Closer Than You Know

by Brad Parks

  There was a pay phone in the corner. I could call Ben—wherever he was—and wait there until he could give me a ride. The only thing that made me chase after Teddy was that I wanted answers. Also, he needed to understand he was going to have to do everything in his power to get Alex back, even if it meant he would go to jail himself.

  I was out in the parking lot, three-quarters of the way to his ancient rust bucket of a pickup truck, when I caught up with him.

  “Hey,” I said, slapping at his shoulder to get his attention. “I’m not an idiot. I know you’ve been dealing again. The Sheriff’s Office pulled half a kilo of coke out of my house. Where the hell did you get that? Are you working for a cartel or something?”

  He turned. “Seriously? Jesus, I come here to do you a favor and you’re going to start accusing me of stuff? Can’t you just be happy you’re out?”

  “Happy? Alex has been taken away by Social Services and I might have to serve five years in prison for barely hitting a cop—to say nothing of what will happen with those drug charges—and you think I should be happy?”

  “Okay. Bad word choice. Look, just get in the truck. I haven’t been dealing drugs or doing drugs or anything like that. I’ve been working and saving, okay? It’s surprising how fast your bank account grows when you’re not injecting all your money.”

  I crossed my arms and stared at him. There was a long time during his teenage years when Teddy was little more than one heartbreak after another. But if there was one thing that kept me from giving up on him—beyond the tug of sororal bonds—it was that he was seldom untruthful with me. Even when he stole from me to support his habit, or suffered a relapse, or broke one of his many promises to turn over a new leaf, he always came clean about it later, once he was sober and feeling sheepish about his latest transgression. It had really helped salvage our relationship during some tough times. He once told me he respected me too much to lie to me.

  “Are you really going to swear to me you haven’t relapsed?” I demanded.

  He looked straight into my eyes and said, “I swear to you I am totally and one hundred percent clean. I’ll pee in a cup right now if you want me to.”

  “And those drugs weren’t yours. You weren’t selling them or holding them for Wendy or anything like that.”

  “Sis, I know we’ve been through a lot of crap together. But I’m telling you, I had nothing to do with that stuff.”

  “Are you seeing Wendy again?”

  “No! I swear!” he said.

  I studied him as if I were a human lie detector. But he just stood there and returned my gaze.

  “You know Ben already grilled me about all of this, right?” he continued. “I thought he was going to take a swing at me. But then I convinced him it wasn’t me.”

  “How?” I asked.

  Teddy shrugged. “Because it’s the truth? I don’t know. Think about it. I never did coke. It’s too damn expensive. For me it was always pills or H. You know that.”

  “So where did those drugs come from?” I asked. “Half a kilo of cocaine doesn’t just show up out of nowhere.”

  Teddy took a few steps toward me. “Sis, this is going to sound a little nuts, but . . . Ben told me all that stuff about them thinking you want to sell Alex, which is . . . I mean, this is all crazy, but . . . Have you ever thought that someone is messing with you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He sighed. “You know, for such a smart girl, you’re kind of dumb sometimes. I think it’s pretty obvious. Someone planted those drugs in your house and then told the Sheriff’s Office they were there. Then they told Social Services you wanted to sell your kid. Someone is totally messing with you.”

  It was startling to hear him lay it out like that, so straightforward, so certain, so . . . correct?

  “Who would do something like that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But you better figure it out. Because if you don’t, they’re just going to keep doing it.”

  I felt my brow crinkling. I didn’t know what to think about any of this.

  “Come on,” he said. “Get in the truck.”

  * * *

  • • •

  We rode away in silence. On the way home, I made Teddy detour to the Walmart, then borrowed money for a handheld breast pump. I wanted to be able to leave the electric one at work.

  As we completed the trip to Desper Hollow Road, I realized I was gripping the door handle on his truck extra hard.

  Despite the surface-level plausibility of what Teddy had said, I was having a hard time convincing myself anyone was out to get me. I just didn’t see how I was worth the trouble. For whatever people say about millennials and our everyone-gets-a-trophy upbringings, I didn’t view myself as some special snowflake. I had long ago shed whatever delusions of grandeur I might have harbored as a teenager.

  The very real truth of my life was that I was a thirty-one-year-old trucking-company dispatcher, living an until-now ordinary life with my baby and my husband.

  Beyond that, I had generally come to believe most people in this world were too consumed with their own dramas to spend much time concerning themselves with anyone else’s. Even when I was a child, in the throes of the system, I came to recognize that what could feel like people out to get me was mostly just a hodgepodge of tenuously connected human beings, each of them bumbling along in narrow-minded self-interest—with the occasional act of altruism thrown in just to keep you from losing hope in the species altogether.

  To think that there was a mastermind orchestrating a well-coordinated attack against me strained credulity. It was the stuff of one of Bobby Ray Walters’s conspiracy theories.

  And yet there was no doubt that what Teddy said made sense. That drug stash hadn’t just appeared in our house on its own. And it hadn’t been there when we bought the place. The last owner had been an elderly churchgoing widow, pretty far from fitting the profile of a coke addict.

  So, yes, those drugs had to have gotten into our house somehow. Likewise, this wild allegation that I wanted to sell Alex hadn’t just materialized on its own. That Social Services director, for as much as I disliked her, was acting on what she felt was solid information.

  Where had that lie originated from?

  I remained every bit as baffled as I had been the day before in her office.

  We made the turn onto Desper Hollow Road, then drove past Bobby Ray’s property—with his couch, his Confederate flag, and his SMILE! YOUR ON CAMERA! sign.

  Teddy turned up our driveway, then brought his truck to a stop. He turned to me with an earnest look.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing, it’s just . . . I didn’t want to bring this up, because . . . I don’t know, I mean, I don’t want to freak you out more. But don’t you think it’s kind of weird they haven’t arrested you on those drug charges yet?”

  “I don’t know, is it? The prosecutor alluded to something about how she might be doing something about that soon, but it didn’t make sense. I don’t really have a lot of experience with this sort of thing.”

  “I do. They don’t usually raid your house, find drugs, and then let you keep hanging out like nothing happened. They arrest you, and then you either get bail or you don’t,” he said. “This is just weird. I have a friend whose mom works down at the courthouse. I’m going to ask her about it, because I don’t think . . .”

  He stopped himself there. He didn’t want to tell his big sister she really ought to be back in jail.

  “Thanks,” I said. “And thanks . . . thanks for bailing me out. I’m not sure if I said that yet. It’s really—”

  And suddenly I couldn’t get the words out. The benevolence of what he had done crashed into me. Teddy hadn’t grown up as poor as I had, but he certainly had his own tribulations to battle, self-made and otherwise. And yet he had battled through them and was just now
coming out the other side.

  This was probably the first time in his whole life that he had a sum like $2,000 saved up. He obviously had plans for that money. And yet he had not hesitated to use it on me—his big sister, who was supposed to be the responsible one; the quasi–mother figure; the one who should have been saving him, not the other way around.

  “Hey, no big deal,” he said, leaning over and hugging me. “I still owe you, like, a thousand times over.”

  “You don’t, but thanks,” I said.

  I pulled myself down from his truck before I wept all over him. I got halfway to the front door and was reaching for my keys when I realized I didn’t have any. The last time I left home, I had been with Ben, and I had assumed I was going to be returning with Ben. I jogged back to Teddy’s truck just as he was starting to back down the driveway and waved to get his attention. He cranked down his window.

  “Hey,” I said. “Can I borrow your key? I don’t have mine.”

  “Yeah, sorry, neither do I, actually. I have no idea where my key is. That was part of what made Ben realize that it wasn’t my coke. I couldn’t even get into your house if I wanted to. You want to come back to my place?”

  “No, no,” I said. “I’ll just wait for Ben. No big deal. Seriously.”

  “All right.”

  “Thanks,” I said, tapping the side of his truck. “Love you.”

  “Love you too, sis.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I walked back to the front stoop, looking at the upended bulbs, which we hadn’t yet had time to stick back in the dirt.

  It was a warm afternoon for early March. I could have very easily curled up on our porch and napped there until Ben got home.

  I sat instead. My gaze again fell on Bobby Ray’s trailer. I had never given much consideration to his camera fetish. It was just one more strange thing about a strange guy. I had certainly never inquired as to what was—and wasn’t—being captured by his lenses. Sometimes the less you know the better.

  But now I was wondering if I might be able to use Bobby Ray’s paranoia to my benefit. My driveway passed right by his trailer. If someone had gone to my place and planted drugs there, it’s possible his cameras might have recorded some part of the act.

  I had never been inside Bobby Ray’s trailer. All of our interactions had occurred on his front lawn or mine—in open places, safe places. And I probably should have waited to approach him. Until Ben got home. Until my brain felt sharper. Until I didn’t have a torn dress.

  If I went down there and something happened to me, I could already hear those victim-blaming voices. She went into his trailer alone. Shouldn’t she, of all people, have known better? What did she think was going to happen?

  But no. I couldn’t let that kind of groundless fear run my life. If there was something telling on those cameras, it might help me get Alex back. That mattered more than whatever theoretical threat Bobby Ray might pose.

  The thought propelled me—first on my feet, then down the hill. This was a new frontier for Bobby Ray and me, nothing more. Just because there were men out there who were predators, it didn’t make all of them that way.

  I passed his couch, then tapped on his rickety screen door.

  “Hang on a sec!” he yelled.

  From inside, I heard his weight making the floor creak. Bobby Ray appeared at the door in white tube socks, camouflage cargo shorts, and a T-shirt that read BASKET OF DEPLORABLES. In the silk-screened image that appeared beneath that lettering, the basket had been wrapped in the Confederate flag and contained a bunch of guys who looked as though they were extras from Duck Dynasty. A variety of long-barreled rifles were arrayed behind the basket.

  It struck me, and not for the first time, just how big Bobby Ray was—well over six feet and approaching three hundred pounds. He was in no kind of cardiovascular shape, but there was a thickness to his neck, arms, and shoulders that suggested he wouldn’t have much trouble lifting his end of a piece of furniture.

  He goes three bills and she weighs, what, a buck twenty? Of course he was going to overpower her.

  “Hey,” he said. “Saw you on the news. Didn’t think you’d be around for a while.”

  “My brother bailed me out.”

  “Decent of him.”

  “Yeah, he’s a good kid.”

  “So what’s . . . I mean, you got a trial, or . . .”

  He let the question trail off. How much of my legal troubles did I share with Bobby Ray Walters? How much did he actually care?

  “Yeah, something like that,” I said. “I was actually wondering if you could help me out with something that sort of relates to all that.”

  “Sure. Shoot.”

  “So you know how the Sheriff’s Office found all this cocaine in our place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s not mine. And it wasn’t Ben’s. And my brother swears it wasn’t his either. We actually don’t know how it got there.”

  Bobby Ray sniffed up a wad of phlegm, then swallowed it. “Shoot. Sheriff probably brought it in with them. They have one of the deputies sneak it in and then toss it where they know one of the other investigators’ll look. That way the guy who finds it can go on the stand later and say, ‘Yes, Your Honor, I swear on a big ol’ stack a Bibles that I ain’t never seen those drugs before.’ But it’s all bull.”

  I had never considered that possibility. “They really do that?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah. All the time. I had a buddy they did it to. He went to work one day and when he got back: Surprise, surprise, they had raided his place and found a bunch of drugs. Then they throw in some bags and scales and say you were planning to distribute. It’s what they do.”

  Is it what they had done to me? I couldn’t think of anyone with a badge who had it out for me.

  “Okay, so I guess that’s one possibility. But I was also wondering if it was possibly someone else.”

  “Like who?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m here. I was wondering . . . ,” I started, then paused. I didn’t know how to form my request, and my sleep-deprived brain wasn’t giving me much help. “You have a bunch of cameras around here, right?”

  “Some you can see, some you can’t,” he said proudly.

  “Is it possible one of them might capture some part of my driveway or my house?”

  He looked to his right, in the direction of my driveway. “Maybe. Why?”

  “What if someone else, not the Sheriff’s Office, planted those drugs in my place? And then they tipped off the Sheriff’s Office that I was dealing, knowing it would trigger a raid?”

  If there was one person who didn’t need much convincing there was a nefarious plot afoot, it was Bobby Ray.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I guess it could have been that. You want to have a look?”

  “That’d be great.”

  “Come on in,” he said, backing away from the door.

  I took a few tentative steps inside. All the shades were drawn. There were no lights on. The small kitchen table was covered with the detritus of a slovenly bachelor life—a pizza box, the remainder of a TV dinner, a pile of junk mail, crushed beer cans.

  “Sorry about the mess,” Bobby Ray said. “Maid’s off this week.”

  “No problem,” I said, though it only fed my unease.

  It was this dingy little trailer, her dress was ripped, and he had all those guns . . . What was she, too stupid to live?

  I followed Bobby Ray through a small sitting area into his bedroom, where the shades were drawn. I thought maybe I’d see a gun rack or a shotgun on a wall or some sign of his enthusiasm for weaponry, but there was nothing visible.

  He sat down heavily in front of his computer. My discomfort was only amplified when I saw his screensaver was a naked woman with a come-hither look on her face. In case t
he gentleman’s imagination needed more prodding, her legs were spread wide and she was squeezing her voluptuous breasts between her arms.

  She should have run out the moment she saw that porn. She was practically begging for it.

  “Sorry about that. That’s my girlfriend right there,” he joked, swiping at his mouse until the screen went away.

  “You might want to buy her some clothes,” I said, trying to be jocular about the whole thing.

  He had already moved on. “All right, so I set this up myself. It all gets saved to the hard drive and it stays there for two months before it gets wiped out. Any deputy who tries to plant something in here is gonna wind up on Candid Camera, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  Bobby Ray brought up a program that showed a split screen of six different camera views and continued his narration. “I got two inside, four outside and . . . Oh yeah, this one gets some of your driveway.”

  He centered the mouse over one of the camera views and clicked on it, enlarging it so it filled the entire screen. I was now looking at a real-time view of his side yard, which included my driveway in the top portion.

  “Yep,” he said. “Camera three. Hang on.”

  He clicked off the live feed and was soon opening a folder, where the archived footage must have been stored.

  Over the next twenty minutes, we rewound through Thursday, Wednesday, then Tuesday, the day of the Sheriff’s Office raid. Then we kept going backward.

  There was nothing suspicious the remainder of the day on Tuesday. It was just Ben leaving for school, and me leaving for work that morning. I felt a little hitch in my breathing as I saw my car. Those would have been among the last moments I got to be with Alex before dropping him off at Mrs. Ferncliff’s. Little did I know how much I should have savored that time.

  Bobby Ray scrolled further back. Monday night was uneventful. Ben returned from JMU, then I came home from Diamond Trucking—two creatures of habit, acting in their customary ways.

  Then, at 1:17 p.m. on Monday, there was something that flashed before my eyes, a quick blur that didn’t fit the pattern. It was a vehicle of some sort. But it wasn’t one we owned.