Bluebird, Bluebird

by Attica Locke

  Van Horn sighed and glanced at Wally, who gave a shrug of censure, as if to say, You’re the one who’s indulging this. This was Van Horn’s mess to clean.

  “I want to see it, too,” Randie said.

  She had not introduced herself, nor had Van Horn asked who she was, but it hadn’t been necessary. The sheriff apologized for his earlier statement and offered his condolences for her loss. Then he said to Darren, “I’ll see what can be done. Dallas has the body”—he said before softening his language—“uh…your husband, ma’am. I don’t think the medical examiner there has completed the autopsy.”

  Darren knew Van Horn was stalling, that the autopsy was already done when Greg called him yesterday, but he had Wilson’s order in his head. Play by the rules. So he said, as nicely as he could, “I’d also like to formally request from your department a copy of Missy Dale’s autopsy when it’s completed.”

  “Maybe I didn’t make myself clear enough. Wilson put you on to monitor the Wright deal. But Missy is a local girl, born in Shelby County.” Behind him, Wally was nodding his approval. “And we know how to take care of our own.”

  “I think you know those murders are connected,” Darren said.

  “Oh, I know. I know how they’re connected, too,” Wally huffed. “One of Geneva’s people getting it in their head some lynching-type deal is going on when ain’t a bit of evidence to that whatsoever. And they took one of ours for one of theirs. Parker, you know Geneva attracts all kinds of trouble over there. Last two killings we had in this town was kin to her.”

  The sheriff pursed his lips but didn’t agree one way or the other.

  “Michael wasn’t one of ‘theirs,’” Darren said. “Wasn’t even from around here.”

  “He hasn’t been to Texas in years,” said Randie, who was without an answer as to why he had driven nearly a thousand miles to Lark. The question was a locked door for which she knew she should hold the key, and the same look of guilt wrenched her face as it had last night when Darren asked why. Why didn’t she know her husband well enough to know what had brought him here?

  Darren looked from Van Horn to the owner of Jeff’s Juice House.

  “Was Missy Dale working Wednesday night?” he asked Wally.

  “I’m reviewing the staffing records now,” Van Horn said, as if looking up who was working at a bar in a town of fewer than two hundred people might take him weeks. Darren felt a heat rise up from inside, flushing his neck at the collar line.

  “Look,” he said, keeping his tone on a slim tightrope between indignation and due deference, trying to keep his anger in check. “The night he disappeared, Michael was at the icehouse where Missy Dale worked. And now those same two people are dead. Tell me you don’t find that significant.”

  “So,” Van Horn said. “You think some cracker shitheads saw Michael and Missy talking that night and followed him out of the icehouse?”

  “I didn’t say anything about Michael and Missy talking, but interesting that you did,” he said. “And I’m just talking about one cracker shithead.”

  “Michael was with this other girl?” Randie said.

  She glanced at Darren with a hurt look on her face, either about Michael or the fact that she thought this was another thing Darren had withheld from her.

  She sounded more heartsick than angry when she said, “Darren?”

  It was jarring to hear her call him by his first name, which no one in Texas would ever do, not when he was wearing the badge. It was a sign of supreme disrespect. But from her lips, it made him feel more himself, made this personal.

  “Don’t make a bit of difference if he was,” Van Horn said. “Everything we got says the man was robbed. The way you’re telling it, if somebody gave that boy a licking out in the woods, then that car ought to been found sitting out on FM 19. Somebody would have seen it when the sun come up. But that car is probably chopped up in Dallas somewhere by now.” He’d gone pink in the face.

  “Keith Dale,” Darren said. “Where was he Wednesday night?”

  Van Horn crossed his arms. “I plan on talking to him about Missy, but it ain’t none of your concern. One ain’t got nothing to do with the other, son.”

  “Ranger,” Darren said, correcting Van Horn.

  Van Horn’s jaw clenched. “Ranger,” he said with a tense nod.

  “He ABT?” Darren asked. “I know Keith did a stint in Huntsville.”

  Randie looked back and forth between Darren and the sheriff. “ABT?”

  “Aryan Brotherhood of Texas.”

  “This county’s clean of that kind of trash,” Wally said. Van Horn blanched but said nothing. The mention of the ABT changed things, and it silenced him.

  “Aryan Brotherhood?” Randie said. Her face had gone slack, eyes widened in alarm. She looked younger all of a sudden, almost childlike in the realization that some monsters are real. “Are you talking about the Klan?”

  “Worse. It’s the Klan with money and semiautomatic weapons,” Darren explained.

  “They’re under control in my county,” the sheriff said, “and I told Wilson this ain’t me opening the door to a bunch of feds rolling through, coming after the Brotherhood. We’re focused on the girl right now, my number one priority.”

  He caught the widow’s eye, but he didn’t take back the sentiment.

  “Let me talk to Geneva,” Wally said to Van Horn. “You know she and my family go a long way back. I’m aimed to help any way I can, and she trusts me.”

  “Leave that woman alone.”

  Darren turned to see that Laura had entered the room again. The child was on the carpet, down by her ankles, scooting on the butt of a thick diaper.

  “We’re talking serious here, Laura,” Wally said. “Go on.”

  The little boy pulled himself to standing and toddled toward the sofa and Randie, and Laura bent down and scooped him up in her arms. To the sheriff, Wally said, “Let me see if I can get her to come clean about some of the rough characters coming out of her place who might have been hopped up and looking for trouble Sunday night.”

  “It’s not natural, the way you stay after her,” Laura said.

  The boy swatted at her earring, then put his hand in his mouth to work his teething gums, slobber raining down on Laura’s checkered shirt. The look she gave Wally was somewhere between a reprimand and a plea. Darren took notice of both it and the way Wally averted his gaze, quickly turning back to the sheriff. “Geneva’s cafe is downstream of your icehouse, Wally,” he said, letting the sheriff know his investigation had already begun. He remembered Wendy’s words yesterday. Everybody know Missy was coming out of Wally’s icehouse. “Missy Dale could just as easily have been killed out there, left in the bayou, and her body drifted down.” Wally stared at Van Horn, perhaps waiting for him to cough up an alternative theory. Darren plucked a business card from his wallet and handed it to the sheriff. “I’ll be waiting on that autopsy,” he said.

  11.

  HE HAD Greg on the phone by the time they got in his truck. “I need that autopsy. Missy’s, too, if you can get it.” Randie shut the passenger-side door as Darren turned over the Chevy’s engine. “Lieutenant’s got me on this thing now, but I could use an outside assist while the sheriff is taking his sweet time.”

  “What turned Wilson around?” Greg said.

  “The wife—” Darren started. He felt Randie in the seat next to him and started over. “A reporter started asking questions. That was enough.”

  “Should I drive up there?” Greg asked. “Get my supervisor to approve a cursory look around? If you’re getting pushback from local law enforcement—”

  “I’m local law enforcement now.” He glanced at Randie in the passenger seat. He was saying it as much to her as he was to Greg. He was making her a promise. “This is my case now, whether Van Horn knows it or not.”

  “The Bureau might have an interest here,” Greg said.

  Darren remembered how this had started, Greg fishing for a professional come-up. Greg wante
d out from behind that desk, and Darren knew it. But he wouldn’t put that ahead of the need to handle this situation right, and that did not include bringing in a federal agent.

  He said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea, another outsider coming in right now—and federal, at that. You know how these county folk can be. But I do need you to get me more about Keith Dale’s time in Huntsville—his cell blocks, known associates, any write-ups, and any connection to the Brotherhood.”

  Greg mumbled something, either a yes or a no, that Darren couldn’t hear over the engine. What was clear was Greg’s disappointment, his anger, even, at being cast out of a case he opened, a case for which Darren was now sending him on errands, keeping him behind the very desk he hated. Irked, he seemed to enjoy the next thing that came out of his mouth. “Lisa called.”

  “What’d you tell her?”

  “That I didn’t know where you were.”

  “Shit.” He’d already told her he was doing a job for Greg.

  Now she would think he was lying.

  The second he hung up with Greg, he meant to call her.

  But Randie lit into him before he could dial her number. “You had access to Michael’s autopsy this whole time? Why did you even bother talking to that podunk sheriff? Why go in there hat in hand, begging for information?”

  “There’s just a way things are done, a certain protocol that’s wise to follow when you’re dealing with these East Texas sheriffs,” he said.

  Randie bit off a bitter laugh. “You and Michael,” she said as Darren pulled up to the highway, waiting to safely cross. She stared out the side window at the rural landscape, the pines and the red dirt, the pickup trucks on the highway, rifles racked in back windows, and Darren felt a feral heat coming from her direction. “He was always saying Texas this and Texas that. How it isn’t that bad. Michael was always making excuses for these racists down here, had some kind of twisted nostalgia about growing up in the country that made him blind to all the rest of the bullshit down here.”

  “It’s not making excuses,” Darren said. “It’s knowing that I’m here, too. I’m Texas, too. They don’t get to decide what this place is,” he said, nodding his head toward Wally’s mansion behind them. “This is my home, too.” He was speaking for a man who no longer could, but he was also speaking for himself. “As for Van Horn, it doesn’t hurt to make him think we’re following the rules.”

  But Randie was unmoved, alight with a quiet fury.

  “He should never have come down here,” she said, her hands balled into fists, the bottoms of which were pressed into the thighs of her jeans, as if she were holding tight to an invisible buoy, as if she believed her anger at Michael might keep her from sinking into the tide of grief that had only begun to lick at her toes. “What the hell did he think was going to happen in a place like this?”

  “Coming home is not asking for it.”

  “This was not his home,” she said.

  But it was, and Darren understood that in a way Randie didn’t. Not Lark, of course, but this thin slice of the state that had built both of them, Darren and Michael. The red dirt of East Texas ran in both their veins. Darren knew the power of home, knew what it meant to stand on the land where your forefathers had forged your future out of dirt, knew the power of what could be loved up by hand, how a harvest could change a fate. He knew what it felt like to stand on the back porch of his family homestead in Camilla and feel the breath of his ancestors in the trees, feel the power of gratitude in every stray breeze. He wanted to say all this and more to Randie. But she was closed off by then, sitting rigid, her chin jutted forward in an aggrieved anger that would never hold. God help her, Darren thought, when that wall comes down and the hurt comes calling.

  It all circled back to Geneva’s, any hope Darren had of stopping a racial witch hunt for Missy Dale’s killer, and going back there was his best chance to get justice for Michael Wright, get answers about his last hours on earth.

  Michael had been in the cafe, Wendy said.

  Darren chased that lead, driving straight from Wally’s to the cafe’s parking lot across the highway. He’d just pulled into a space on the other side of the gas pump when his cell phone rang. Lisa’s photo popped on the screen, a shot from a trip they took to Mexico when she graduated law school. Her kohl-lined eyes peeked out at him from behind the brim of a wide straw hat. Randie saw the image, too. She stared at it a beat too long, then nodded when he asked her to give him a minute. He stepped out to answer the call, leaning against the truck bed, the heel of his right boot resting on one of the Chevy’s rear tires.

  “What are you doing, Darren?” Lisa said. She sounded tired in a way that he knew didn’t bode well for him; her patience had run thin. He’d burned through what little goodwill he had by not driving to Houston last night.

  “Wilson called me in on something.”

  “You turned in your badge, Darren.”

  “No, I didn’t.” He refused to add the equivocal not yet.

  “I thought you and Clayton talked,” she said. “About school.”

  “If there’s something you want to ask me, just ask me, Lis. You don’t have to use my uncle to do it.”

  She sighed and said, “I don’t want to do this again.”

  “Neither do I,” he said, thinking she meant have this fight again. “I got two dead bodies out here, Lisa. I got people looking to me to make something right out here.” He glanced at Randie, watched her through the cab’s back window. She was staring straight ahead at the front of the cafe, at the cinched curtains in the windows and the sign out front advertising fried pies.

  “And you have a wife who’s alive here.”

  “You kicked me out. What did you expect me to do?”

  “Well, now I’m asking you to come home.”

  “No.”

  The answer was immediate, and he meant it, but it didn’t stop the feeling that he’d crossed a line past which he couldn’t quite breathe right, the air around him thin and useless, like he couldn’t get enough of it into his chest. “Lisa—” She hung up on him just as Randie opened her door and stepped out of the truck.

  Wendy was sitting on a woven lawn chair, its yellow and blue threads fraying and swaying in the fall breeze. She was cracking pecans over a paper bag. At her feet were a handful of objects laid out on a blanket: a sewing machine, dusty Coke bottles, an old guitar accompanied by a sign that read STRINGS NOT INCLUDED, a smattering of tin cans, and a few mother-of-pearl pill cases. On top of a Mercury parked nearby was another sign: TAKE A PIECE OF TEXAS HOME WITH YOU. Randie was studying the makeshift bazaar when Darren came from around the side of his truck. Wendy nodded at the familiar face, then caught sight of the badge on his chest. “That thing real?” she said. “Not, I’ll pay you thirty dollars for it.”

  “It’s real,” he said. “Ranger Darren Mathews, ma’am.”

  “Well, ain’t this some shit.”

  She turned to see Randie eyeing a flat round tin, the green label rusted over in spots. Wendy pointed to it and said, “That belonged to my mama.”

  “And you’re selling it?” Randie said.

  “What I need a tin of hair grease from 1949 for?” Wendy said, popping the meat of a pecan into her mouth. She was dressed head to toe in red, and her crimson lipstick had stained her front teeth. “Lady come through here about a week ago and paid me ten dollars for a can just like it. Shit, I believe my mama paid ten cents.” She started on a new pecan, cracking the shell with a silver nutcracker. “You see something you like, let me know.”

  “We’re here about Michael Wright,” Darren said.

  “Who?”

  “The black man who was killed.”

  “Oh, no,” Wendy said, studying Randie. “You not kin to him, are you?”

  “He was my—”

  Darren stopped her, wanting to disperse information only when and how he saw fit. “Did you see him when he was here, talk to him any?” he asked Wendy.

  “Naw. That was G
eneva,” she said, just as something on the highway got her attention. Her face fell, skin going slack, and Darren saw she might be even older than he realized. He watched her expression go from naked fright to outrage. He turned to follow her gaze. “Now, looka here,” she said. There was a blue Dodge truck creeping along 59, going at a stalker’s pace of barely forty miles an hour, passing by the cafe. The driver was white, but in profile Darren couldn’t see much of his face. “That’s three times now,” she said.

  “The truck?”

  Wendy nodded. “Keith Dale.”

  “That’s Keith Dale?” Randie said, turning in time to see his truck’s tail end disappear up the road as the truck picked up speed, gunning past Geneva’s. “He was at the icehouse last night,” she said, turning to Darren, trying to understand what it meant, seeing Keith here. It wasn’t good, Darren knew that much.

  “He ain’t the only one, neither,” Wendy said. “Bunch of them down Wally’s way been riding up from the icehouse, eyeballing the place, making sure Geneva know they watching. I told her she could hold on to my pistol till all this blows over, but she got her twelve-gauge loaded under the cash register.”

  Darren stared off after the truck, wondering would it turn around.

  He thought, Why is Keith Dale not being interrogated right now?

  He grabbed Randie by the arm. “Let’s get you inside.”

  He opened the door for her, then turned to Wendy. He’d meant her, too. But the old lady’s answer to his concern lay behind a fold in her skirt that she lifted to reveal the .22 in her lap. Didn’t look like it could kill a mosquito, but it was all she needed to say, Not running me from my place of business. Her corner of Geneva’s parking lot wouldn’t go down without a fight. Darren hoped like hell he could solve this case before there was another murder in Lark.

  Geneva was behind the counter wrapping a plate with foil. She set it inside a cardboard box on the countertop, the words Heinz ketchup printed on it. She wiped her hands on her apron, this one a starburst pattern of yellow and orange, then lifted the lid of the pastry case. The cafe warmed with the smell of butter, sugar, and canned fruit, peach and pear. Huxley was at his usual seat with his newspaper. Next to him was a young black girl in her early twenties. She had a milky skin tone that was just short of high yellow, and she had her nose in a bridal magazine. As Geneva wrapped a few fried pies in foil, the girl pointed to a couture gown in the magazine and said, “Grandma, what you think of this one?” Geneva gave the most cursory glance and shrugged.