couldn’t get a signal, Dru and Shea said they’d try.
“In the house,” Lily said. “Upstairs. Use the landline.”
“No.”
Lily looked down at her dad.
“I don’t need an ambulance.” Rolling onto his back, he groaned softly, and the breath he took in was deep enough to make him shudder.
“Are you sure?” She touched his face again, his shoulder.
“I’m all right, Lily. Help me up.”
She braced his elbow while he levered himself into a sitting position, pushed his back against the porch railing.
Lily looked him over. He was as pale as skim milk, and his hands shook as he ran them over his face. They were long fingered, thick knuckled, and strong. She’d seen him wrestle a calf to the ground with those hands, wield an ax, bandage her knees. They were an old man’s hands now, the skin across the backs mottled and so thinned by time that the veins were as visible as lines on a road map. When had he aged so much?
“What happened?” she asked softly.
“Got light-headed.” He bent his head back against the railing, closing his eyes again as if to shut her—shut all of them―from his sight.
He was embarrassed, Lily thought, and it made her heart ache.
“Y’all go on now. I’m good. Lily, you call me when you get back to Dallas.”
“I’m not going,” she said.
He argued, but he knew that when she made up her mind she could be as stubborn as he was. She and Erik got him into the house. Dru held the door. Shea picked up a stray coffee mug and followed them into the kitchen.
“What can we do?” Dru asked.
“Nothing,” Lily said, easing her dad into a chair at the table. “Thanks,” she added, “but it’s fine. We’re fine.” She was looking at her dad.
He nodded.
“All right, then,” Dru said. “Well, you’ll call us if you need anything?”
Lily met her glance, but only briefly. “Yes, thanks,” she repeated.
Dru and Shea left, and while Erik stayed with her dad in the kitchen, Lily went out onto the front porch to call Paul, steeling herself, unsure how he’d react when she said she wasn’t coming back to Dallas after all. He would in all likelihood be angry with her, but beneath the icier currents of her panic and concern for AJ and her dad, she felt relieved. She wasn’t glad for her father’s collapse, but she didn’t regret that it kept her here.
Paul was leaving the police station when she caught him, via a back entrance, he said. “The press is out front. Not looking for me,” he added hastily when Lily voiced her dismay. “It’s that councilman, Hawkes. I don’t wish trouble on anyone, but whatever mess he’s in, it takes the spotlight off us. Hawkes is a bigger fish.”
Lily perched uneasily on the swing’s edge. “Why are you at the police station at all? I thought they were through questioning you.”
Paul’s laugh was truncated. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s like they suspect me.”
“Why?”
“They’re making a big deal out of the fact that there was no forced entry, that I fo
und the body.”
“AJ kept a key outside.”
“What?”
“AJ kept a key to his apartment in the gaslight outside his front door. He told us about it, and you said it wasn’t a good idea. Becca, or anyone who knew, could have used it to get in. You need to see if it’s missing.”
“I’ll tell Bushnell, but since I already told him I have a key, I doubt it’ll make a difference. He’s pissed anyway because I had Jerry meet me here this morning. I’ve lawyered up, as they say, but damned if I’m going to deal with them and not have legal counsel—the way those bastards twist everything.”
“Jerry is your corporate attorney, Paul. We need Edward on this.” Saying his name out loud caused her heartbeat to slow and thicken, but it wasn’t as if she was inventing an excuse to mention it. This situation was real, not some dire-straits charade she’d invented in the hope that once Edward heard about it, he would feel compelled to meet with her again.
“I still think getting a criminal attorney involved is premature at this point, Lily. Trust me. I know what’s best.”
“All right.” Lily forced herself to agree, to seem amicable, even as mutiny hardened her jaw. It was wrong to delay; she could feel to her core that it was. She wanted to shout it at Paul, to say, This is not about you and what you want. This is about our son—his life—
Paul was talking, something about surveillance cameras.
Lily apologized. “I’m sorry, can you say that again?”
“The cops have got the tapes, video off the cameras around AJ’s apartment. If the film’s any good, they’ll be able to see who, besides me, AJ, and the girl, went into his apartment. It’ll take time for them to review it, though.”
“More waiting,” Lily said, and she regretted it, because it set Paul off.
He was sick of waiting, he said. He’d told Bushnell to get off his ass. “While he’s wasting time looking at me, the real killer is out there, footloose, and he’s got our son.”
The Truth We Bury: A Novel Page 9