by Nicole Baart
Lucas joined Alex and bent down to see what had held the piece of furniture so tightly in place. “Foot okay?” He asked quietly.
“Shut up.”
“Yup.”
The chair was sticking out at a forty-five-degree angle to the ground. The back left leg had dug a deep gash in the hard-packed earthen floor of the barn and was now securely rooted in between the dirt and what looked like a thick tree branch.
“Looks like you’ve got quite a bit of leverage,” one of the young officers quipped from over their shoulders.
Alex didn’t respond to the jab, but leaned in closer to the foot of the chair and carefully dusted dry earth off the branch.
“So there’re roots underneath the barn. Big deal.” The other rookie cop turned away and proved himself gutsy enough to grab Jim’s body and stop its dancelike sway.
“I don’t think it’s a tree branch,” Alex mumbled. “Too far away from anything growing nearby.”
“Sounds ominous,” Lucas quipped.
“Mysteries R Us.” Alex waved him closer. “Take a look at this.”
Lucas crawled down on his hands and knees and studied the object. It was barely peeking out of the ground, a hint of grimy hardness in a parallel line with earth. Only a couple of inches were exposed, but Lucas could tell that it extended far beyond eyesight and deep underground. Dirt worn as smooth as cement banked both sides—if the chair hadn’t disturbed its hard-packed grave, the incongruity beneath the barn floor might have never surfaced at all.
Reaching out a tentative hand, Lucas brushed the dirt away with his fingertips, revealing a grayish white surface that was comparatively smooth despite tiny pockmarks that dug minuscule basins across the exterior. He clawed at the dust with his nails until they began to split, then he turned to Alex with a sigh.
“The knife?”
Alex handed it over without a single cynical comment.
Lucas scratched and dug, prying chunks of earth away with each vicious slash. Within minutes, he could tentatively wrap his fingers around it. He pulled gently. It didn’t give an inch. Pulling harder produced the same effect: nothing.
“What do you think it is?” Alex cut in.
In the corner of his mind, a shadowy thought was beginning to materialize in smoky, elusive wisps. Lucas brushed more dust away, touched the object again, and realized with a paralyzing jolt that the doctor in him had always known what it was. His subconscious perceived it even when his mind refused to believe. “Oh, God.” Lucas whispered it—a prayer, an invocation, a heartfelt, aching plea—because he knew . . . he knew what lay beneath the feet of the community’s infamous outcast.
“Lucas, come on, don’t get all melodramatic.”
It was through a fog that Lucas managed to mumble, “I think we’re looking at Angela Sparks.”
A tangible quiet descended on the barn. Disbelief, thick and poisonous, choked each man as they stared at what they now knew to be a bone. A human bone. Moments trudged by before Alex found his voice. “I thought Jenna was helping her get out of town.”
“Me, too.”
Jenna Hudson was deep water. Mysterious, flowing, dark. She had stormed into Lucas’s life late in his residency and had affixed herself indelibly, ineradicably in his mind before she ever made it to his heart. Jenna, with her baggy jeans, piled hair, bare feet. She wore her own skin as if it was an afterthought, something that she had just tossed on as she swept out the door. She claimed him without meaning to, without really seeming to care if he was hers. But he was, and from the first moment, she knew it.
Jenna was all eyes. Blue so bottomless it was navy, almost black. And it was those eyes, in the face framed by curls that appeared to flow out of everything that was her, shadowy enough to be coal, that demanded all of Lucas. He had never been in love before, and he never bothered to question if he even knew what love truly was. He simply married her.
The first time Lucas told Jenna that he loved her, they were getting groceries. It became a Sunday ritual early in their relationship; the resident and the social worker, too busy during every other imaginable hour even to contemplate something as unnecessary as grocery shopping. And yet they found themselves spending hours as they discovered new delicacies, chased each other down aisles, and intentionally avoided every bargain. Their cart overflowed with chocolate cherry bordeaux ice cream, thin wedges of expensive cheeses, sprouted wheat bread trucked in from the organic bakery downtown.
Jenna was standing over the vine-ripened tomatoes, touching and carefully pressing and easing the chosen few into a clear plastic bag on the day it finally happened. Lucas was leaning over the grocery cart, indulging in his new favorite pastime of simply watching her.
“You know I love you.”
It was a casual statement, and Jenna didn’t even seem to notice. He thought about saying it again, about reaching over the tomatoes to touch her, make her feel his skin pressing against her hand, maybe even pull her close. He didn’t. It wasn’t until she had fastened the bag with a green twist tie and gently laid the crimson treasures in the bottom of the cart that she said, “I know.”
She didn’t say it back. She didn’t have to.
By the time Lucas proposed to her, Jenna still hadn’t managed to utter the words, but it didn’t matter. He knew how she felt, or at least he was convinced enough to believe that his love was enough for them both.
He asked her to marry him the day her grandmother lost her driver’s license. After her mother died, Jenna lived with her grandmother, Caroline, in a tiny flat that was closer to Milwaukee than Chicago. She drove over an hour each way just to get to work at the hospital. But her commitment to Oma dictated that she stay with her as long as she could care for the spunky eighty-five-year-old.
Lucas was with Jenna when she got the call that Caroline had been in an accident. The hospital where she had been taken was a good forty-five-minute drive, but Lucas and Jenna abandoned their date and sped to her side. The accident turned out to be a fender-bender, and Oma suffered no more than a bruised knee where her leg slid into the console inches from her seat.
When Caroline saw her granddaughter, the tears that were threatening to spill trailed one at a time down her wrinkled cheeks.
“Oma, why didn’t you stop at the stop sign?” Jenna asked.
Caroline’s answer solidified what they had known for some time: “I thought I stopped. I mean, I stopped in my mind.”
The officer who arrived at the scene pulled Jenna aside and gave her Caroline’s driver’s license.
It was in the kitchen of the flat, after Caroline had bathed and relaxed enough to fall fitfully asleep, that Lucas got down on one knee. It felt strange, even to him, as the cold of the linoleum floor seeped through his jeans and into his very bones. Jenna was sitting with her legs under her in an uncomfortable wooden chair, warming her hands on a cup of black coffee and looking into its depths as if answers waited for her in the dregs.
He hadn’t planned it this way. They were supposed to be bundled up beneath the lights of Navy Pier overlooking Lake Michigan. Her cheeks would be pink from the wind and a scarf would be knotted at her neck as she said something playful to him. He would have taken out the ring when she wasn’t looking. She would have turned away from the water and found him there. She would have laughed and said, “Yes.”
Instead, she raised tired eyes to look at him almost sadly. She asked, “What are you doing?” And he said it again, “I love you.”
It was the first time he saw her cry. Jenna put out her arms and he shuffled over to her, still on his knees. She wrapped herself around him, legs and all, and held on as if she was afraid of being swept away. “Are you asking me to marry you?” He was shocked to hear the disbelief in her voice.
“Yes,” he said.
She said it back. “Yes.”
When they moved to Iowa to follow Caroline, Lucas left the city with no regrets. She was with him, all five foot two inches of her, and nothing else mattered. They moved into a centu
ry home on the outskirts of a town that boasted no more than one grocery store and enough gossip to last at least a hundred lifetimes.
Blackhawk was nestled against the hills that marked the border between Iowa and South Dakota, and the muddy Big Sioux river ran a trembling line between the trees less than a stone’s throw from the invisible marker of the official city limits. The cobbled main street of Blackhawk’s picturesque downtown ambled past pretty houses with Dutch lace curtains and a hodgepodge collection of small-town amenities. There was a crumbling brick bank, an equally dilapidated police station, a café, a tiny library that specialized in interlibrary loans. But Blackhawk’s claim to fame was a trio of antiques stores that boasted sagging shelves of what Lucas considered junk, but which people came from miles around to admire and procure for dusty corners in their own homes.
The streets were cracked, the trees ancient and gnarled, the people reserved. Blackhawk was nothing to write home about, situated in the proverbial middle of nowhere. Sioux Falls was a forty-five-minute drive away. Omaha could be reached in two and a half hours, Minneapolis in four. But the Hudsons weren’t known for doing anything halfway, and they threw themselves into their new life with the same passion they directed at everything else.
Jenna started Safe House, a domestic violence aid center that specialized in helping victims of abuse begin new lives. Lucas was always stunned by the number of women who saw Jenna every week. Bustling metropolis or quiet village, violence seemed to know no boundaries.
And Lucas himself, making what he believed would be a temporary adjustment to small-town life even more easily than his wife, joined Blackhawk’s medical clinic and worked alongside two other doctors diagnosing strep throat and setting broken bones.
For the first few years, Lucas felt like he was camping, on vacation from normal life. Or on an extended mission trip like the three months he had spent just outside of Tegucigalpa, giving wide-eyed orphans their first taste of medical treatment. They had hated the needles. But then two years in Blackhawk turned into four, and four into eight, until a decade had passed and then a momentous dozen years—one-third of his life—and he was officially a small-town resident.
It wasn’t necessarily the life he had always dreamed of, but Jenna was the woman he had always dreamed of.
She was more than enough.
2
MEG
The first time Meg Painter met Dylan, he was crouching behind the raspberry thicket in her backyard. It was the Fourth of July, after the barbecues and the fireworks, when the night was dark and still and quiet but for the occasional chirp of an early cricket and the screams of a dozen neighborhood kids. As their parents sipped wine spritzers around the Painters’ brick fire pit, the kids tiptoed through the adjoining yards of Ninth Street Circle NE, erupting in a frenzy of mock terror when they tripped over a comrade lying in ambush.
“Bloody Murder!” the shout would rise, if the discovery had not rendered the poor adolescent speechless or if the would-be murderer was too slow to seize his victim and slap a silencing hand over her gaping mouth.
Most of the time, the detection was quick, painless, and punctuated by frantic shrieks that quickly multiplied as the cry went up. “Run! Bloody Murder! Run!” And from every corner of the block they would come, tripping, stumbling, falling headlong into the warm grass in their haste to elude whatever dark shadow loomed behind them.
The front porch was sanctuary, and though the kids who gathered to play midnight games were probably too old for such frivolity, the darkness seemed prime to entertain the ghosts of their waning childhood. They sometimes ended up crawling on hands and knees after they fell in the last few yards to safety, then dragged themselves up the porch steps to slump against each other and replay the most entertaining bits of their exploits: who tripped whom, or accusations of a kiss stolen in a shadowy, secret corner.
Someone passed around a pilfered can of Bud Light that he had lifted from the cooler without detection, and they took turns sipping the half-warm beer, pretending that they liked it. Meg’s older brother, Bennett, had his hand on her best friend’s leg, but Sarah didn’t seem to mind. And in the farthest corner of the porch, a knot of boys passed around a pack of cigarettes and lit up like they knew exactly what they were doing.
It was all a little perplexing to Meg. The lukewarm beer, the throaty laugh that didn’t sound like Sarah at all, the innocent game that felt altogether different because a year had gone by since the last time they played it. They were older, all of them, and the knowledge of it seemed to crackle in the air around their heads like electricity.
Although it felt awkward, Meg tucked her long legs beneath her and forced a laugh of her own—a grown-up, sexy laugh that came out sounding hollow and all wrong. Some girls could pull off a sexy laugh at fourteen. Meg apparently wasn’t one of them.
“Where’s Dylan?” Sarah’s older brother, Jess, called from across the porch. He flicked the ash of his cigarette over the railing and picked his way around the strewn bodies of his friends to sit on the steps next to Meg. “What’d you do with the new kid, Megs? Out with it.”
“Dylan?” Meg repeated. Jess was grinning at her, and she could see an outline of herself reflected in lamplight of his eyes. She looked small, crouching. Sitting up a little straighter, she said, “I haven’t seen him. I don’t even know who he is.”
That wasn’t entirely true.
Meg had glimpsed the new boy—a recent Phoenix transplant and the only unknown in the midst of a decade-old summer tradition—when everyone was walking through the outdoor buffet to fill their plates with burgers still sizzling from the grill. She bypassed the potato salad, baked beans, and greasy chips in lieu of two hamburgers, fully loaded. It was while she was squirting ketchup on the second bun that something shivered down her spine and made her look up. The yard was dotted with blankets, lawn chairs, and people, but she found him almost instantly.
Dylan was balancing on the twisted limb of a low-lying amur maple, his sun-browned legs tangled in the branches so he wouldn’t tip off backward. He was staring at Meg, holding a glass of lemonade loosely in his hands as if he had forgotten he was holding it at all. There was a shock of dark hair falling across his forehead, tickling the edge of his eye, and he gave his head a little flick that could have been interpreted as a long-distance hello. When he realized that Meg was looking at him, he grinned. It was sudden and bright, a flash of brilliance that surprised her so much she almost took a step back, even though he was fifty feet away.
She glared at him, and made a point to avoid him for the rest of the night. And she’d done a pretty good job of it until Jess started accusing her of tracking his whereabouts. As if she cared.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know who Dylan is,” Jess smiled, leaning close. “All the girls know who Dylan is.”
Meg didn’t mean to tip away from her childhood friend and neighbor, but the back of her head met the porch pillar and Jess laughed.
“You’re like a little sister to me, Megs. That’s why I gotta keep an eye on you.” He took a quick drag on his cigarette and caught Meg watching. “Not for you,” he said, tossing it into the bushes. “Bad business, smoking. Bad for your health.”
“But not for your health?” Meg snapped.
Jess just laughed. “Come on, we’d better find Dylan. City kid probably wandered into the cornfield and got lost.”
The group of kids left the security of the porch and spread out in every direction, avoiding the warm light of the fire pit and the raucous conversation of their parents. At first Jess stayed close to Meg’s side, but then one of the other guys tagged him in a run-by and they ended up careening into the darkness amid a flurry of shouts and the pounding of bare feet.
Meg wasn’t much interested in finding Dylan, and didn’t really care if he had tried to hide in the cornfield. She had grown up her whole life with a field in her backyard, and she knew that the horror stories weren’t true. There were corn snakes in the plowed rows, but not mu
ch more, and if you were stupid enough to wander in too far, all you had to do was pick a row and follow it to the end. You’d come out eventually.
She was on her way back to the porch—to the single empty beer can and the sudden, bewildering understanding that some magic switch had been thrown and she was all at once half woman instead of all little girl—when she felt a hand snake around her ankle. It was so abrupt, so unexpected that she couldn’t even gasp. The world stopped spinning in its orbit.
In the moment that she paused, Dylan grabbed her wrist and yanked her to the ground beside him. There was a patch of earth behind the raspberries where grass refused to grow, and she landed on her seat in the dust, a fine cloud of dirt mingling with the faint, tart scent of ripening berries in the air around her.
“Why aren’t you screaming?” he asked.
Because I can’t, she thought. She wondered if he could see her eyes, the way her stare betrayed a mixture of shock and awe.
“I’m Dylan Reid,” he told her, a smile in his voice. And she knew that he was grinning at her again because she could see the moonlight shimmer off the straight row of his teeth. “It’s nice to meet you, Meg Painter.” He reached for her hand. When she wouldn’t close her fingers, he held her hand in both of his and pumped it up and down.
“I didn’t feel you,” Meg finally whispered, finding her voice. “I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t feel you.”
Dylan didn’t seem at all perturbed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She didn’t say anything.
“You can feel when someone is nearby?” Dylan guessed. “A sixth sense?”
“A tickle,” Meg whispered almost against her own will.
“A tickle?” he repeated, a laugh threatening in his light tone.
Without thinking, Meg punched him in the chest, hard.