The Missing Place

by Sophie Littlefield

  “You mean, open them right now? Before we pay for them?”

  “Yeah, who’s going to care?” Shay yanked off the cardboard band, tossing it into the cart.

  Colleen put on the socks and boots. They were stiff, a little low on the instep, but otherwise fine. Already she could feel her feet warming up.

  “Might as well put the other one on and wear them out of the store,” Shay said. “Parking lot’s only going to have got worse.”

  Colleen hesitated only for a moment. She rolled her old socks and tucked them in her leather boots and put them in the box. Her pants broke awkwardly over the top of the new boots, so she tucked the cuffs into them. She was certain she looked absurd.

  With Shay’s help she picked a pair of heavily padded nylon gloves in a shade of deep pink, and a matching synthetic scarf and knit hat that were surprisingly soft. In the checkout line, Shay tossed in a couple of tabloid magazines, gum, and mints. Colleen maneuvered herself in front of the cart and, handing over her credit card, pushed away Shay’s fistful of bills. “It’s all my stuff,” she protested.

  “Not the magazines and the—” Her phone went off and Shay pulled it out of her pocket, stepping out of the line. “Hello? Yes. Thanks so much for . . . okay . . . no, but I can remember . . . yeah, that’s fine. And thanks, really.”

  “Ma’am?” The checker was trying to get Colleen’s attention. The belt was rolling, the customer in front of her pushing his cart toward the exit, and Colleen had failed to notice.

  “I’m sorry.” She piled her purchases on the belt, explaining about the boots and socks; the checker accepted the box and wrapper without comment.

  “Roland gave me an address,” Shay said. “Here, I’m texting you so I don’t forget. He said he’d be there at nine. So that gives us almost an hour. Let’s head next door.”

  “Next door where?” Colleen said, signing the credit card slip.

  “You didn’t see when we came in? Liquor department has a separate entrance.”

  Colleen hadn’t noticed, and she didn’t really want to brave another gauntlet of lonely, horny men with their appraising eyes. But maybe it wouldn’t be as bad in the liquor section: perhaps the men would feel chastened by the nature of their purchases, like kids caught reading comic books in Sunday school, and they’d keep their comments and gazes to themselves.

  The Walmart liquor department was easily as large as the Tip-Top Liquor store back home in Sudbury, but in place of the wood-crate and plastic grapevine décor at the Tip-Top, the hand-lettered “staff picks” cards with the Wine Spectator ratings, there were shelves stacked with enormous bottles of spirits and cases of beer. More beer in the refrigerators lining the wall; the wine was limited to a paltry selection of cheap California labels.

  Shay picked up a twelve-pack of Coors Light. “What about you?” she asked. “You want anything?”

  Colleen debated for a moment. “I’ll get a bottle of wine.”

  She made her way over to the refrigerator and scanned the bottles. The only labels she recognized were the cheap table wines, the Glen Ellen chardonnay and Beringer chenin blanc.

  “What a nice change of pace,” a man next to her said. “A woman with a little class. Don’t see enough of that around here.”

  Colleen was about to turn her back and leave without picking a bottle when she noticed that the man was nothing like the others she’d seen in the store: for one thing, he was freshly shaved, with a conservative haircut. For another, he was wearing a suit and a cashmere overcoat, the effect only mildly spoiled by lug-soled boots.

  “Sorry,” the man immediately amended. “Forgive me. You spend a few days here and you completely lose track of your manners. Jesus. I feel like a jerk. You just don’t look like . . . well, like Lawton material.”

  “It’s no problem,” Colleen murmured, and stepped politely aside to give him access to the case. She was about to head back to the front of the store when a thought occurred to her.

  The suit. Clearly not from here. Who wore suits in Lawton? Executives, that’s who. Oil company executives. And safety compliance inspectors. And lawyers.

  A riffle of revulsion mixed with fury kept her rooted to the spot. And then . . . an idea so bold and so unlike her that she threw herself into it before she could hesitate.

  She curved her lips into a smile and turned back toward the man. “Allen . . . right?”

  Confusion passed over his face. “No, I’m Scott. Scott Cohen, White Norris?”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry!” Colleen laughed as though embarrassed. “I thought—but no. I see it now. Not much resemblance at all. It’s been a long day. I’m Vicki. Vicki Wilson, Slocum Systems.”

  Immediately she regretted using her best friend’s name; she felt like she was dragging Vicki into something sordid. But it was the only thing that came to mind. Colleen really had worked for Slocum Systems once, during a college internship. She offered her hand; Scott had a nice handshake, firm but not crushing.

  “Nice to meet you. Even under questionable circumstances.” He smiled, circling a finger in the air to take in the Muzak, the heat blasting from ceiling vents, the depressing lighting and industrial shelving.

  “Oh, I know. I wouldn’t dream of coming here, but the hotel where I’m staying doesn’t carry anything decent.”

  Scott laughed. “What a coincidence. I’m at the Hyatt—best hotel in town, and the nicest thing on the shelves in their bar is a bottle of Cutty Sark. Stuck here another few days. And there’s only so much bad pinot a man can stand—you know?”

  Colleen smiled, reaching past him into the case and picking up the most expensive bottle she saw. Her mind raced, trying to think how to extend the conversation without seeming too obvious.

  “So, what brings you to Lawton?” Scott asked. Colleen glanced at his left hand—yes, wedding ring.

  “Oh, Black Creek Lodge is one of our accounts. Slocum’s in food services.”

  “We have some of our boys over there, I think. A couple of drilling crews. I’m from the head office, so I’m not real familiar with operations on the ground.”

  “Oh, then you heard about the boys who went missing.” Scott’s expression went instantly wary, and for a moment Colleen thought she’d pushed too far. “I have a son that age, is why it’s on my mind,” she added hastily. “He’s away at Cornell.”

  “Terrible thing, really.” Scott seemed to relax. “Boys that age, no sense at all, probably halfway to Vegas. So, Vicki . . . any chance I can talk you into sharing this nice bottle of”—he reached for the same shelf that Colleen got her own bottle from—“Navarro pinot grigio with me? The Hyatt’s got a nice lounge. Nicer than any of the other hotels around here, anyway.”

  Colleen felt her smile tighten on her face. No one had tried to pick her up, explicitly or otherwise, in over a decade. Maybe closer to two. But there was something about the vibe in this town, a desperation and carelessness fueled by the terrible weather. Scott didn’t even look abashed.

  But Colleen felt her heart constrict. What was she doing? What was happening to her? She hadn’t spoken to her husband for more than a few tense moments in days; her son had been missing for over a week. And not to put too fine a point on it, but she hadn’t had sex in nearly a month, and the time before that had been only because she’d had too much to drink at a holiday party. Not that she had any interest in an affair or even flirting with a stranger. Although that was what was called for, wasn’t it? She’d come this far, and she’d promised herself she would do anything for Paul; wasn’t this just the next step? Drink with this stranger, keep her ruse going, tease out whatever details she could—and end the evening early. It wasn’t a crime. He couldn’t accuse her of being a tease; even a mild flirtation had to beat another night of pay-per-view and room service.

  “I’m so sorry; I’ve been up since four a.m. East Coast time,” she found herself saying. “And I’ve got early meetings tomorrow.”

  “On a Sunday?”

  Shit. Shit. Colleen h
ad completely lost track of what day of the week it was. She tried to smile. “With my team. Some of them came in from the West Coast, and we’ve only got tomorrow before we go see a new account.”

  “Yeah? Which one is that?”

  “It’s—well . . . I’m afraid I can’t say. It’s all very preliminary right now.”

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked,” Scott said. “We’re under pretty tight confidentiality restrictions ourselves. But hey, there’s lots of development going on; I’m sure it’s boom times for your business. So tell me, how long are you here for?”

  “The rest of the week. We’ve got . . . a couple of pitches.”

  “Well, listen, then.” Scott tucked the bottle under his arm and reached inside his coat, taking out a leather card case. He extracted a card and held it out to her. “My info’s on there. Email, and that number’ll forward to my cell. Why don’t you give me a call if you get an evening free? No sense both of us dying of boredom up here, is there?”

  His smile was just crooked and self-conscious enough to lend him a sort of charm, and Colleen slipped the card into her purse and thanked him. “I’ll do my best. I have to see how the presentation goes.”

  “Tell you what—for now, let me buy you a drink anyway.” He took the bottle from Colleen’s hands and walked to the register. The cashier looked at them with faint interest while she rang him up.

  “Two bags,” he said, and she put the bottles into separate brown bags, twisting the paper over the tops, and then slipped them into the ubiquitous plastic Walmart bags.

  “Here you go, then,” Scott said, holding the bag out as though it was a box of long-stemmed roses. “Can I walk you to your car?”

  Colleen searched for Shay, but she had disappeared. The only people on either side of the glass doors were men dressed in work clothes.

  “Oh, thanks but I . . . have to pick up a couple things in the other side,” Colleen said.

  “All right, then. Uh, I’ll be looking forward to hearing from you. Have a good presentation.”

  “Thanks for the wine.” Colleen headed out into the cold and walked toward the other set of doors without looking back. Inside, she ducked to the right, to the darkened Subway counter, where she was hidden from view. She waited, her heartbeat slowly settling down.

  Her phone rang. Shay.

  “Hello?”

  “What are you up to, girl?”

  “I’ll explain. Uh . . . can you pick me up by the main entrance?”

  “Yeah, I just watched you walk back in there. After I watched you with that guy long enough to figure out you didn’t need me horning in. Give me two minutes.”

  twelve

  “WHITE NORRIS,” SHAY said thoughtfully. “How many rigs do they run in Ramsey County?”

  “I didn’t ask,” Colleen said, sounding exasperated. “Maybe you could’ve gotten him to just turn over his industry secrets on the spot, but I’m not used to talking to strange men in liquor stores.”

  Shay resisted rolling her eyes, and after a moment Colleen apologized. “I’m sorry. I’m just a little tense, and . . . well, thanks for coming to pick me up.”

  “It’s no problem.”

  Shay concentrated on her driving. It had started snowing hard while they were in the Walmart; now the flakes made a blur in the taillights of the truck in front of her.

  The directions Roland texted her led to a duplex on a street not much different from Brenda’s, visibly run-down even under the cover of snow. There were already three vehicles in the driveway, so they parked on the street. As they stepped into a plowed pile of snow on the sidewalk, Shay guessed Colleen was glad to be wearing her new boots.

  They trudged up the steps. The door on the right side of the duplex opened before they had a chance to knock. Roland was waiting, dressed in a Steelers jersey and a pair of sweats.

  “Come on in, don’t let the cold in,” he said, ushering the women inside, where they stamped snow onto the towel-covered mat in front of the door. They added their boots to a pile that filled a huge Rubbermaid tote next to the doormat. The house smelled of microwave popcorn. As they were shucking off their coats, a woman with oversize glasses and a ponytail sprouting from the top of her head came into the room with a tray of mugs.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m Nora. My daughter’s asleep in the back of the house, so I hope you don’t mind talking in the front room. I made y’all some coffee.”

  “Thank you,” Shay said.

  “I’m really sorry to show up like this,” Colleen said. “You and Roland—we appreciate it so much.”

  “No, listen. If something happened to my daughter . . . I don’t know what I’d do. Okay. Y’all need anything, just holler. I’m going to go work on papers in the den.” Roland took the tray from her, and she put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed. A look passed between them.

  “She teaches at the high school,” Roland said gruffly. “She’s got to grade papers. Here, go ahead and sit.”

  He set the tray on a worn oak coffee table, and the women sat down on the couch. He pulled an armchair closer to the table.

  “You know anything about the Fort Mercer reservation?” he asked without preamble.

  “You mean the Indian reservation?” Shay asked.

  “Yeah. Upward of five hundred thousand acres an hour east of here, mostly Oyate. Got a casino, a couple of one-stop-sign towns, and a lot of unhappy folks living in trailers. Oh, and a fair amount of oil just sitting there under their alfalfa fields and grazing land.”

  “Why aren’t they selling it?”

  “Well, that’s the big question, right? Turns out that through a series of incredible screwups, some of them their own fault, they’ve managed to sell the rights at a fraction of what they’re worth. Like in some cases, less than one-one-hundredth of their value when you figure in the bonus and royalties.”

  “How does that even happen?” Shay asked.

  “Well, the tribal council is supposed to negotiate on behalf of its members and distribute the profits from the tribal leases. But that ain’t been happening, and things are getting out of control.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” Colleen said. “What are the tribal leases? And bonuses and royalties?”

  “The mineral rights? You know how that works, right?”

  “No, I . . .” Colleen reddened.

  Shay tried to curb her impatience. After all, most of what she knew about this stuff came from Taylor; it didn’t sound like Paul had told his parents the first thing about the job. Still, she was surprised Colleen hadn’t been curious enough to learn on her own. North Dakota oil was showing up in the national news more and more often, and a single Google search brought up thousands of results.

  But maybe Colleen had tried to ignore it, hoping that would make it all go away. Maybe she figured that if she refused to acknowledge the oil boom that had lured Paul far from home, from the tidy little life she and her husband had planned for him, he’d eventually give up and come home.

  But it hadn’t exactly worked out that way, had it?

  “Okay, well, just because you own surface rights to a piece of land, you don’t necessarily own the mineral rights,” Roland explained. “Like if you own your house, right, you’re in charge of your yard and the water and electric lines that come into it and all. But you don’t necessarily own what’s beneath it, including the oil. People who own land out here, they lease out the mineral rights so companies can come in and drill, and they can make a lot of money that way. The big companies almost never own the land, just the rights, and then they pay royalties back to whoever holds the lease and a bonus when the well goes into production. A well might have an active life of twenty, twenty-five years, so it adds up. And since most people don’t have the ten million dollars it takes to drill their own well, they have to go that route and let the companies do it.

  “But what happened on the reservation got all fucked-up—excuse me. The tribe still holds the rights on a lot of the land out
there, and they’ve got a tribal council that’s supposed to negotiate for the best interests of all the members, and then the profits go back to the people. But so far no one’s seen a dime. The council leased the land a few years back to a number of individual speculators at incredibly unfavorable terms, and then it turned out they were all acting on behalf of Hunter-Cole, which turned around and bought the leases from them, and now Hunter-Cole holds the leases for like a quarter of the drillable land up there. There’s a guy on the council who made a shitload of money on the deal, and if you ask me, that’s the real crime in all this, since he was the one that green-lighted the deals in the first place. Hunter-Cole bought and paid for him. But tribal lands are still held in trust by the US government, so the thinking goes that the government should have stepped in to stop this all from going down. Save them from themselves, so to speak. And now they’ve got three or four lawsuits challenging the leases.”

  “But I still don’t understand how this could affect our boys. Or anyone working on Hunter-Cole rigs. I mean, none of them had anything to do with these deals.”

  “Yeah, but get this . . . these leases? They were nearly all for three years, which is the standard term. And they’re going to start expiring soon. The way it works is that as soon as a well starts producing, the company has the right to work it as long as they’re still bringing oil up and paying the royalties. But if Hunter-Cole hasn’t put wells into production, the tribe has the right to let the lease expire and resell it.”

  “Shit,” Shay said, as it all suddenly came together. “And let me guess what could get in the way of Hunter-Cole drilling.”

  “Safety violations?” Colleen guessed, her face going pale.

  “OSHA investigations?” Shay said. “Rig fires in the news, footage of bad accidents?”

  “OSHA . . . hah,” Roland said bitterly. “Most people don’t know this, but OSHA can only level fines. They can’t actually shut down a rig. Hell, there was a Nabors rig out here, they had three guys die over eleven months, and the thing’s still running.”

  “So it has to be . . . individual lawsuits?” Shay guessed.