Bluebird, Bluebird

by Attica Locke

  Darren walked to the bathroom, where a box of pulpy, hard tissues sat inside a plastic holder covered in an array of rose decals, pink and red. He brought over the whole thing and sat it beside her on the bed before resuming his seat a few feet away from her. Boots back on the ground, his hands visible, sitting beneath a framed ranch landscape, steers painted black and brown.

  Randie blew her nose. “It’s just that what he said made no sense.”

  “The deputy told you something other than drowning?”

  “He said the sheriff thinks Michael was robbed.”

  This was the first Darren had heard this. “Robbed?”

  “That he was coming out of the icehouse that night. The sheriff’s deputy said he might have been drunk.”

  Based on what? Darren thought, remembering that, by Greg’s telling, there hadn’t been a word about an unusual blood alcohol level in the autopsy report, which Darren now suddenly wanted to get his hands on.

  She grabbed another tissue. “But his credit cards are still in his wallet.”

  “You touched it?” he said, even though one glance at the bag told him it didn’t matter. Any evidence on these items had already been destroyed.

  “I opened it right in front of the deputy. Credit cards and more than a hundred dollars in cash. Maybe someone took his watch, or maybe it fell off in the water. But how could he have been robbed if his wallet wasn’t touched?”

  “The car,” he said, not because he believed it, necessarily, but any cop would have to consider it. Randie looked at him, surprised that he guessed.

  She nodded. “Michael was in a ‘real nice car,’ as the deputy put it, like that itself was a crime, and he said that somebody might have jumped Michael for it.”

  “But his car key is here,” Darren said.

  “He kept a spare in the glove box. Anybody could have gotten hold of it,” Randie explained. “Michael wasn’t from around here, so they think he got lost—on foot, probably, walking in the woods—then fell into the bayou. The car will turn up eventually, they said.” She shook her head. “But you saw that place. Michael would never even walk into a place like that.”

  The same place where Missy Dale worked, Darren thought.

  “How was your marriage?” he asked, offhand.

  “How’s yours?” she said.

  It was the first time he saw the woman behind the tears, the way her eyes, though wide, could narrow to twin points of outrage, the way her jaw squared in the lamplight. She resented the question. He didn’t particularly like it being lobbed in his direction, either. “You said ‘separated,’ that’s all,” he said.

  “He cheated on me.”

  She said it matter-of-factly, then left the awkward silence for him to fill.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quickly, realizing too late that this was the first condolence he’d offered, and it was for the fact that her husband was fucking another woman.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again, this time for the social fumble. But she waved it off, then grew quiet, looking down at her naked ring finger. “So you left him?”

  “No,” she said. She wasn’t crying anymore, but her voice was strangled with regret. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t divorce him, but I didn’t forgive him, either. I didn’t leave, but I didn’t stay, either. I went to work for months on end, took every assignment I could get my hands on, kept as far away as I could.”

  “Did you love him?”

  “Does it matter?”

  She was, he saw more clearly now, a beautiful woman, and he couldn’t understand a universe in which a man who had the love of a woman like that would fuck around. But he had to broach the question. He still didn’t know why Michael had come to Texas on his own. “Was he still seeing other women?”

  “Michael and I haven’t spoken in months,” she said with a formality that hadn’t been there before, a cold shoulder in Darren’s direction.

  “Do you know why he drove here? A thousand miles from Chicago?”

  She glanced at the edge of the bed, where the plastic bag of her husband’s possessions was still resting. The answer wasn’t there.

  “What was in Lark?”

  “I have no idea,” she said. In the seven years they’d been together, Randie said, Michael had never once taken her to his hometown, which she mistakenly believed was a few towns over, confusing Timpson and Tyler.

  Darren thanked her, told her he had some deer jerky and crackers in his truck and that she was welcome to them, since the clerk had said the motel’s vending machines were locked after midnight. Randie said she was starving and not picky. “Thank you.” She managed a wan smile, a reflexive expression of gratitude that women can muster even when they’re in pain. But when Darren rose from his chair and started for the door, she leaped off the bed and grabbed his arm, a look of wild panic on her face, as if she thought he might not come back. Her fingers dug into the muscle above his elbow. “You’re going to find out what happened to him? Because I did love him—I did,” she said, pleading for him to believe her, as if he might not help if she didn’t love him. “You’re going to find out who did this, right? I mean, that’s why they sent you, right?”

  Darren couldn’t bring himself to tell her that no one had actually sent or asked for him, that she was the only one in the world who wanted him there.

  Because right then, that was enough.

  “Get some rest,” he said, patting her on the arm. “I’m not leaving you.”

  He texted Lisa only after he knew she’d be asleep. Any conversation about his not coming home would have to wait until tomorrow. Randie had passed out after tearing through a package of saltines, and he’d closed her hotel room door softly, her rental-car keys in his other hand. Then he waited. Outside room 9, he stood watch, leaning against the slim patch of stucco between their two rooms, his gaze traveling between the parking lot, which was empty save for his truck, and the four-lane highway beyond until he was satisfied that no one was on the hunt—the thugs from the bar or anyone else who by then knew the wife was in town. It was as safe as it would get before sunrise, he knew, but he waited another hour to be sure, figuring, correctly, that no bar in East Texas stayed open past the devil’s hour of 2:00 a.m. Then he took off for the highway.

  He went out on foot, Maglite in hand, .45 on his hip, and the half-full pint of Wild Turkey tucked in his back pocket. It was only enough bourbon to leave him wanting more, but it was better than nothing. It made the night sky feel low, stars dusting the top of the pines like snow. The air had a cool bite to it now, and he regretted not wearing his jacket, but he needed the white shirt to keep him alive, a torso-size reflector for any headlights passing at seventy miles an hour. He stayed to the shoulder, mostly, crunching on gravel and dirt underfoot, his ear open for the sound of any restless wildlife in the woods flanking the highway. This time of night, the semis were few and far between, and in the hush of the country, his mind cleared. He took a swig or two of the bourbon—for warmth and, he could admit, courage. Staying in Lark would cost him something; he knew that going in. He just didn’t know what. Nor could he figure what it was about these murders that bothered him so much. Something about their supposed simplicity—homicide theories that rolled out effortlessly, buoyed by the waves of hundreds of years of history—made Darren suspicious.

  It started with the order of the killings: black man dies, then the white girl. It didn’t fit any agreed-upon American script, didn’t match the warnings he’d gotten from his uncles about fooling around with white girls or even making an off-color remark in their direction, and it suggested a level of vengeance for the murder of Michael—a stranger in Lark—on the part of black folks in town that didn’t make much sense. At Geneva’s, he’d felt no vitriol from her customers toward anyone but the law enforcement lurking behind the cafe, and he heard not one bad word about Missy Dale. In fact Geneva had spoken kindly about the young woman’s child. Tim, the trucker, had seemed equally concerned. It was Wally, frankly, who was positing t
hat Missy had died as a result of some bad feelings on the part of black folks in Lark, that her murder followed that of Michael Wright as a matter of causation and not happenstance. Well, Wally and Sheriff Van Horn—who had asked Geneva for a list of the men and women who’d been inside her cafe last night—were thinking along those lines. He heard Greg’s voice in his head, was reminded of his tribe’s reluctance to give in to the idle power of coincidence—the tribe of law enforcement, that is. But cops digging where nothing was buried could lead to its own set of problems. And the more he thought about it, the more he thought it was entirely possible that someone had seen a late-model BMW and jacked Michael for it, leaving him alone and dazed on a dark night like this one. It was possible he had gotten lost. At least it had to be considered. And the issue of Missy, and the awful manner in which she was found, might have nothing to do with Michael Wright and everything to do with the clientele at the icehouse, the rough characters she worked around, any of whom might have a jacket full of rape charges. It had to be considered, he told himself again, even as his doubt lingered.

  It was near six miles to the icehouse, and his feet ached inside the soles of his boots, a pecan-colored pair of cowhide ropers that would split if he asked them to make this walk again. He was glad to see the rental car, a blue two-door Ford, sitting alone in the darkened parking lot. The neon sign had been put to bed, and the lights inside were likewise dark for the night. He’d been prepared to find the car vandalized, but it looked in order, and through the windows his flashlight lit up Randie’s bags in the backseat, including a black camera case. He’d grown damp with sweat on the walk, and as soon as he turned the engine over, he rolled down the windows and let a little air hit him in the face as he drove.

  He didn’t go back to the motel, though, not yet.

  He left the parking lot heading in the opposite direction, his knees practically pressed to his chest in the tiny car as he crept along 59. He found the turnoff for FM 19, a farm road that led through the woods from the highway to the Attoyac Bayou, which ran behind both Geneva’s cafe and Wally’s icehouse—with only a distance of about a quarter mile between the two establishments and their two different worlds. Down the farm road, Darren bumped along the sliver of pavement, which had no dividing line, small-town folks being accustomed to yielding to courtesy. Through the floorboard he felt every bump in the road and every crack in the asphalt, his head nearly touching the car’s ceiling every few seconds. He got about fifty yards down the road before rolling the car to a stop. The driver’s-side door creaked as he opened it, the only sound in the dark save for crickets and tree frogs chirruping together in song. He was walled in on two sides by sky-scraping pines, dwarfing him and the tiny Ford, gnats and night beetles dancing in the light of the car’s high beams. As an experiment, he reached through the car window and shut off the headlights. The dark was extraordinary, thick enough to touch, a velvet quilt of black stitched through with stars, tiny knots of light barely bright enough to let you see your hand in front of your face. Darren knew Michael had been found back here, a stone’s throw from the icehouse, but what was Michael doing on this road in the first place?

  If the sheriff’s theory held any water, there was no way Michael’s car was stolen from the icehouse parking lot. Michael was a smart man, graduated law school, for God’s sake. Surely he would have just walked the relatively well-lit highway back to Geneva’s. No, something had gotten Michael on this farm road, and this is where he got jacked for the car. Had to be. At this hour, without a passing car on the highway—headlights showing the way out of these woods—it was possible to lose your bearings in the dark, to get twisted and turned around, especially after a few drinks. Darren would put himself at a .09 right now, just fuzzy enough for a man of his habits to have a sense that he ought to stop but not at all drunk enough by his standards to miss the problem with the sheriff’s theory. If he stood still enough, he could actually hear the water.

  The bayou was in front of him, he realized, maybe fifty yards from where he was standing. If Michael was left without a vehicle and stranded out here alone, why would he walk toward a body of water he couldn’t see? No one in his right mind would do what Darren was doing now: walk through a thick of dark woods he didn’t know his way around. But walking toward the unknown was what he’d signed up for, and he hadn’t turned in his badge yet.

  He walked straight ahead, past where the farm road curved to the south, and continued straight ahead into raw woodland; he was following the tinkling sound of the bayou. He ducked beneath low-hanging branches, pushing the larger ones out of his way, one hand still on his pocket-size flashlight, its weak beam no match for the thickening woods. He had the thought to turn around and turn the Ford’s headlights back on for guidance, what a man at a .05 would have known made a hell of a lot more sense than walking blindly in the dark. It was as he turned back to the car, the sloppy pivot of his left foot, that he slipped. The drop wasn’t deep, but the shock of it made it impossible to stop the fall. He twisted his body as he went down, turning to claw at the earth to stop the slide into the water, but he couldn’t gain enough purchase and lost his flashlight in the process. He went into the bayou boots first, shooting in horizontally and feeling the water seep across the front of his body.

  He closed his eyes just in time, but still the water burned.

  He clamped his mouth shut and felt so starved for air that he had to beat back panic through sheer force of will. I’m not dying here tonight. He moved his arms in some approximation of a breaststroke, keeping his body afloat. One kick of his legs was all it took for his right foot to hit the bed of the bayou. Darren felt his toe jam up against the inside of his boot. With the pain came a bolt of realization. Just stand, man. Just stand. Within seconds, Darren was on his feet, the bayou water coming no higher than the tops of his thighs, and he knew there was no way Michael Wright had walked into the bayou on his own and drowned.

  Part Three

  9.

  HE WOKE up cotton-mouthed, his eyes still burning. His cell phone was shrieking at him from the bedside table, where it sat beside the gun he’d disassembled last night and left on a motel towel to dry. Lisa, he thought.

  But it was worse, much worse.

  Wilson, his lieutenant, was calling from Company A headquarters in Houston, and he was in his ear before Darren could even clear his throat to say, Morning, sir. “What in hell is this I’m hearing about a double homicide in Lark?” Darren sat up, mumbled, “Sir,” and was immediately cut off. “First of all, no one from Shelby County called for an assist. Two, that’s Tom Randall’s beat. And three, and most goddamned important here, you’re on suspension, Ranger.”

  Darren glanced at the clock. It was past seven. He’d meant to be up hours ago. He thought about the wife in the other room—ransacked his brain for a minute trying to remember her name—and wondered if she was okay, if she’d woken up frightened and alone. Randie. He nearly whispered it.

  “Tell me you’re not in Shelby County right now,” Wilson said. “Please tell me I don’t have to call the captain and tell him not to bother weighing your fate, to just go ahead and fire your ass for insubordination.”

  Wilson had hired him eight years ago, championing his promotion from state trooper to Texas Ranger, even going to bat for him against members of the top brass who didn’t think Darren had the soul of a Ranger, that Princeton and law school would burden him with a level of intellect and self-consciousness that wouldn’t serve him in the field, where instinct often ruled and the simplest conclusion was nearly always the right one, especially when it came to murders in rural Texas, which are nearly always preceded by someone proclaiming to anyone within earshot of the local watering hole that Some things just need killing.

  Wilson had served in Company A with Darren’s uncle when William became one of the first black Texas Rangers in the department. He thought the world of William and the Mathews name and pushed for Darren’s ascendancy, suggesting that the company keep him at head
quarters, in Houston, where he could work in the department’s Public Corruption Unit, investigating crimes for which paperwork was everything. Darren had been bored and restless, and he’d begged to get on the ABT task force and always felt like Wilson treated him differently after that, that he’d somehow let down his biggest booster by so nakedly proclaiming his interest in black life, his feeling that some crimes mattered more than others. The meth and the guns were one thing, but in his heart he knew he wanted to destroy the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas for different reasons. And Wilson knew it, too.

  “We had a deal, Mathews,” Wilson said, his voice strained to the point of near breathlessness. It occurred to Darren that Wilson was trying to keep his voice down in the office, that news hadn’t yet spread and Darren might still be able to save himself. “I was expecting you to walk into my office this morning.”

  “How did you know?” Darren said.

  He had a sudden, panicked thought that Greg had said something. It was paranoid, disloyal thinking, the hangover talking. He stood and walked to the room’s sink, which sat outside the actual bathroom. He cupped water in his right hand and sucked it down, drops of it wetting the front of his undershirt.

  “The wife,” Wilson said. “She has some media contacts.”

  “She’s a photographer.”

  “Right. Well, she called somebody at the Chicago Tribune, and I get a call this morning, not ten minutes ago, from a reporter asking about a suspicious death, and I don’t know what in hell he’s talking about, except he mentions your name and asks if the Rangers are investigating a hate crime, something the local sheriff out there is trying to cover up. What in hell have you started, Mathews?”

  “It’s a drowning that ain’t a drowning, I can tell you that much.”