She indicates a girl with a beauty-queen smile. Actually, all the girls have beauty-queen smiles—and out of eighteen scholarship recipients, only two are boys. One portrait in particular stops me. The girl looks distractingly like Kaycee: a waterfall of blond hair, wide-spaced blue eyes. According to the little brass nametag, her name is Sophie Nantes.
“Why so many girls?” I can’t help but ask.
“Well, we keep need in mind as much as we do talent,” Misha says. “Plenty of colleges offer their own sports scholarships, but most of the money is for the male teams, so there’s that. And there are more local opportunities for our male students who don’t want to go to college. Farming, construction is making a comeback, entry-level jobs at Optimal. That kind of thing.”
The door at the end of the corridor leads us to the auditorium. “Next year, we’ll mount our first musical production,” she says. Her voice is swallowed by the vast space. Tiers of seats climb into darkness. “And we have forty students already signed up for a two-week music camp in August. Half of them will be playing on donated instruments. Can you imagine? For years, the marching band had to meet in the back parking lot while the cheer team got the cafeteria after school. Now they’ll rehearse here.” She opens her arms to the silent stage. For the first time, she seems happy. Not just happy, but joyful, alive with energy and pride. She turns to me. “And do you know what was here before?”
I shake my head.
“Nothing.” There’s a dark satisfaction in her eyes. “Absolutely nothing at all.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Joe is on me as soon as I walk in the door.
“I’ve been calling you for an hour,” he says. “Where were you?”
I put down my bag, nice and slow. “Good morning to you, too.” I reach for my computer but he’s too fast and snaps it shut.
“You ducked out yesterday, too.” He gives me a funny look. “Do you need a refresher course in teamwork?”
He’s right; I’ve never had a problem sharing strategy with Joe before. But weirdly, I just feel resentful of him for asking. Optimal is mine—my mess, my mystery, my case.
It has to be. Otherwise, the magic won’t work, and finding the truth won’t help me forget what happened.
But Joe is watching me, and there’s no reason to lie. “I took a tour of the community center,” I say. “It seems more and more like Optimal’s determined to buy their way into the town’s good graces.”
“And ours,” Joe says. He pivots and goes to his desk, returning with several binders so stuffed with paper they could double as bludgeons. When he dumps them on my desk, I have to reach for my bag to keep it from skipping straight off the table.
“What is this stuff?” I ask. But as soon as I fan open one of the binders, even before I make sense of the 1099s, I know. “Optimal delivered.”
“They didn’t deliver,” Joe says. “They dumped. Most of it is still boxed up in the basement of the courthouse.”
I stare at him. “There’s more?” Each binder is five inches thick, and packed with data. It will take weeks for us to make a picture of expenditures, even if the whole team did nothing else.
All the humor has vanished from his face. Joe hates mistakes—especially his own. “One hundred and seventeen binders in all. And in no order, from what we can tell.”
“They buried us.”
“They did what we asked them to do,” Joe says, through gritted teeth. He just manages a smile. “But yes, they buried us.”
“And we have no idea where to start,” Flora adds.
Thanks, Flora.
Flipping through pages and pages of expenditure reports and 1099s, I feel increasingly hopeless. Of course it’s our fault. I don’t know what I was expecting. Big red arrows, some helpful Post-its flagging payments to the EPA, maybe a few expenses politely filed under “Bribes.”
—
We spend the day trying to piece a thousand pages of data into some kind of story—or the beginning of one, at least. It’s too hot to think—by noon, it reaches ninety-eight degrees outside—and more and more I get the feeling that the answer I want can’t be found in any numbers.
At six I give up and pack the boxes of documents into the trunk of my car, swearing to myself I’ll look at them later. I’ve promised to see my father for dinner, and although I can’t think of anything I want to do less, I’ve run out of ways to put him off. I swing home to take a shower as cold as I can stand it, soaping hard, as if I can wash away some of the day’s frustration.
I’m surprised to find the garage door open when I arrive, and my dad’s car is running, although the driver’s-side door is open. I can almost hear my heart slamming against my chest.
“Dad?” As I step into the shadow of the garage, fear falls on me like the pressure of a hand. I reach into the car to shut off the engine. “Dad?” I keep calling for him, even though he’s clearly not here.
The house is open, and I go from room to room still shouting for him. Nothing.
The basement is dark, and there’s no sign he’s been down here in ages—the junk is undisturbed, and impassable.
Then I remember: the toolshed.
I sprint up the stairs again. Before I’m even out the door, I spot him—not at the toolshed, but a dozen yards away, lying motionless on the grass.
“Dad!” I rocket off the porch. Dropping to my knees, I put my hands on his chest. His eyes flutter. “Dad! Can you hear me? Dad.”
He opens his eyes. His face is sunburned. His lips are peeling. He must have been out here for hours.
“Abby?” He blinks once, twice, and finally his eyes find focus.
“How long have you been out here?” I’m scared to touch him, to move him—I remember that you aren’t supposed to move people who have fallen. Or maybe that’s people who have been in an accident. I can’t think straight. A dumb animal panic is grinding my thoughts into uselessness. “What happened? Are you hurt?”
His eyes drift past me and land again. “I—I think I fell.”
“You think?”
“I don’t remember.” He frowns. “It’s the squirrels. There are squirrels in the attic again. I thought I’d patch the roof…”
“There’s no attic, Dad,” I tell him. “That was in the old house, remember?” We moved when I was five from the other side of Plantation Road because of problems with the neighbor: my dad became convinced he was spying on us, then accused him of doing hell’s work, then became the one spying so that he could prove it. I haven’t thought of the squirrels in years.
“I can hear them moving around.”
“That was the old house, remember? Back when Mom was alive.”
He closes his eyes. The skin of his eyelids is so thin it shows the movement beneath them. “I remember,” he says. Barely audible. Then, a little louder: “It’s my back. That’s why I couldn’t get up. I must have thrown it.”
I hook him beneath the shoulders but hardly manage to lift him before he seizes up in pain, crying out so loudly I nearly drop him.
“Dad, please.” My voice sounds frail. Desperate. Young. Not more than a week back in this place and the old Abby is emerging from the dark shadows like a skeleton. “I’m trying to help!”
The second time I try to lift him he only seems heavier. Sweat slicks my underarms. Pain has turned his skin waxy, and when I say his name again he barely shakes his head.
I stand up and the ground swings beneath me, like it wants to buck me off. A shadow circles high overhead. An owl, maybe, or a hawk. Bad omens. My legs feel strangely wooden, like a puppet’s, pulled by phantom strings.
In the kitchen I find my purse where I dropped it and rifle through it for my phone, shaking so hard I mistype the code twice before I manage it.
Condor picks up on the first ring.
—
I’m with my father, holding his hand, trying to comfort him, when Condor arrives, quietly and without comment. Together we move at a crawl, supporting my father between us to his car
.
It doesn’t even occur to me to tell Condor that it’s okay, that I can drive my father to the emergency clinic in Dougsville, that he can go home now, and he doesn’t suggest it. In the car, I don’t say a word, although my father revives enough to rant against doctors, to claim they’re all quacks after our money. I’m too tired even to be embarrassed.
X-rays show what is likely a broken rib: a painful injury, but one that has to heal itself. The doctor writes a prescription for painkillers and tells my father sternly that he’ll have to take it easy.
In private, he asks me when my dad last had a physical. Immediately, my skin heats up.
“Not long ago,” I say, convinced that the doctor can tell that I’m lying, that I have no idea, that I’m a terrible daughter. “A year or two, maybe.”
“His blood pressure is pretty high,” he says. “And he was confused by some of my questions. Has he complained to you about headaches?”
I feel like I’m back in high school in front of a quiz I haven’t studied for. “No,” I say.
The doctor folds his mouth into a thin line. “He gets headaches.” Then: “Take him to his regular doctor for an exam. Soon.”
It’s nearly midnight when we return my dad to his house. As soon as I try to loop an arm around my dad’s waist, he says, “I got it, I got it.” Instead, he leans on Condor’s arm, and I trail behind them. Condor raises his eyes to hold mine and I read the sympathy there. I have to swallow the urge to cry.
Finally, when my dad is sleeping, after I slide behind the wheel of my car again, I find that only a few hours have passed since I first pulled into the driveway.
I follow Condor back to my rental house, guided by his taillights. We go slowly, as if in a processional. Condor pulls into his driveway, but emerges immediately to cross the browning yard to my car, getting a hand around the door to open it for me even before I’ve cut the engine. The surge of the crickets is so loud it sounds like an ocean.
“Thank you,” I say. My whole body is heavy with exhaustion. The porch light activates. I can feel his eyes searching me all over.
“All in a night’s work.” He keeps his voice light, but he isn’t smiling. “Are you going to be okay?”
I nod. I can hardly stand to be so close to him. It makes my body ache for entirely different reasons.
“You want to come over for a drink or something?” he asks me.
I don’t risk looking at him. If I do, I’ll say yes.
Condor picked up on the first ring. He helped my limping father into bed. And ten years ago, he took those photographs of poor Becky Sarinelli, and passed them around to everyone as a joke.
True or false? Good or evil? I’m beginning to think Misha was onto something. Maybe the line isn’t so clear after all.
“I should get some sleep,” I tell him.
But as I turn away, he skims my shoulder with a hand, and just that touch freezes me in place.
“Listen.” He licks his lips. I imagine following the line of his teeth with my tongue. “I don’t mean to overstep—I mean, you’re obviously dealing with a lot. I read things wrong…” He looks uncertain, and momentarily young. “Did I read things wrong?”
My whole body burns from standing so close to him. I can feel the rhythm of my heart beating in my ears. “You told me you made a lot of mistakes back when you were younger. Was Becky Sarinelli one of them?”
The change is immediate. It’s like a gate slams down behind his eyes.
“Where did that come from? Who did you talk to?” Even his voice sounds different. For a moment, I’m afraid of him. Of his bigness. Of the darkness. Of the fact that no one is around to witness whatever happens next.
I lift my chin. “Just answer the question.”
For a long time, he stands there, staring at me. The long look of his hatred hooks me right in the stomach, makes me dizzy with guilt and regret.
Finally, he laughs. But there’s no humor in it. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, you got me there. Becky Sarinelli was one of those mistakes.”
I turn, stumbling on the grass, and hurry for the door. I’m not sure why, but my throat feels raw and I’m suddenly sure I’ll be sick. I drop the keys on the porch, snatch them up again, and shove them in the lock.
“Why did you really call me tonight, Abby?” he shouts after me. Taunting me.
“I don’t know,” I tell him. I slip inside, close the door and lock it. For a long time, I’m afraid to look outside, afraid to see him there. But when I finally work up the courage to check the window, there is nothing outside but the night.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The phone yanks me awake just before dawn.
It goes silent before I can find it—still buried at the bottom of my bed, under a pile of yesterday’s balled-up socks and underwear, gum wrappers, and wrinkled receipts. It’s almost dead, of course—but starts ringing again right away.
Joe. For God’s sake. I almost hit ignore.
“You don’t get to be a pain in the ass until after nine A.M.,” I say.
“There’s been a fire,” Joe says. Nothing else. No details. No panic. Just: there’s been a fire.
I stand up and sway slightly, lightheaded. “Where?” I say, although I already know.
“Gallagher’s,” he says. “Get here.” He hangs up.
—
By the time I get to the farm the volunteer firefighters have cordoned off the blaze, spraying it down from different angles, like it’s some monstrous animal they’re trying to tether in place. The fields are all tinder, brittle from lack of rain, just waiting to go up.
The barn is gone. Little evidence is even left of what happened. It’s just a flat portion of foundation and a tunnel of ash whirling hot to the sky. Gallagher’s house got scorched, too, but not as bad. The damage is contained mostly to the paint job, although part of the east side has succumbed to the heat and crumbled away, leaving a view into his kitchen. The noise sounds like violent messy eating, like something giant snapping its jaws. The dogs are freaking, too, and for a terrible second I think of the cows and the donkey Gallagher keeps around.
Joe must know what I’m thinking, because the first thing he says is, “None of the animals were hurt.” He adds, almost as an afterthought, “Gallagher’s fine, too. It was the barn they were after.”
That’s all he has to say. Whoever did it, it was a stupid, desperate, clumsy move. Maybe the fire was meant to scare us off. Maybe it was somebody who is worried about having a job and a brand-new community center and plastic swing sets in the park.
Standing there in the smoke-choked morning, staring at the ghost silhouette of our makeshift office, now nothing more than ash and rubble, I feel almost giddy. This fire proves we’re right. It proves that we’re getting closer to the center of the maze. There will be answers in Optimal’s records. I’m sure of that now. And those records are sitting in the trunk of my car. Perfectly intact.
By noon the fire has been extinguished completely, and we waste an hour picking through the remains. It’s just something to do, a way to shove the day back into some kind of order while we wait for the men from the sheriff’s office to finish poking around, like they might find a can of gasoline with an address and a signature. Joe answers some questions, all the same way (Seen anything? No. Know anything? Nope. Anybody giving you trouble? No.), until the conversation finally lands on Optimal.
Now they want to know what we’re doing, what we’ve heard, what ridiculous stories Gallagher’s been feeding us, and do we know he got busted back in the day with enough illegal fireworks to blow the whole town apart, and do we know that Optimal employs sixty percent of Barrens half- or full-time, not counting the locals who run the bars and grocery and post office, all of them busy again after the town was nearly dead, if you thought about it that way you couldn’t count the people in Barrens who weren’t on payroll one way or the other…
And if there is something in the water it sure as hell ain’t running out of Optimal.
In the afternoon we lump the whole team into the tiny living room at my place until we can figure out a better solution. We divide twenty binders between us and get to work. Except for the rhythmic hiss of turning paper, we work mostly in silence, and unexpectedly I feel a sense of ease that I haven’t felt in I don’t know how long.
It’s Flora who first spots the discrepancy: not money going missing, but too much money accounted for. Optimal has been paying Clean Solutions Management, a firm they subcontracted to deal with chemical disposal, massive sums almost quarterly.
Clean Solutions Management’s website is all low-tech and full of meaningless jargon.
It always pays to follow the money.
I remember what Lilian McMann told me about the too-clean evaluations entered into the federal system on their behalf. There must have been a bribe in it somewhere. “Could Optimal be redirecting money through a company like Clean Solutions?”
Joe squints at me. “What do you mean, redirecting?”
“I don’t know. Think of what they did for Aaron Pulaski. Optimal’s parent company paid off Pulaski so he wouldn’t come after them for labor violations, didn’t they? Maybe one of their subcontractors is cutting checks, too.”
“That would be a lot of effort.”
“Well, maybe it’s a lot of pockets.”
Joe’s eyes are like razors—I can feel them trying to dive straight down into my thoughts. “Like whose?”
Like Colin Danner’s, I think. And maybe his buddy Michael Phillips, who cleaned up the reports he put into ICIS. Maybe the entire goddamn town.
“I don’t know,” I say instead. I haven’t told him about what I learned from Lilian McMann except in general terms. “I’m just throwing it out there.”
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