As I tail the Sequoia, I imagine starting a new life out here. Renting a walk-up apartment, sitting by the window at night and listening to the groan of long-haul trucks on the freeway. Out here, where nobody knows my dad or my brothers, I could be whoever I want.
Then again, Nina knows my family, and she doesn’t seem to mind me.
The road dead-ends in a gravel lot with picnic tables and hiking trails zigzagging toward stubby hills on the horizon. There are four other cars, so I figure it’s safe to park and watch Shadwell leave his SUV.
He’s acquired a huge backpack, like he’s setting off on a day trip. But instead of taking a trail, he sits down at a picnic table, props the pack against it, and stays put.
Through my binoculars, I watch him slip a map from the pack and spread it out. More thrills.
Two cars arrive. One leaves. A group of college-age girls stake out the table beside Shadwell’s, and he goes over to chat with them, pointing at his map. The girls flip their hair, consult the map, laugh, leave. One looks like she might be inviting Shadwell to follow, but he shakes his head.
More newcomers: it’s a hiking hot spot. My target continues to study his map as kids with daypacks mill around him, their moms corralling them back to the group.
I return to my living-in-the-desert fantasy. Even if I can’t afford UNM, I could probably get places on crews, working my way up from PA to boom operator to best boy. The student filmmakers made me work my ass off, but when they saw I was willing and able, they forgot I was a kid and invited me out for tacos and pitchers of watery margaritas.
I train my binocs on Shadwell again. The composite family group is gone, the kids straggling down the trail, and he’s up. Map in hand, he approaches two newcomers: middle-aged women with fanny packs. The women both talk at once, showing him stuff on the map. He socializes for almost five minutes, then returns to his post.
The next arrivals are a hand-holding couple. Shadwell ignores them. A family with three screaming toddlers. Them, too. But when a lone blond woman wobbles her mountain bike over to the table, he pulls out the map again and makes his standard approach.
Twenty minutes later, the mountain biker waves good-bye. I hold my breath, waiting for Shadwell to follow her down the trail. But he’s glued to that table. I check my watch—we’ve been here nearly two hours.
As two and a half more pass, the pattern repeats itself with uncanny accuracy. Whenever a woman or a group of women comes to the trailhead, Shadwell waltzes up with his map and plays Confused Urban Hiker. Smiling and laughing—Mr. Smooth. When they leave, he waves bye-bye and sits down to wait for the next comers. Any group with guys or children in it, he ignores.
What is he, a serial flirter? Or does he just really, really like the view from that picnic table?
A few groups of female hikers act especially friendly. Once Shadwell follows two laughing girls down the trail, and I slip out of the van and glide across the parking lot, keeping him in sight—only to scramble for cover when he turns and heads back to that same damn spot again.
I’ve seen cats stare at mouse holes for hours. But when the mouse pokes its head out, the mouser generally does something.
Not this guy. When he finally folds up his precious map and rambles back to his Sequoia, I wonder if this is how voyeurs operate, getting a thrill just from being close to their targets.
Maybe these women aren’t his targets at all. Anything seems possible. All I know is he has a lot of time on his hands.
And now he’s spending it driving back the way he came. On the edge of the suburbs, he turns off into a dingy strip mall and parks in front of a Big Lots. So it’s a shopping trip after all?
Or not. Because when Shadwell hauls himself out of the Sequoia, he’s still harnessed into the megabackpack.
That seems odd.
I park at the other end of the lot and track him with my binocs as he trudges around the corner of the store. Then I dart across the lot to the building, flatten my back against the wall, and follow.
Beyond the loading dock and a ragged line of trees, the asphalt gives way to another wasteland of grass and sagebrush. There’s nothing to block my view of Shadwell hiking his way across the scrub toward—what?
If I follow him out there, he’ll spot me. But two of the low, bristly pine trees have limbs close to the ground.
I cross the loading dock and swing myself onto a bough, getting a faceful of chubby needles for my trouble. The bark is scaly, and the branches feel dangerously delicate, but I grit my teeth, brace my feet against the trunk, and manage to reach a decent sitting-fork about fifteen feet up.
There he is—his dark green T-shirt semi-camouflaging him as he strides rapidly among the sagebrush, heading for a cluster of piñon pines like the one where I perch. If he looks back now, he’ll see me, but he doesn’t look back.
Through the binoculars, I trace his route as a faint trail against the surrounding scrubland. Maybe those rec trails pass along the back of the strip mall.
Which means some of those girls from the picnic area could show up here. My nails bite my palm.
Shadwell disappears into the pines. I creep higher, giving myself a longer view, and wait for him to emerge.
What’s he doing in there—lying in wait with his map? Picnicking?
But no: through the binocs, I spot movement among the spindly pines. A flash of silver rises, falls, rises, and there’s a shudder in the air—the distant thud of steel on stone? Or my imagination? Wind catches the pine needles, tossing blinding sun into my eyes, and I feel dizzy and grab the trunk harder between my thighs.
Still the rhythmic movement out there. Digging.
If he turns around and comes back, I’ll be ready to slide down the tree, sprint across the loading dock, hide in the van. But this time I won’t follow him.
I’ll go out there and see for myself what he’s buried between the pines.
Vertigo tugs at my knees and throat as I gaze over the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Below me stretch buttes and temples and spires, banded like the Kremlin in wine red, iris purple, velvet black. Coming from a landscape with only gullies and gorges, I’ve never seen the earth drop clean away before.
In the past few days, everything I thought I knew has dropped away, too. I should be grateful for the fresh landscape, but instead my head just keeps spinning.
I lay awake last night wondering how I could nudge Becca toward the subject of why she didn’t tell me I had a brother. She won’t say much about Dylan that isn’t a love fest, I know now, but how she says it matters. If she won’t meet my eye, I’ll know something’s wrong.
I just have to get up the courage to broach the subject.
“Why didn’t you tell me about Dylan?” I blurt out, forcing my gaze away from the view.
Becca looks confused, with reason—she’s already apologized for “accidentally misleading” me in her e-mails. “I thought I did mention him, hon, but I didn’t say he lived in Albuquerque. I know now I should have.”
I try to smile and look her straight in the eye, pinning her down, but it’s harder than I thought. “You said you had three kids. You made it sound like none of them would remember me.”
The abyss at my feet keeps tugging my gaze. If solid ground is down at the bottom of the canyon, where’ve I been standing my whole life? Maybe I’ve been living on a high, protected plateau like the people in Sky City, only I didn’t know it.
I thought if I could catch the Thief, stop him, I wouldn’t have to be him. But it’s not that simple.
The rim feels safer. I’m glad we don’t have time to hike to the bottom.
“Dylan was pretty young,” Becca says. She doesn’t add when I gave you away—doesn’t need to. “Memories are weird at that age.”
“You sent him my photo,” I point out. “He recognized me from it. You never sent me a picture of him. And he says he remembers a lot.”
What I really want to ask is “What do you remember about Dylan’s childhood, Becca? Do you
feel like you really know your son?”
Becca wouldn’t protect a monster because he’s family—I can already tell that about her. But if there’s something even slightly off about her son, she knows.
I should be scanning her face for signs of denial or dishonesty, but I can’t even look at her. Maybe I don’t want to know anymore if something’s wrong with Dylan. My own darkness is hard enough to face.
A heavy hand cups my shoulder—a mom’s hand with experience in soothing freak-outs. “I’m sorry,” Becca says.
This is her consistent MO. No excuses or drawn-out explanations, just sorry. How can I fight that?
Maybe she should be sorry, because she set me up for the sick terror of that moment in Home Depot when he spoke my name and everything started to unravel. But the terror itself came from inside me. From dreams and obsessions and memories that won’t settle into consistent shapes.
Becca goes on talking while I stare into the chasm, tracing the distant flashes of the Colorado River. I force myself not to blink so my tears will dry where they are, unseen.
“I didn’t want to overload you. The people at the agency, they say to take it slow with the information. You didn’t even answer my letter at first. And Dylan—well, he has this idea that you’re very important to him. I worried he wouldn’t be able to give you space.”
“He is…a little intense.” I gaze at the darkness beneath our feet.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t give him a chance. I’m so glad you did.”
Not even a tremor in her voice. If she thought Dylan might ever hurt me, she wouldn’t be able to hide it. Not Becca, who expresses everything, and who knows how it feels when someone you love reveals an unexpected dark side.
She believes in him. Really believes.
“Becca,” I say. “How did it happen? With my father? Did you know before the police did?”
Her arm leaves my shoulder and encircles my waist. “No, honey. It was Denise, your aunt, who called the cops. She told them what she’d seen, and then Steve confessed. He was a disturbed man, not a bad one. He thought he was protecting his sister.”
Disturbed. A few chemicals out of whack in the brain, and—
My head and hands quiver like I’m grounding an electric current, and Becca lets her arm fall and steps away. Maybe she thinks she overstepped her boundaries.
“If you’d been the one to see the murder, would you have gone to the cops?” I ask before I can stop myself. “Or would you have protected Steve?”
Maybe she won’t respond. Who asks that kind of question?
But my birth mother says in a lost voice, like she’s floated to the bottom of the canyon and is calling back up to me, “I would have wanted to protect your dad. But…a mom thinks of her kids first. And I don’t trust a man who’s been violent once, Nina.”
She would have turned him in. “Thank you,” I want to say. “I’m sorry I ever doubted you.”
Instead, I just clasp her hand.
I take pics of everything.
The hiking trail winding behind Big Lots where I retrace Shadwell’s steps after his Sequoia peels out of the lot. The grove of piñon pines from the inside, white light teasing the fuzzy boughs. The two boulders and the small, almost random-looking cairn of rocks between them.
I’m grateful to the student who thought to stow a spade with the other gear in the van. It’s dinky, barely longer than my arm, but the hole isn’t deep. Maybe six inches down, I uncover the bright blue lid of a five-gallon plastic bucket.
Even before I open it, I remember Nina saying the Thief made caches, burying his “supplies” in the middle of nowhere so he’d have them when he needed them.
I snap a pic of the contents once I have the lid off. And later, once I’ve unearthed the bucket and lugged it back to the motel room, I slip on cheap rubber gloves, lay out each object on the desk, and frame and shoot them one by one.
A fancy rifle scope. Rounds for a .22LR. A suppressor, homemade by the look of it. A flashlight. Duct tape. Zip ties.
Everything you’d need for a murder.
No point in going to the cops. Maybe there are prints here—I didn’t see Shadwell put on gloves. But unless somebody went missing within five miles of those hiking trails, the authorities wouldn’t do much besides question Shadwell and keep him on the radar. If they believed me.
For now, all I have are shreds of suspicious behavior and buried tools. And, of course, secondhand “psychic visions.”
Maybe he’s one of those people who do weekend geocaching or live-action role-playing. But there’s nothing pretend about the bullets.
I almost hit Nina’s number, then stop myself. She doesn’t need to know any of this while she’s safe at her birth mom’s place, well away from her brother, and I’ve got an eye on him.
I’ll tell her when she comes back, but I’m already dreading it. I can see the anger and suspicion on her face as I confess I’ve been following her brother.
The only way to get through that conversation without making her wince and hate me is to gather as much evidence as I can. Enough to convict or exonerate him.
So I return to Piedmont Drive, which is starting to feel like my second home. I do some surveillance from the foreclosure, then sit in the van guzzling a sugary gas-station latte, watching Shadwell’s house as the sky darkens and stars appear.
They grilled on the deck today. Shadwell chased the kid around the patio while she shrieked in that borderline hysterical, happy way kids have. Hot Girlfriend started laughing, too, and chased them both indoors.
TV glow bounces on the living room windows for an hour or so, then disappears. If it weren’t for that bucket, I’d be almost convinced he’s as normal as they come.
I’m about to doze off when a car door slams in the darkness.
I know that engine—the Sequoia. Shit. I need night vision goggles. He must’ve slipped out without making a sound.
I wait for him to reach the cross street before I start the van, my heart machine-gunning my ribs. Maybe he’s going out in the desert where I saw him after Sky City, to the cabin and supposed dump site. Maybe he’s going back to Big Lots to retrieve his cache. What will he do when he doesn’t find it?
Whatever he does, I’ll be careful. So careful. She can count on me for that, at least.
I lie in a frilly guest bed in Becca’s house, listening to the drone of central AC and the faint singing of the wind chimes outside. The birds make no sound, their cages covered.
I knew Becca wanted me to leave the B-and-B and stay with her. The wish was in her eyes, unspoken, so I offered.
I text Kirby, and we go back and forth for ten minutes about the new guy she might be seeing, who is older!!!! Like, almost legal drinking age!
I try to imagine this older guy, but the only face I see is Warren’s. HS boys aren’t so bad, I write. Srsly.
I get a handful of kissy-heart emojis for my trouble. Look at you! You are soooo falling for him. Adorable.
I send a blushing-face emoji. Stop embarrassing me! Okay, beddy-bye time. Miss u.
The puffy white duvet feels like a cruel joke when the outside temperature hovers near eighty. Silk embroidery on the pillowcase scratches my cheek. Somewhere a real-ass cuckoo clock calls the half hours, breathily singing: Whee-koo! Whee-koo! Figures Becca would have one.
The smell comes up so quickly, filling my nostrils, that I almost moan.
Deep, dank, musty earth that hasn’t been disturbed in ages. Soil hidden under the sand, rich with minerals, irrigated by hidden streams.
The duvet is gone. The AC is gone. The desert is still here.
The desert, still and always the desert. And now I hear a shovel biting the earth, hitting a rock with a dull clang. I feel the burn in my forearms as I fight the rock free and raise the shovel to toss a black heap on the growing pile beside me.
I’m digging a hole. He’s digging a hole.
He hobbles with every step, his right knee sore because he missed a ladder rung on hi
s way down and fell hard. It’s his bad knee, the same one where he tore the meniscus after a run. But he keeps digging.
Timbers swing wildly in his vision as he turns back to the hole. The camping lantern brings out every crack and knot in the old wood. A blister is forming between his thumb and forefinger with a sweet, sharp ache.
He’s skinning himself raw for this hole in the ground, nearly six feet long and going on five feet deep. The last hole he dug down here was pathetic, an act of desperation. The target had to be folded to fit. This one fits all the traditional requirements.
He did his homework this time, too—made sure the old gold mine didn’t have a second level. He didn’t want to dig himself through the floor and tumble into a shaft.
Luckily, this state is full of mining-history geeks. A book from the ’30s taught him the Dennings-Goodman Mine was dug in this ridge in the 1880s, its main entrance dynamited shut in 1905. Just the three chambers, twenty feet at the deepest, plus the tunnel—more of a hopeful, exploratory dig than anything else. The vein gave out, and the get-rich-quick artists moved on.
Their loss is the Thief’s gain.
His hole is a good hole. It will fit whatever it needs.
My phone wakes me from a deep sleep, chirping like a mutant cricket, and I reach out blindly to squash it dead. Instead, I somehow connect.
Her voice, thready and tentative. “Hey. How are you?”
Hearing her makes me feel warm all over, and only part of it is guilt because I can’t tell her where I was last night. “Hey you. I’m good. Just—kinda was sleeping.”
“Oh God, I’m sorry. I know you like to sleep late.”
“’S okay.” My throat and nasal passages feel scorched, tender. I’m starting to understand why the old desert rats quake and drawl the way they do. “I like hearing your voice.”
“Same here. We’re going to the Painted Desert in a sec.”
Ten A.M. already. I’ve been sleeping in my clothes, blinds open. I crashed here at seven after spending most of the night on the shoulder of that desolate county road, waiting for Shadwell to leave his desert lair.
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