The Truth We Bury: A Novel

by Barbara Taylor Sissel

  But what he said was that he didn’t blame her. “You should call Mary Nell.” He named her best friend from high school, who lived in Greeley now. “Every time I run into her, she wants to know why you haven’t been in touch.”

  Lily picked up her purse, thinking if Mary Nell asked after her, it was likely out of deference to her dad. He was remembering when she and Mary Nell were girls, when they loved horses and barrel racing, experimenting with the latest eye shadow, or hanging out at the Sonic in town, flirting with boys. Girl stuff. What he’d forgotten was how different she was after he’d brought her home from Phoenix, how little she’d resembled the flighty, silly girl who’d been Mary Nell’s best friend. She’d done things, been in places so awful that she couldn’t talk about them, certainly not to Mary Nell, who would have been horrified. There’d been gossip. It was unavoidable in a town the size of Wyatt. Lily had hidden from it, isolating herself. She’d seen almost no one back then, with the exception of her dad, Winona, and Paul. She still kept to herself. What did she have in common with Mary Nell, especially after almost thirty years, given all the unaddressed history that sat between them? It wasn’t a question she wanted to ask her dad.

  “Maybe I’ll call Mary Nell,” she said instead, and she was happy when it brought a brief light of relief to his eyes. “You sure you’ll be all right?” she asked him. “I should be back by six or so. I’ll make dinner.”

  He shooed her away with his hands. He might saddle up Sharkey, he said, do a little more exploring. He’d keep his phone on. “You’ve got yours?”

  She pulled it out of her purse along with her car keys, showing it to him.

  Lily arrived in Greeley an hour later with no clear recollection of having driven there. Bo Dean’s, the roadside diner where she was meeting Edward, was ten miles farther north on the outskirts of town. It was one of their chosen places from the past. The coffee was bitter, the food marginal, and there were few regulars. Any crowd was mostly made up of truckers and other highway drivers, families with kids, salesmen. The fact that there was almost no chance of recognition was what made the place ideal.

  She was early, but Edward was there before her. In a booth at the back. And when his gaze found hers, there was a moment when his happiness at seeing her seemed to infuse him with light. The world receded, and over the odors of bitter coffee and rancid grease, Lily instead caught the scent of the starch that she knew from memory permeated Edward’s crisp oxford shirt. She could smell the fading note of his aftershave, some mix of citrus and pine. There was more silver threading his dark hair than when she’d last seen him, but it was still rumpled and unruly, appealing, like a careless boy’s hair. But his gaze had sobered now, and his dark-brown eyes were grave, and a little wary, in their regard of her.

  “Ma’am?” A waitress appeared at Lily’s elbow and spoke.

  “It’s fine,” she said to the woman. “I see him.”

  The waitress nodded and walked away, but Lily felt rooted to the floor, her stomach knotted with the thrill of his proximity even as a voice in her brain lectured that their meeting was a mistake. She hadn’t changed from her jeans and boots, or put on lipstick for him, but the lack of preparation didn’t alter the fact that her intent, at least in part, was to woo this man. It was still there, her lovely and terrifying desire for him. It hadn’t lessened, hadn’t changed.

  And she had no right to it.

  Edward might be unencumbered by a spouse, but she was not.

  His marital status could have changed, though, couldn’t it? In three years he could have acquired a wife and even children, for all she knew. Her heart grew cold at the thought.

  Still, she walked toward him and, sliding into the booth across from him, thanked him for coming.

  The intensity of his gaze caused her face to warm. What is this about? What are we doing here? The questions weren’t less overt without the shape of his voice.

  “It’s AJ,” she said.

  “That’s what I figured.” He leaned back. “I heard something about it, driving down from Dallas just now.”

  “He didn’t kill that girl, Edward.”

  “You don’t know where he is?”

  “No. He called last night and asked me to bring him his passport, but I told him he needed to come to the ranch or go home to Paul.”

  “Was he upset when you refused?”

  “I don’t know. Dad took the phone, but before he could say anything, AJ hung up, or the call was disconnected.”

  “You realize he might have been forced to make the call.”

  “Yes, but I could kick myself. If only I’d agreed, he’d have had to tell me where he is.”

  “You’re sure it was AJ?”

  Lily took a moment. “I’m sure,” she said. “As sure as I can be.”

  “On the news, they said his laptop and cell phone were found at the bus station in Dallas.”

  “But no one saw him get on a bus.”

  The waitress came to their table. They ordered cups of the terrible coffee and sat in silence once she left. Edward looked out the window. Lily wanted to put her fingertip on the delicate netting of lines that fanned from the corner of his eye. She wanted to trace a path to the dimple that appeared when he smiled. She didn’t dare do either.

  Other than the last time they’d been together here, sheltering beneath the diner’s awning from the rain, when their fingers had briefly linked, or when Edward had cupped her elbow in his palm while accompanying her to her car, they had never touched each other, not deliberately. And yet those encounters were seared into her memory and made her ache.

  “Is it my advice as a criminal attorney that you want? Is that why you wanted to meet?” Edward brought his attention back to her.

  She didn’t know if the edge in his voice was from anger or disappointment. Once, in an unguarded moment, he had told her he hadn’t ever known a woman like her, one to whom he felt he could say anything without risking judgment. It had been after he’d admitted his darkest secret—that he had a gambling addiction. The day he’d realized it, he had said, was the day he’d put another man down on his knees and aimed a gun at his head with the intention of robbing him to get money to go to a casino. That incident was the one that had finally penetrated the fog he’d been operating in. He had been on a rural road somewhere in Louisiana when he woke to himself—that was how he’d worded it, the end of his acting on his compulsion—and he’d run, leaving the man on his knees, leaving his car, the driver’s-side door hanging open. The police had caught him eventually. He’d received probation and a court-mandated order to enter a twelve-step program, which he’d done. He hadn’t placed a bet or gone into a gambling establishment in eighteen years at the time he’d described his experience to her. Twenty-one years now. If he was still keeping his promise.

  Lily remembered Edward telling her the promises you made to other people weren’t as important as the ones you made to yourself. What mattered, he had said, was what you did out of the sight of others. She kept his glance. “If—when AJ is found, if he needs a criminal attorney, then, yes, I want you to represent him. He’ll want that, too.”

  “And Paul? What will Paul want?”

  Now it was Lily’s turn to stare out the window. Her gaze drifted to the highway beyond the café parking lot, where a stream of traffic flowed, constant, monotonous, indifferent. When Paul had contacted Edward Dana after AJ’s first arrest for murder, it had been at the recommendation of a friend who was a business associate. Edward had gotten the friend’s son cleared of a felony assault charge. He’d said Edward was a bulldog in the courtroom, that if he couldn’t get AJ off, no attorney could.

  Paul had discouraged Lily’s participation in the legal discussion concerning AJ’s defense. He’d said it was men’s business. But Lily had attended the initial consultation anyway, arriving at Edward’s office unannounced, ahead of Paul and AJ, determined to inform Edward of her intention to be included. AJ is my son, too—that phrase had repeated in her mind. I
have a right to be here, she had planned to say. But when Edward appeared in the reception area, the moment became uniquely charged. Lily lost her power of speech. A few minutes, or an eternity passed—she was never sure which—and when Paul arrived and found her already there, standing with Edward, he’d stopped, his glance switching between them as if he were trying to sort out what he’d walked into.

  “You may not believe me,” Lily said now, bringing her gaze back to Edward, “but before this happened, I was only waiting for AJ’s wedding to be over.”

  “To do what? Nothing has changed, has it? You’re still married.”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know.” Her answers came in quick succession. She realized with a jolt that she didn’t know which of them was the correct one.

  The waitress came and set mugs of coffee in front of them. “Cream?”

  Lily nodded, taking the small silver pitcher from her, upending the contents into her cup, knowing it wouldn’t make the bitter brew more palatable.

  “What does AJ’s wedding being over have to do with anything?” Edward spoke as soon as the waitress was out of earshot. “I haven’t heard from you in three years. I have tried, tried my damnedest to—” He broke off, turned his mug in a circle, contemplating it.

  Forget you.

  She knew he had tried his damnedest to forget her. He didn’t need to say it for her to know his meaning. She had tried to do the same with her memories of him.

  “Six years ago”—Lily went back to the beginning—“when AJ was charged with murder, when I thought he would go to prison, I prayed. I don’t know if there is such a thing as God, and if there is, whether he hears, but I begged him for AJ’s life. I said to this god I’m not even sure of that if he would please keep AJ safe, I would be a better person, a better wife and mother.

  “And he was saved.” She raised her glance to Edward’s. “Because of you, your legal expertise, my prayer was answered. But I was never a good mother. Even before that happened, there were times—I was always afraid AJ would come to harm because of me—my—my lapses of attention. When AJ was two, we . . . Paul hired a nanny. She took over AJ’s care.”

  “Why? Did something happen?”

  “I—it was—” Lily broke off. She couldn’t talk about it, the first time she had bargained with her uncertain god for AJ’s life. She was already mortified.

  “You were so young when he was born. Only twenty, right?”

  She’d been twenty-one, but her youth was no excuse. She thought of the dozens of times she and Edward had met in the past. With few exceptions, their conversation had been inconsequential. They shared a love of books. They liked being outdoors. Where Lily loved riding a horse at full gallop, Edward loved skimming a sailboat over the water. He had a second home on Lake Buchanan, and a boat he’d named the Summer Wind after the Sinatra song.

  He would teach her to sail.

  She would teach him to ride.

  In some fairy-tale place.

  “You know I have a son I haven’t seen since he was twelve,” Edward said. “Charlie’s thirty-three now, and I don’t know where he lives.”

  “Because of the gambling.”

  “Yes.”

  “Once you told me you were thinking of hiring a private investigator to locate him.”

  “Yeah, well, I can’t seem to find the guts to make that happen. I’d have to face him, then. I’d have to explain why making a bet was more important than being his dad.”

  Edward kept Lily’s gaze, and his love for his son and his pain at the loss of him was naked in his eyes. They were no longer dealing in fairy tales, she thought, but in the harsher edges of reality, the places in their lives where they felt they had failed. “AJ and I aren’t close. He doesn’t know me—the dreams I had, the life I planned.”

  “Before Jesse, you mean.”

  Edward knew the story. How Jesse had happened upon her on the highway outside Wyatt one summer day after she’d graduated high school, struggling to change a flat tire. He’d stopped and offered to do it for her. She’d been enthralled with his twentysomething bad-boy good looks, his hard, lithe body, the way he sat on his motorcycle, long hair curling over the collar of his leather jacket. He’d ridden a Harley like the one in the movie Easy Rider. Jesse could have passed for Peter Fonda.

  He’d followed her home to the xL, somehow conned her dad into giving him a job. Jesse had wanted the job, but he had wanted Lily, too, the boss’s daughter. The power she’d had over him—over both Jesse and her dad—had thrilled her. She’d driven them both crazy for different reasons. She’d been glad in a perverse way when her dad caught her and Jesse smoking pot behind the barn, when he caught them half-naked up in the loft, making out.

  It wasn’t long, maybe a week or ten days after she’d brought Jesse to the xL, that her dad booted him off the property, and when Jesse went, she’d gone with him. She thought she was such hot shit. She’d loved it when he’d showed her off to his biker buddies, holding her out to them as if she were a trophy, a notch on his belt. During the month she rode with him, if any other men had so much as sniffed around her, Jesse had challenged them. He’d beaten them down if they’d wanted to carry it that far. But he’d turned that temper on her, too, in the weeks they’d spent together, using his fists on her, punching her low, where no one would see the damage. During sex, he’d put his lips to her ear and call her cunt and whore. Her stomach heaved, remembering.

  “AJ doesn’t know about Jesse, or that I was arrested,” Lily said now. “Paul forbade my talking about it. I thought it didn’t matter, that it was best to pretend it never happened.”

  The waitress came, and left when both Lily and Edward declined refills.

  “You think it was a mistake, not telling AJ.” Edward wasn’t asking.

  “Yes, but I don’t mean to compare our experiences. It’s just that I understand your fear that if you found Charlie, you would have to explain why you weren’t in his life—” She broke off, shrugging slightly.

  “But unlike me, you aren’t to blame, Lily. You rode up to the convenience store on the back of Jesse’s bike, thinking he was going to buy beer and cigarettes. You didn’t know he was armed when he went into the store.”

  It was true. She’d had no idea when Jesse warned her not to follow him that he had the .357 he carried in his saddlebag shoved in the waistband of his jeans. It had been concealed by his jacket. She hadn’t been paying attention, anyway. She’d been too excited. He’d taught her to drive the Harley, and he’d promised she could drive it when he got back. She’d scooched up on the seat, fingered the keys, used her hands to twist the handlebars, pretending to gun the engine. When she’d heard the cracking noises and looked around, she’d thought a car on the highway backfired. She ought to have known better. She’d grown up on a ranch and shot plenty of guns. “The kid Jesse killed was younger than me,” she said softly. “Only seventeen.”

  The remembrance of that day was vivid now, making Lily shake. She could smell the tarred surface of the parking lot, warmed by the sun. She heard the shots, three in quick succession—bam, bam, bam. Jesse’s sudden weight on the seat of the Harley behind her had almost unbalanced her. “Go! Go! Go!” He had shouted it in her ear.

  “It’s all right,” Edward said.

  She felt him scoot in beside her, felt his breath stir her hair. When his arm came around her and he pulled her close, she went still. The whole length of his leg—hip, thigh, calf—pressed against hers. She felt the swell of his breath. She wanted to look at him, to see what was in his eyes, but she was afraid if she did, she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from kissing him, from crushing herself against him.

  As if he read her mind, Edward turned her face to his. He locked her gaze, and she felt his thumb trace the contour of her lower lip. His fingertips brushed a slow path down the length of her neck, coming to rest in the hollow of her throat, where her pulse was beating as rapidly as the heart of a small bird. The moment held, shimmering, electric.

 
He looked away first, and she felt almost sick with disappointment. A sound broke softly from his chest. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That crossed a line.”

  “No,” she murmured. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

  “I wish things were different.”

  “Yes. I do, too.” He’s leaving. The thought surfaced in her brain. Lily wondered how she would stand it. She wondered how she could be so consumed with longing for Edward when her son was missing. “I think, sometimes, if the police hadn’t caught us, I might have become a criminal. Maybe I have that kind of mind.” She revealed another of her secrets, one that haunted her.

  Edward looked sidelong at her.

  “I was so scared, going to jail. But I deserved it. I did what they said. I was there when Jesse robbed that store and shot that boy. The fact that I didn’t know what he planned is no excuse.”

  “You’re assuming too much responsibility, and that’s my legal opinion. If you’re guilty of anything, it’s bad judgment, like ninety-nine percent of the rest of the population.”

  She toyed with her spoon.

  “I know the charges against you were dropped, but you never said how.”

  “When Dad came to Phoenix, he brought Paul with him. They’d done business together, been friends a number of years. He knew Paul was from Arizona and had connections there. Favors were called in, and I was released.” Lily felt a wave of old bitterness. She hadn’t wanted anyone’s favors. “I was back home in Texas within a month. Jesse died in prison a year and a half later in a knife fight with another inmate.”

  “And you married Paul.”

  “That was the price of my freedom,” Lily said.

  “Are you saying you felt obligated to marry him?” Incomprehension lightened Edward’s voice.

  “Dad and I both felt we owed him, but the way the marriage came about was more subtle than that.”

  Edward bent his elbow on the table and leaned his head on his hand, looking at her, still incredulous.