Sometimes Faye tells herself that this is why Hal needs her, why he comes to her to talk, to troubleshoot, to gripe. Faye understands that he needs someone who will listen to him without bringing up his children. And she is that person. She’d supported his decision to run for sheriff; he’d encouraged her to buy the shop from her boss. They’d been friends; they’d observed the rules they’d made up on that long car ride home the morning after. They’d done a damn good job at denying themselves, if you asked her. And no one was ever the wiser.
But now, with Annie missing, she feels exposed, a beam shining on a lifetime of loving another woman’s husband, of the lies she’s told, all her sins catching up with her in one furious moment. She sees the way Travis Dove looks at her, as if he has special insight into the blackness of her heart. She fights the urge to confess it all to the boy pastor, even though he is not a priest, and she’s never been inside a Catholic church. She’s heard that confession is good for the soul. But the one person she truly should confess to has gone missing.
She’s spent so much time telling this one story—the one about her being a saint who sacrificed everything to step in and rescue poor orphaned Annie—that she’s started to believe it herself. She has believed it so much she’s let Annie believe it, too. She’s let Annie believe that Faye saved her, when it was the other way around. She wants the chance to tell Annie that, to tell the truth. She wants one more chance to set things right, but she fears now she will not get it. She begins to cry, at first a sniffle that quickly builds into a sob. Hal pulls her close, so close that they are aligned cheek to cheek, chest to chest, limb to limb. For once, there is nothing between them.
His ringing phone awakens them both. Faye sits up with a jolt, fearing an angry Brenda is on the other end. His wife never says an accusing word about their relationship, never even hints at the possibility of his unfaithfulness. She trusts him implicitly, which makes Faye feel awful inside, especially when the woman is standing right in front of her face. Brenda York, former beauty queen, used to intimidate Faye. Respected and well liked around town, her reputation preceded her. At first, Faye couldn’t imagine what Hal saw in her when Brenda had it all. But over time Faye realized that, while Brenda was sweet as pie, she wasn’t very exciting. And Hal needed some excitement.
She listens to the conversation from Hal’s end, determines it is not his wife looking for him but something about the case. Something serious. He ends the call and looks at her, his brow furrowed, and she knows that it’s about Annie.
Please don’t say she’s dead, she thinks, even though just a few hours ago, she’d practiced saying it out loud to him.
“What?” she asks, and she can hear the panic in her voice. The shop is dark, but she can make out the familiar shapes: the row of hair dryers; the sinks where women rest slender necks on cold, hard porcelain; the three mirrors and chairs where she and two other stylists stand just about all day long. This is the place where beauty happens, she thinks. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?
“There’s trouble over at Cordell’s,” he says. “A group of men showed up there, looking for Annie. They’re convinced he’s got her. His sister called the police because they won’t leave. They’re mostly just drunks and probably harmless, but I better get over there.” He looks at Faye, making sure she understands what he’s saying. She nods, the last vestiges of sleep vanishing with her understanding.
“You don’t think he really does, do you?” she asks. It’s a hopeful statement, but her voice comes out weak and uncertain. She clears her throat.
Hal shakes his head, his mouth a grim line. “Of course not. We did question him. He’s got the best alibi around—his lawyer was with him during the time she went missing. And his sister, too.” He pauses. “I wish he did.” He presses his mouth to her cheek without any emotion behind it. He is already out the door in his mind, racing toward the unfolding scene at Cordell Lewis’s house. She understands this about him. She would’ve made a good cop’s wife. Too bad Brenda York held prior claim.
“Also,” he continues, “the Spacey kid?” He lifts his eyebrows to make sure she’s tracking with him.
She nods.
“I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but they’ve checked the cell towers. It looks like Annie was at or near his residence the night she went missing. That’s why they took him in tonight at the vigil.” He pauses. “I figured you were dying to ask.”
“And I figured you’d tell me when you could.”
Faye feels her heart rate pick up speed thinking of Annie’s lie about spending the night at Tracy’s. Faye has racked her brain to recall Kenny Spacey. All she can come up with is a fuzzy memory of a fifteen-year-old boy skulking around, his eyes only on Annie. Tall and thin, an inch of pale skin poking out of pants he’d outgrown. She recalls thinking the boy resembled a praying mantis with his large eyes set in his small face.
“You know that boy’s in love with you, don’t you?” she’d asked Annie.
“Oh, Aunt Faye,” Annie would always respond, then wave her hand in the air like Kenny wasn’t worth talking about.
“He gives me the creeps,” Faye’d said. But she’d said it only once. Maybe she should’ve said it more.
Hal starts to get up and winces. They fell asleep tangled up in this stupid chair. They’re too old to be doing such things. They are not the younger versions of themselves. Never has she been more aware of that than in the midst of all this. She fears that in the years to come, they will not so much outgrow each other, or grow apart, but that they will just grow old, with less energy to pursue a friendship that can never be anything more. Just keeping up with regular, everyday life is hard enough.
And yet, she cannot imagine her life without him in it. She has wrestled with their unconventional arrangement long enough to come to terms with it. She loves him and knows he loves her, too. He loves her in ways he cannot love his wife, though she knows he loves his wife as well. She wishes she were his wife, that it could be that simple. But it has never been simple with them, from the moment she walked into that station and found him there holding her niece. Back then, Annie had been the one unwilling to let him go, and now it’s her.
She, too, makes that first move to stand and pays for it. She moans as she reaches for her clothing. They do not watch each other put on their clothes, an unspoken agreement not to witness each other changing back into who they were before he walked her inside the salon. She has grown so adept at treating him just like anyone else, at cramming all her feelings into bite-size bits of time. This, she thinks, is no way to live. But she doesn’t have time to think about that now.
Hal looks at the chair for a moment, an amused expression on his face.
She rolls her eyes. “Don’t go getting all impressed with yourself. This doesn’t change a thing,” she says to him, even though of course it is a lie. After decades of erecting boundaries, one night has torn them down.
“I was just thinking how glad I am that you’ve got this chair in here. It came in handy tonight.”
She blushes and gives him a demure look.
“What?” he goads, a playful grin giving away how pleased he is with himself.
She shrugs. “It’s possible I’ve thought of it before. That the chair would be good for, well, you know, if the situation ever . . . presented itself.”
He raises his eyebrows as his grin grows wider. “You did, huh?”
She cocks her head and gives him the smallest of smiles, all she will allow herself under the circumstances. “Maybe,” she says.
“I promise I won’t let it go to my head,” he says.
“Liar,” she retorts.
And then, just as soon as the moment comes, it’s gone. They remember who they are, where they are, and what’s happening. In unison, they silently sink back down into the chair and lean into each other, their breathing synchronizing as they collect themselves. It happened, but it is not all that happened. It’s not even close to the most impo
rtant thing.
She is the one to turn the conversation back around. “You’d better get a move on.”
Hal leans forward and nods. He has a bald spot on the back of his head, the tiniest spot—barely noticeable unless you really look. She has seen it spread to the size of a half dollar in the time she has known him, a slow, gradual loss that he seems unaware of. She wonders if the hole will grow any larger, if she will be around to see it, or if one day she will run into him in the grocery store. He will be picking up extra buns for hamburgers; she will be buying a microwave meal for one. They will chat, keeping everything light and on the surface in case people are watching, like they’ve grown adept at doing. Then he will walk away, and she will turn to get one last look. She will notice it then. She will see that the spot has grown as big as a man’s clenched fist.
He kisses the top of her head, already lost to her, already mentally in his car and headed toward the situation at hand. She doesn’t mind this. She has grown used to it. He rises, and she hears vertebrae crack in protest as he does.
“I’ll call you later,” he says.
She nods, but before he can walk away, she grabs his hand to stop him. He turns, surprise on his face. She does not usually stop him from leaving. This, too, has been their unspoken agreement: they are free to go at any time, free to live their other lives. Though, it occurs to her, she doesn’t have as much of an “other life” as he does. He has his wife and his daughters, one of whom just had her first child. He is a grandfather now. (He shows her pictures of the little boy almost every time she sees him; she pretends to be interested.)
Faye, on the other hand, has a life that seems to dwindle a little more each year. Her family shrinks instead of grows. She does not have a significant other, a life partner, or whatever it is they’re calling it these days. She has no one to love but Hal. And this doesn’t seem right. Her life, in this assessment, falls far short of how she’d like to describe it. She can feel something shift in the air, something that feels dark and threatening. She does not think he can feel it, though, and she doesn’t tell him.
All she says is, “Don’t give up on her.” She doesn’t bother to hide the desperation in her voice. She cannot hide things from him anyway. He knows her too well. He doesn’t answer her; he only walks away, and she watches him go. In the dark room, she cannot see the bald spot on the back of his head, but she knows it is there.
Kenny
A cop comes into the interview room and awakens him from a fitful sleep, his head resting on his folded arms on the table, like he used to do in school. He is dreaming of Annie walking with him by the river, her hand resting in the crook of his elbow, her head on his shoulder. He wakes in a panic and, disoriented, looks to his left, at the spot where his girlfriend would be sleeping if he were at home in his bed. But of course he’s not, and even if he were, his girlfriend wouldn’t be there. He really should train himself to sleep right smack in the middle of the bed, he thinks as the cop takes a seat in front of him and pushes a Coke in his direction. Maybe he will grow accustomed to her absence faster that way. His mind will come to terms with the fact that she’s gone.
She’d sent him a text after she took her bag and left, saying that she’s still deciding what to do, that she needs more time. But he knows this is a kindness. She is letting him down gently. She will keep needing more time and more time, until eventually they both just give up. She will move on, but he isn’t sure he will. She is the first girl other than Annie who he has truly cared about. She made him believe there could be life after Annie. He’d grown hopeful during his time with her, optimistic, which is not his nature. What is it they say about being a fool for love? Yes, love has made him foolish. More than once.
There is no life after Annie. He has known this all along, he supposes. He has known it from that first conversation he ever had with her, back in middle school, when the pretty girl stood up for the weird boy, and a friendship was formed. He was lost to her in that moment, terminally lost, in a way that ruined him. But he doesn’t want to think about that now. It is all too sad to think about. Now he has to say whatever is necessary to get the hell out of here.
The cop cracks open his own can of Coke, the noise loud in the tiny enclosed room. Kenny forces himself to take a nice, controlled sip of the can in front of him, willing himself to stay calm, to appear calm. But he hates cops. He has ever since he was in tenth grade and got framed for shoplifting by some guys who pretended to be his friends, invited him to the mall in Greenville, then made it look like he’d stolen things when it was them who did it. “Hey, hold this bag,” they’d said, and, gullibly, he’d taken the bag from their hands so that when the cops arrived, it was him holding the stolen goods, not them.
The cops had believed those guys, of course, because they’d come from good homes; they’d had rich fathers. What did they need to steal for? Kenny’s own father was gone, his mom was poor, and he was stupid enough to think that they’d liked him, that he’d finally had some real friends. The next day at school, they’d started calling him a thief, and they would’ve kept on calling him that for the rest of high school had Annie not intervened. Annie was always saving his ass. But Annie isn’t here now.
Another cop comes in and sits beside the guy who handed him the Coke. This one wastes no time in getting to the point. “Mr. Spacey, we’ve got a few questions for you.” His mute partner just sits beside him, the silent, supportive type.
He squints at the two of them, Tweedledee and Tweedledum. “Are you arresting me for something?” he asks.
The chatty one answers with a smirk. “Should we be arresting you for something?”
“No,” he responds. “But you’ve kept me in here for hours, and I haven’t gotten my phone call,” he says. He looks at his watch. It is the middle of the night. He’d been hustled out of the church service hours earlier. “And I can’t very well rouse my attorney at this hour.” He is bluffing. He doesn’t have an attorney, doesn’t even have the faintest idea who to call. He should’ve called and set something up, just for safety’s sake, after the first time the cops came by. He is kicking himself now that he didn’t. He keeps up with his bluff. “I won’t answer any questions without my attorney present.”
He knows how this works: if you refuse to answer questions, you look guilty. If you hire an attorney, you look guilty. Yet people who voluntarily and freely talk to police often regret it later. The officer, momentarily beaten, stands. “Then we’ll let you work on getting in touch with your attorney. Once he gets here—”
“Or she,” Kenny interjects, just to be an ass.
The guy rolls his eyes, amends himself. “Once he or she gets here, the four of us will sit down and have ourselves a nice little chat.” Kenny has never heard the word chat sound so menacing.
The cops leave the room—they are in plain clothes, so he thinks they must be detectives. As the door closes behind them, Kenny fears asking for an attorney, instead of freely answering questions, has just made him look guiltier. But he can guess what they’ve found, what they will ask him about. And he knows that his answers will not satisfy them. He knows that once they start asking questions, he will likely not leave this station, unless it is to be transported to the courthouse or prison. He has lived in this town long enough to know the way things work. When people see him, they automatically smell smoke. It stings their noses, fills their heads. What these cops have discovered is enough to give off the spark they’ve been waiting for since the day he arrived in this town.
Faye
She arrives home to find Travis sitting motionless on her couch, clutching his phone as he stares straight ahead. There is no sign of Clary or Tracy or Scott. She doesn’t want to ask Travis about Clary. And she got a message from Tracy saying she and Scott were going to a bar for a much-needed drink after the police made him open Annie’s car. But if they’d just had one drink, they would be back by now. Lord knows what those two are up to. Faye is not comfortable with it, especially if it’s going
on in her house. But what right does she have to say anything after what she and Hal just did? She should ask Travis where that reference is in the Bible about people without sin casting the first stone. She would bet he knows right where it is, chapter and verse.
But this is what she knows—tragedy brings out the best and the worst in people. The state of suspended reality that comes with a time of tragedy can make people believe that nothing they do right now counts. There is a freedom that comes with that feeling, a pass to do anything you want, damn the consequences. So she will keep her mouth shut about Tracy and Scott, if for no other reason than she hates hypocrites and doesn’t intend to start being one tonight.
Travis, blessedly, doesn’t ask where she’s been or what she’s been doing out at this hour. He simply nods and looks back at the phone in his hand. She doesn’t understand why he is here, why he doesn’t just go to his hotel or even home. She wonders how long he intends to stay, why he’s staying at all.
He isn’t their pastor; he owes them nothing. He came up here to officiate a wedding, and the wedding is off. He should go back to his megachurch, his loving wife, his adoring fans. And yet he’s sitting in the dark in the wee hours of the morning on her couch, looking pensive and lost. It is the lost look that gives her pause, that keeps her from just heading to her room and her bed like she wants. “You okay?” she asks him.
He looks up from his phone, startled. He blinks a few times. “Wh-what?”
“You look upset. I mean, well, of course you’re upset—we all are. I just wanted to make sure there wasn’t something I could do to . . . help.” She doesn’t know what she is saying. She is too tired to make much sense. She regrets opening her mouth at all.
Travis presses his lips together in an almost smile and cocks his head. “You’re asking me if there’s something you can do for me. When I should be asking you that,” he says. She watches as he slips into his pastor persona like someone else would slip on a pair of sunglasses. She wishes she could stop him, tell him he doesn’t have to do that for her, remind him that she knew him long before he became the person he is now. But she doesn’t.
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