by Attica Locke
Darren was afraid to let her speak freely.
He stood from the table quickly, blocking Bell from stepping too far over the threshold. Clayton didn’t want her in the house and said so, whispering to his nephew, “Don’t let her near the silver,” of which they had exactly two items, a teapot and a single serving spoon, both tarnished to hell. Bell didn’t want to be there any more than Clayton wanted her in his home. In fact she wouldn’t talk to Darren in the house and asked him to step out with her onto the front porch.
Lisa reached for his hand solicitously. “Darren?”
“It’s okay,” he told her.
But he felt vaguely ill as he stepped onto the porch with Bell, closing the front door behind them, as if any minute the floor might rise to meet his face.
The stars were out by now, pinpoints of light against a blue-black sky.
There was a long unpaved drive that led up to the country house.
Darren couldn’t see past the second parked car, the light from the front porch not strong enough to tell him where his mother had come from, whether she’d driven or been dropped off. Her black ballet shoes were coated in red dust.
“We need to talk, Darren.”
“I don’t have three hundred in cash, not on me,” he said. “Tomorrow I’ll stop at the bank in town, then I’ll swing by the trailer before noon, okay?”
She stopped him to say, “I found it, Darren.”
“What?”
“That little thirty-eight you didn’t want the deputies to find.”
Mack’s gun.
The one the cops had been looking for.
“Why else would you have put it in the ground?”
“Mama, listen, I didn’t—”
“Clayton likes to make a point that I wasn’t ever welcome at this house, but me and Duke hung around here all the time when his brothers weren’t home. I still know the place pretty well,” she said. In the dark, her eyes looked coal black, and the lines around them were filled in by shadows. It gave her face a witchy quality, and Darren felt breathless and anxious around a woman he realized in this moment was a stranger to him; he didn’t know her well enough to know what she might do in this situation, how much trouble he was in. “After I cleaned up the trash like you told me and took it out to the bins,” she said, pointing to where they stood alongside the house now, “I looked at that tree right there and knew it hadn’t been there before.” She pointed to a burr oak that was indeed recently planted.
Darren had noticed it about a week after Ronnie Malvo was killed.
It had never occurred to him that Bell would notice it, too, otherwise he would never have let her anywhere near the old farmhouse.
Bell, talk of searches by the sheriff’s department and Mack under suspicion ringing in her ears, had dug at the soft earth around the newly planted tree, finding the snub-nosed .38 just hours after the sheriff’s deputies had left the house. She didn’t know whose it was, but she knew it was significant and that in her hands it was a power over her son that she craved. She could make him do anything now. She could make him love her, even, maybe invite her to live with him; she could make him take care of her as she grew old.
She didn’t say anything like that, not yet.
But Darren saw it all coming.
She held his gaze in the dark, pinned him in place. “What’d you do?”
Nothing.
He’d done nothing.
He’d known Ronnie Malvo was killed with a .38, but he hadn’t asked Mack where his gun was. He’d noticed the new oak on his property, but he hadn’t asked Mack when and why he’d planted it. He’d done nothing because Malvo was a bad guy, a cancer, a lump of hate that would spread untold destruction if left unchecked. He’d done nothing because, if he was telling the truth about it, Darren didn’t care that the man was dead. He’d done nothing because Mack was a good man who’d never had any cross with the county sheriff, had never, in his nearly seventy years, done a thing wrong. He’d had all the facts right in front of him if he’d bothered to look. But he’d done nothing. He’d asked Mack no questions, behaving like a defense attorney when he’d taken an oath to be a cop. He got it confused sometimes, on which side of the law he belonged, couldn’t always remember when it was safe for a black man to follow the rules.
He’d done nothing.
Did that make him no better than Mack and Mack no better than the killers in Lark? No, that couldn’t be right. But Darren wasn’t sure of anything anymore, his righteous clarity clouding in his bourbon-soaked brain. He looked across the dark porch at his mother. A pack of mosquitoes buzzed around her head, but she stood perfectly still, a faint smirk on her painted lips. In her dry and calloused hands, he saw she was clutching a sequined handbag. She’d dressed up for this, he thought. He sank into a metal lawn chair as he realized that of course she’d pocketed the gun when she found it, that she had it in her purse right now, that she held his entire career as a Texas Ranger in her hands.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Reagan Arthur, Joshua Kendall, Sabrina Callahan, and my new family at Mulholland and Little, Brown for the care and enthusiasm with which they’ve greeted me and my book.
As always, I’d like to express my gratitude to Richard Abate, whom I’m lucky to count as a manager and a friend.
Thanks to Lieutenant Kip Westmoreland of the Texas Rangers, who is not to blame for liberties I took or facts I bent for the sake of a good story. He was kind to share some of his time with me.
Thank you to my parents, Sherra Aguirre and Gene Locke, for instilling in me a deep love for East Texas.
Thanks also to Dr. Cheryl Arutt for every Thursday session along this journey.
Finally, this book would not exist without the love and understanding of my family, specifically my daughter, Clara, who missed her mother at many a soccer game while I was writing, and my husband, Karl, who often did the work of two parents. You two are answered prayers, dreams come true, and grace on earth.
About the Author
Attica Locke is the author of Pleasantville, which won the 2016 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and was long-listed for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction; Black Water Rising, which was nominated for an Edgar Award; and The Cutting Season, a national bestseller and winner of the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. She was a writer and producer on the Fox drama Empire. A native of Houston, Texas, Attica lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and daughter.
Also by Attica Locke
Pleasantville
The Cutting Season
Black Water Rising
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