Phyllis looked at her, her eyes showing some surprise. “Well, you always loved singing, and you were so good.”
“You . . .” told me it was a pointless waste of time “ . . . never told me that,” she finished, looking away. “You made music sound like a . . . very bad idea.”
“I never said any such thing.” Her mother looked affronted.
Calliope leaned forward, as though to make sure the words made it clearly across the table. “I was fifteen. It was June. It was a Saturday. I told you I wanted to sing. I told you I wanted to be a star.”
Her mother frowned. “Honey, I don’t remember you saying that.”
“I—”
“Not specifically,” she continued. “I remember the sentiment well enough. And that summer. Do you remember that summer?”
Calliope nodded. “It was hot.”
Phyllis stared at her. “It was hot, yes.” She took a drink of her coffee. “It was the worst drought in twenty years. Nothing was growing. Your father didn’t know how we were going to make our loan payments. Your grandfather had died three months before. I think . . .” She looked into the middle distance. “I imagine I was worried you might end up in some crazy situation with no stability, like what we were going through. If I said something that bad, well, I’m sorry. I am. I don’t see why you’d never tell us about—” She shook her head. “You’ve always been so secretive.”
Calliope opened her mouth to speak twice before she could get the words to come. “I’m sorry, but I seem to remember something about Dad having cancer.”
“Oh.” Her mother waved her hand as though to sweep the words away. “That was just your sister blowing things out of proportion. It was a couple of lumps on the back of his neck; they cut ’em right out. We would have called you if it had been important. He wears sunscreen now, and . . .” She trailed off, watching Calliope’s expression. “I suppose I shouldn’t be calling the kettle black.”
Calliope shook her head, the corners of her mouth twitching.
Phyllis returned her wry smile. “Maybe we could catch each other up.”
“I’m sorry,” Calliope said. “I really wanted to see Dad.” Afternoon light slanted through the windows, and Calliope’s throat had the pleasant ache that came from a lot of talking, but she’d turned the conversation away from uncomfortable topics or stepped around the land mines of old arguments more than a few times, and it was wearing her down. Also, she was becoming increasingly conscious of the time.
“Oh please.” Her mother smiled without showing teeth—it looked more like a pained grimace. “I ought to be the one apologizing.” Her expression took on that same distant, daydreaming look she’d had earlier in the day. “When you—” There was a knock on the front door. Her mother’s eyes snapped back to the present. She looked at Calliope, the corners of her eyes tense.
Calliope’s brow creased, and a surreal sense of danger sparked in her chest. “Mom?”
Phyllis shook her head and stood up. “Better get that.”
Calliope sat alone at the table for a few moments, bemused, then pushed herself out of her chair with her good arm and moved after the older woman. “I’d be happy to just stay and wait for him to get home,” she said, her voice raised just enough to carry, “but I should get going.”
“Maybe you could hold off on that,” replied a man’s voice. Phyllis stood next to the open door, her arms crossed. She had stepped back and to the side to reveal her visitor, but Calliope had already caught sight of the broad, flat-brimmed hat over her mother’s head.
The man in the doorway rested his hands on his hips, making it look as though he was simply stretching after sitting in a car for too long, not imposing his size on the two women or putting his hand closer to the firearm hanging from his belt. “Hello, Calli. Haven’t seen you in a coon’s age.”
“Hello, Jim.” Calliope tilted her head, letting a hint of sarcasm creep into her voice to mask her nervous concern. “Or is it ‘Hello, Sheriff’ today?”
“Oh . . .” Jim Fletcher shifted and looked away from both women and out over the dry and rustling cornfields surrounding the farmstead. His breath puffed in the cold air. “I suppose sheriff is the right idea, at least for a little while.”
“Mmm.” Calliope folded her arms, unconsciously mimicking her mother’s stance. “You want to come in, or should I get my coat?”
“Oh,” her mother admonished her. “Calli, you don’t have to be—”
“How about we go for a drive,” Fletcher interrupted, with an apologetic nod to Phyllis. “No reason for me to track mud into your mom’s house.”
“Jim . . .” Phyllis breathed.
“Right.” Calliope hadn’t moved, and her face was impassive, but the adrenaline wash at the local lawman’s words made her breathing short and tight and left her hands tingling. “Am I under arrest, Sheriff?”
“Ahh . . .” The older man spoke the word as though it hurt. His face sagged. “Do you think you need to be?”
Calliope pursed her lips and tried to remember that the sheriff was a friend of her family’s—someone who’d let her off the hook on two tickets when she’d just been learning to drive, and fined her three other times when she had no good excuse and should have known better. “I really don’t,” she said, turning toward the kitchen, “but I’ll go for a drive if you like.”
He nodded after her. “That sounds about right. I just want to get things straightened out,” he added, to Phyllis.
“She hasn’t—”
“It’s fine, Mom.” Calliope pulled her coat off the back of the kitchen chair and returned to the room with it hanging over her bad arm—which conveniently gave her an excuse not to use it. She walked over to the door. “I’m assuming your car’s warm enough I don’t need to put this on.”
“Sure, sure . . .” The older man made room for Calliope to pass, holding the door as he did.
“Jim—”
“It’s fine, Mom,” Calliope repeated. She stepped through the door and started down the steps, her eyes taking in the open yard and the tracks of the car her sister had left in. She stopped, remembering the look Sandy and her mother had exchanged just before the younger woman had left. “You should probably call Sandy and tell her you stalled me long enough.”
Her mother said nothing at all as Calliope walked the rest of the way to the sheriff’s vehicle.
As the sheriff’s SUV pulled out of the driveway and headed down the gravel road that led to the highway back into town, Calliope watched the cornfield on Jim Fletcher’s side of the vehicle.
Don’t come after me, she thought. Just . . . let me work this out before you show up and eat the local police department. She didn’t expect that anyone out in that field might have heard her, but that wasn’t the point—her thoughts were more a prayer than a message.
“Something on your mind, Calli?” The sheriff had his eyes on the road, but he could obviously see the direction of her gaze out of the corner of his eye and thought she was looking at him.
“Not much,” Calliope said, sitting back and turning her attention forward. “I think we probably could have straightened things out back at the house, but it means a couple calls back to L.A., and I’d rather the long-distance fees got charged to you.”
Fletcher chuckled. “Well, thank you for not sugarcoating it for me.”
“I do what I can.” Calliope allowed herself a small smirk. Although he was taking her in to his office, the sheriff hadn’t put her in the backseat cage. In fact, he’d opened the front passenger door for her even though she’d stood next to the rear door. From where she sat, she could reach him, his gun, a vertical rack-mounted shotgun, and the steering wheel. Either he didn’t think that Calliope was really any kind of danger, or he was pulling off the mother of all con jobs to get her guard down as far as possible.
That last was a sobering thought; the only reason the sheriff would have to play that sort of game would be if he were bringing her to Walker, and the supposed special a
gent had shown up unexpectedly so many times that Calliope couldn’t bring herself to rule out the possibility.
She glanced at Jim Fletcher, and her misgivings faded. The older man had stoic and unreadable down to some kind of martial art—she imagined he was a terrifying poker player—but she didn’t think he was a very good liar. It was a subtle distinction, but one that mattered a lot to her, and it didn’t feel wrong.
“Think your mom’s going to beat us into town, at this rate,” Fletcher said, interrupting her thoughts. Calliope looked in the rearview mirror on her side of the vehicle and saw her parents’ pickup closing the gap behind them. “Guess she thinks I’m not going to give you a ride home afterward.”
“Are you?” Calliope turned to look at the sheriff. “ ’Cause if you already know you’re going to, I’m not sure why we’re driving into town.”
“Oh . . .” That familiar, pained expression crossed the older man’s face again. “I guess I don’t know. It’s a little complicated.”
“Sounds like you’ve got a lot of badges being shoved in your face.” She tried to keep her voice neutral. “That’s usually what complicates things for me.”
“Just the one,” the sheriff replied, his voice tinged with just a hint of disapproval. Calliope filed that away for later. “One’s enough, sometimes.”
“Sure.” Calliope said, pronouncing it shoore. She could hear the verbal tics and phrases of her youth creep back into her voice with almost every sentence she spoke, as though her mouth was dropping into old habits with some kind of relief. “We’ll get ’er all fixed up in town.”
“Mmm.” Fletcher’s eyes went to his own rearview, and Calliope caught the faintest of twitches at the corner of his mouth and eye. “Think your mom’d be too happy if I pulled her over for speeding?”
Calliope raised her eyebrows. “You’re the one with the gun, Jim”—she blew air between her teeth—“but I’m not sure that’d be such a hot idea.”
“You’re pr’y right,” he said, holding his poker face. “Don’t need that kind of trouble today.”
“Good,” Calliope replied. She let a few more miles scroll by in silence, then: “That badge flasher you mentioned . . .”
Fletcher didn’t obviously react, but the air around him seemed to go still. “Yeah?”
“Is he still around?”
Sheriff Fletcher motioned Calliope into a seat in his office. “We’d better make this first part quick.” He lowered himself into his chair. “I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m not going to get a Christmas card if I don’t let your mother in here pretty soon.” He raised his eyebrows and opened both his hands, palms up, in Calliope’s direction. “Unless you don’t want her in here while we talk. It’s not like I need to have your guardian present.”
“Let her sit out there all day if you want,” Calliope replied. Her voice was even, but the last few silent minutes of the ride into town had given her time to review the way her mother had played her, and cast a gray pallor over what had seemed an impossibly good reunion.
The sheriff’s eyes flickered at her tone, taking in the high spots of color that shone on her cheeks. He rested his arms on his desktop blotter. “Calli, look at me.” His tone was private and familiar—so far from his “sheriff” voice it surprised her into meeting his gaze. “When your mother came to the door,” he said, “her eyes were wet. Now”—he raised a hand to forestall Calliope’s angry reply—“maybe you’ve got good reason to be upset with her, but you need to know that if she could have wished me off her front step right then, she would have.”
Calliope opened her mouth, closed it, and turned away from the sheriff’s look. Jim Fletcher had always been hard to fool but, worse, he’d been a hard man to make trouble around—a talk with the sheriff back in high school had left Calliope feeling like she needed to apologize to everyone for being a bother.
Fletcher nodded as though she’d given him some kind of agreement and leaned back in his chair. “So . . . a couple questions before we bring everyone in?”
Calliope glanced back through the office window. Her mother stood near the dispatch desk, her arms crossed tightly over her midsection, talking with her father, who stood with his back to them.
He’s thin, Calliope thought. Thinner than the pictures.
“Sure.” She turned back to the sheriff. “Just a couple; I’d like to see my dad.”
Fletcher nodded, his lips pressed together. “Fair enough. Back at your folks’ house, you said you could straighten this out with a long-distance call. Can I have that number?”
Calliope pulled out her cell phone, scrolled to Darryl Johnson’s name, and handed it to the sheriff. “That’s the detective who was investigating my partner’s disappearance back in the city.”
Fletcher squinted and copied the number onto his blotter. “And . . . he’ll be expecting a call?” He handed the phone back to Calliope.
She shook her head, dropping the phone back into her left pocket. “Expecting it? Not really.”
The sheriff made an attempt to look confused; as a result, he looked like a police officer who was pretending to look confused. “Then how do you know he’s going to vouch for you?”
Calliope shrugged. “Don’t you know people who’d vouch for you even if you didn’t warn them ahead of time?”
The older man dipped his chin. “Sure . . .” he said, pronouncing it the same way Calliope had on their drive to town.
“So do I,” Calliope said. A small, less confident voice in the back of her head hoped she was right. She ignored it.
Fletcher gave a short chuckle that someone might have mistaken for a throat clearing. “Fair enough.”
Calliope kept her eyes on him. “He worked with Special Agent Walker for a couple of days too.”
The sheriff’s face gave nothing away, but Calliope did notice his hands pause for the barest second as he moved a paper on his desk. “That’s interesting, that you bring that name up.”
“Not that interesting.” Calliope settled into the chair, working hard not to favor her shoulder. “He’s the kind of guy who likes to push badges into people’s faces. Not very likable.”
Jim Fletcher met her eyes. “You’re not wrong about that, but that doesn’t mean he’s not someone a county sheriff has to at least listen to.” Before Calliope could answer, he picked up the handset of his phone. “I’m going to call your detective friend and run the county phone bill up a bit,” he murmured, his eyes on the number scrawled on the blotter. “Go give your dad a hug and tell Dwight we all want some coffee.”
Calliope considered any number of things she wanted to ask the sheriff about what Walker had said to him; while she didn’t think he would ask her anything she couldn’t—one way or the other—answer, in front of her parents, there were a number of things she wanted to ask him while they had some privacy. But it looked like her chance was already gone. She stood up and let herself out of the office.
Behind her, the sheriff watched her leave, his eyes sharp.
Calliope walked through the sheriff’s department, feeling that familiar frisson that always filled the air when strangers were around law officers in their private space. It didn’t matter if the visitors were victims or criminals—alleged or convicted; Calliope thought the simple fact was that there were strangers in perhaps the one place that an officer could feel legitimately safe, and it put them on edge. Since starting work with Josh she’d experienced—and caused—that discomfort many times. She located the deputy that Jim Fletcher had pointed out (the youngest in the room) and repeated his message, then continued toward her parents.
Her father still hadn’t turned around when she’d reached them. He was speaking to her mother in the low, steady murmur of half-spoken words and inflection that functions as a kind of impenetrable code between longtime couples. Something inherently stubborn in Calliope’s makeup kept her from walking up next to the pair; she stopped, her hands in her pockets, and waited for him to turn around. Her eyes scanned the back of h
is neck, looking for the scars from the cancer surgery her mother had mentioned, but the collar of his coat was pulled high and tight against his hairline.
Her position meant that she was easily visible to her mother, who had watched first Calliope, then her husband as her daughter had crossed the room. Now, her eyes—troubled in a way that Calliope found perversely comforting—found Calliope’s for a moment. She nodded in a particular way and took a half step back from the closed huddle.
Her father turned. Calliope’s first instinct—brutally suppressed—was to turn away or close her eyes. From her chair in Jim Fletcher’s office, he had looked thin, but she realized now that the jacket had given her a false impression of his remaining bulk. He was rail-thin, gangly, in the way that teenage boys were, with joints that seemed too big for their limbs. His cheekbones and jawline were far more pronounced than she remembered—even the ridge along his temples seemed to press at his skin—and his fair hair had washed out to gray.
“Your mom says you two had a good talk.” He reached his arms toward her, an invitation more than embrace.
“Yeah.” Calliope stepped into his arms and squeezed almost as tightly as she could with one arm, then squeezed once more, harder. “Where’s the rest of you?” she exclaimed. Her voice was muffled by his coat, but he chuckled and stepped back. “Oh, you know; the treatments are a pretty good diet program.” He patted his stomach with one long-fingered hand. “I’m putting it back on, though. Twenty—”
“Treatments?” Calliope shot a look at her mother. “What kind of treatments?”
He frowned in turn. “Doesn’t matter. They didn’t take long, and I’m fine.”
“You—”
“Hey,” he interrupted. His eyes met hers and matched the stone in his voice. “We’re not doing this here. It’s not why we’re standing in the sheriff’s office—we’re going to talk about that.”
Calliope glared at him, feeling a familiar obstinacy seep into her in reaction to his tone. “How about I say I’m fine and not to worry about it and not tell you anything about what’s going on? How’s that sound?”
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