“One night, one of the men decided to stay up through the night and keep an eye on his livestock. He decided to keep his plan a secret, because whenever the men discussed their plans as a group, the predators did not come. This man, a smart man, had figured that the predator was not an animal, but one of the men who lived in the village. This man loaded a gun and sat in the darkness of his barn, waiting for the door to open and for the thief to show himself. Night came on and the moon, which was no more than a sliver that night, rose up into the sky. This man waited, quiet and patient. He had already decided he would wait for as many nights as it took to catch the thief.
“When the night was as dark as it would ever get, the door of the man’s barn pushed open. The man aimed his gun, but he was so surprised to see a white dog in the doorway he barely noticed the pack of wolves coming in behind. The eyes of the white dog seemed familiar to the man, and the beast had somehow opened the barn door like a human. The dog looked the man in the eyes, saw the gun in the man’s lap, and began to howl in warning. The wolves streamed out of the barn, their jaws packed with all the chickens they could grab. The man regained his senses and aimed the gun at the howling dog. He shot as the dog turned and ran away. The bullet hit the dog, hit your great-grandfather, in his right leg. He howled in pain, and a white hawk, the largest hawk the man had ever seen, flew down from the sky and carried the white dog away.
“When your great-grandfather awoke the next morning, a man again, his leg throbbed where the bullet had hit him. The hawk was no longer a bird, but a woman just about the same age as your great-grandfather. She told him she had plucked the bullet from his leg with her sharp beak and packed the wound with healing plants to stop the bleeding and ease the pain.
“Because of the bullet, your great-grandfather always walked with a limp, but he didn’t mind, because the bullet brought your great-grandmother to him. At night, when he was a dog and your great-grandmother was a hawk, they would travel as far as they could together and as they traveled, they played a game. Your great-grandmother would find beautiful limbs high in the trees and she would drop them into the woods. Your great-grandfather would fetch the limbs and run ahead until morning. During the day, your great-grandfather carved the limbs he’d carried the night before into sturdy, straight sticks. Together they placed the stick in the ground, and they would travel in whichever direction it leaned. After many, many nights, one of the sticks stood straight up. It did not lean to the east or the west. It did not point to the north or the south. On that day, your great-grandparents knew they were home. They built a house and soon they had your grandmother. Your great-grandfather continued to carve the branches from the trees. He lived to be a very old man, and the limp from the bullet grew worse as he grew older. He used the sticks he carved as walking canes during the day. At night, he still became the white dog but he no longer roamed. He stayed by your great-grandmother’s side, loyal and true. And she stayed with him, always protecting him from danger.”
Liam looked up at his father like he expected more. “That’s it,” Obi said. “That’s the story of your great-grandparents.”
The rain poured. The ground beneath the tent was turning to mud. It was the middle of the day, but it could just as easily have been night. No sunlight broke through the dark sky.
Liam scratched a mosquito bite on his ankle. “No,” he said. “I don’t think that’s true.”
Obi laughed. “And why not?”
“Because sometimes I dream about the white dog and he doesn’t limp at all.”
Liam reached for a sleeve of crackers and a jar of peanut butter. He dipped one of the crackers into the jar and brought it to his mouth. Crumbs scattered across his chest and onto the sleeping bag. “Tell me something else,” he said. “Something true.”
Chapter Fifteen
Geneva listened to the rain splat against the pavement outside. Even from the motel bed, she could see it was going to be a gray, dreary day. No light shone through the window. Atul slept beside her, one leg kicked out from under the thin, cheap sheets. He looked like a child. Hard to believe he was the same man who’d pinned her last night. Hard to believe there was a side of Atul she hadn’t seen before. What other surprises was he hiding? She would never know. Their time was up. Already she’d stayed too long. Pisa told her to go straight home, and now it was a new day. Dread, that was what she felt. Dread for what was coming, and for everything she didn’t know.
* * *
She should have listened to her father. He’d told her Bruce was not a man worth marrying. He said she’d regret it. How she hated it when other people were right. Still, even though their life together was one disappointment after another, when she learned Bruce was dying, she felt something vital ripped from her gut. When the doctor laid out Bruce’s long list of illnesses and said he might not live a month, she lashed out at him. “What do you know? There are bigger forces working here. You can’t predict everything with your medicine.”
The doctor admitted he didn’t know anything for sure. “Then stop spreading lies,” she told him. “I have witnessed miracles. I won’t be a slave to your science.” Now it was nearly a month later, and Bruce was still alive. Nothing about the month felt miraculous.
This is what the doctor told her: Bruce had cancer in his lungs and liver, emphysema, coronary atherosclerosis, high blood pressure, diabetes, and a few other things she couldn’t recall. She hadn’t even known he was sick until she found him collapsed by the shed, that dreadful shed. She hadn’t wanted to know.
She slipped from bed and closed herself into the tiny bathroom, where she scrubbed her face with a rough cloth and a bar of soap that smelled like lemon drop candy. She ought to head out this instant, before the rain picked up and before Atul decided to try to keep her here against her will. Also, she really didn’t want to get involved in Chandra’s problems. Geneva didn’t trust the girl. Chandra played innocent for her father, but Geneva recognized a streak of deception in her. No telling what really happened by the river. Better to keep out of it, let Chandra deal with her own problems.
The door to the bathroom creaked loudly when she pushed it open. “Come back to bed,” Atul said.
She slipped her feet into her sandals, bent to straighten a strap caught under her heel. “I have to get home.” She avoided his eyes, not wanting to see the violence bubble up again.
“You said you would help me. You said you knew that man, the sheriff.” Atul’s voice rose in an annoying whine that put Geneva in mind of mosquitoes. Would he sting her next? Take her blood? Probably.
“I’ll take you to the sheriff, but then I’m gone. You can’t keep me here, Atul.” No one can keep me, she thought.
“How do you know this man?” Atul’s voice was sharp and accusing.
“He’s an old friend. We went to school together.” In fact, there was a time she might have married Randall, but no sense telling Atul that. She’d broken Randall years ago, back when she was not much older than Chandra. That’s what he told her when she said she was marrying Bruce. “I’m broken,” he said. “I’m in pieces.” As she knew he would, he’d pulled himself together and married an average, pretty woman. They raised two average, pretty children. Yet Randall never got over Geneva. The few times they’d crossed paths over the years, he’d looked at her with those moonstruck eyes, called her Genie. When she needed him, he was there. That time she’d poisoned Bruce, an incident that got blown way out of proportion in her opinion, Randall was the one who’d convinced the judge she was fragile and not dangerous.
“Chandra needs to come with us.” Geneva picked up her purse and checked to make sure her keys were in the front pocket. “She really should have reported this right away.”
“She was scared,” Atul said.
By the time she was Chandra’s age, she’d been scared plenty. She was just about Chandra’s age when she lost her own mother, something she still didn’t like to think about. Chandra needed to learn that fear could be the source of great pow
er. Chandra needed to go see Pisa.
They drove out into the wet morning. Atul insisted on riding with her, even though it would be a far sight quicker if she didn’t have to take him back to the motel later. He was afraid she would abandon him. It was a reasonable fear. She parked the car in front of his sister’s home. “Turn it off,” he said. She killed the engine. He took the keys from her and walked up the front steps, where he pressed a doorbell. Geneva saw a curtain flutter in one of the windows, but it might have just been a breeze or a trick of the light. He knocked. Knocked again. The door remained shut and Atul returned to the car. His hair dripped with rainwater. “She isn’t home.”
My ass, Geneva thought. “It’s seven o’clock in the morning. Where could she be?”
“My sister works at the hospital. She often goes in early.”
“I’m talking about Chandra. That girl is in there sleeping or ignoring you. You need to go in and get her.”
Atul returned to the front door, knocked again, and then banged on the door with the side of his fist. The curtain moved. It was no trick of the light. Geneva got out of the car, followed Atul up the front walk.
“Atul, this is ridiculous.” She reached past him and tried the door handle. The door flew open. “There—” Geneva gestured at the entryway. “—go get her. I’ll just wait here in the rain.”
From where she stood on the front porch, Geneva saw an overstuffed floral sofa worn thin along the arms, a shelf filled with an ungodly number of ceramic cows, and an empty brass umbrella stand. She could use an umbrella right about now.
Atul walked past the cow display and disappeared down a dark hallway. Rain fell harder now. It would get worse before it let up. She should have listened to Pisa and gone straight home. Now she’d be stuck driving in the rain, and it would take twice as long.
Chandra skulked out behind Atul. She wore a pair of baggy blue shorts and a gray T-shirt with OLE MISS scrawled across the front in red letters, a navy baseball cap pushed down low over her forehead, a pair of plastic flip-flops on her feet. This generation seemed to believe flip-flops were actual shoes and not just something you slipped on to avoid getting foot fungus at public pools. Geneva led the sorry procession back to the car, flinching at every slap, slap, slap of the dreadful flip-flops. Chandra slid into the backseat and sat slumped down, arms folded across her chest, jaw clenched.
Atul slid into the passenger seat. “She doesn’t want to do this. Maybe we should let it go.”
Geneva glanced at Chandra in the rearview mirror. “Your father says you saw a man kill someone. Is that true?”
“What do you mean, is it true? Do you think I’m a liar?”
Geneva cranked the car, pulled away from curb. She wanted to reach back and slap the girl, yank the stupid hat off her head, and tell her to sit up straight. Instead, she drove. The rain fell in large, heavy drops. Geneva turned on the windshield wipers. “Your father says you were out by the river. Which river?”
“The Tallahatchie, I think.” Chandra said. “I don’t know, maybe the Yazoo.”
“What were you doing out there at night? It’s not safe.”
“I was camping,” Chandra said. “I went for a hike and I got turned around and was out later than I expected.”
Geneva did not believe that for a second. Chandra didn’t look a bit like a girl who camped or hiked. There was nothing robust or outdoorsy about her. If anything, she looked sickly and pale. “Alone?”
“With a friend from school,” Chandra said. “But I was alone when it happened.”
“Where was your friend?” Atul twisted around in his seat to look at his daughter.
“See, I knew this would happen. I knew you would get mad.”
Geneva turned the car onto Highway 49. She increased her speed and flew past a tractor taking up the southbound lane. She barely avoided a head-on collision with a pickup truck traveling north. The driver of the pickup laid on his horn and raised his middle finger as they passed.
Chandra screamed. “Oh my God, she’s going to kill us all!”
Geneva’s stomach clenched. She had a flash of the three of them dead and bleeding on the side of the highway. She thought of the storm she’d seen in Pisa’s eyes and then in Atul’s. She slowed down and turned the windshield wipers up a notch. The road felt slick and unsteady beneath her.
“You can tell all this to the sheriff,” Geneva said. “You don’t have to tell us.”
“I would like to know where your friend was when all this happened,” Atul said. “You told me that you were going camping with Debbie. I knew I should have met her before I let you go. I don’t know anything about this girl or her family. You go to college and you come back with no hair and you wear clothes that look like they were plucked from the garbage and you don’t talk to me and you disappear for days. I won’t have it. I won’t have a daughter of mine behaving like some common American slut.”
Geneva turned off the highway. The car bounced across railroad tracks. She bit her tongue, tasted blood.
“You can’t make me do anything,” Chandra said. “I’m twenty years old. I’m an adult.”
“You’re a child,” Atul said. “You are behaving like a child.”
Geneva pulled into the alley behind the county jail. Three trustees stood outside smoking cigarettes. “Lock the doors.” They walked past the trustees who nodded at them and blew smoke in their faces. Inside the building, Geneva shivered. She pushed her rain-soaked hair back and led Chandra and Atul down the dreary hallway to the main office. She’d spent a bit of time here when she was arrested for poisoning Bruce. She knew that the door to the left led to a dozen cells where inmates sat waiting for trial dates or transportation to a larger facility.
She told Chandra and Atul to wait for her, gesturing toward a row of plastic chairs underneath a wall full of Wanted notices. Atul sat, but Chandra stood looking nervous as a trapped rat. A deputy who looked no older than Bobby sat behind the only desk in the room. He looked up when they came in. “Wutcha nee?” The man’s cheeks were bulging and he could barely speak around the wad of chewing tobacco in his mouth. He spit a brown stream into a coffee mug, and removed the wet wad from his mouth with a practiced scoop of forefinger and thumb. “What do you need?”
“I’m looking for Randall.” Geneva pulled herself up tall and peered down on the insolent deputy. “Is the sheriff in?”
“Not today.” The deputy shoved the tobacco back into his mouth and resumed typing on an old computer.
Geneva adjusted her skirt, just to give her hands something to do. “Can you give him a call? I need to speak with Sheriff Randall.”
The deputy rolled his eyes and scooped the tobacco out of his cheek again. “If you need something, you’ll have to deal with me. Otherwise, I need to finish up this paperwork.”
“There’s no need to be rude,” Geneva told the man. “And, if you don’t mind my saying so, you shouldn’t be chewing tobacco if you can’t even talk to people while you do it. It’s a disgusting habit.”
“Look, lady.” He dropped the wad of tobacco onto a piece of plain white paper. A wet, brown stain bled out around it. “I’m trying to quit smoking. Up until about a month ago, I could smoke right here at this desk. Now, all of a sudden, it’s a nonsmoking building. It wasn’t my idea, but there you go. I don’t really care for this chewing tobacco and I’ll grant you I don’t quite have the hang of it, but it’s the one thing that is keeping me from climbing the damn walls. Can you understand that?”
“I suppose I can.”
“All right, then. The sheriff’s daughter is getting married this week. He’s got all sorts of family in town, and he left me strict instructions not to bother him unless it’s a genuine emergency. Is this a genuine emergency? ’Cause if it’s not, you’re gonna have to deal with me.”
Geneva looked over her shoulder at Atul and Chandra. Of course it wasn’t an emergency. The girl didn’t even want to be here. She glowered at Geneva. Her eyes were glassy and red, her skin
sallow to the point of jaundice. She looked like she’d been on a bender. Geneva turned back to the tobacco-chewing deputy. “We need to report a crime. Sheriff Randall is an old friend of mine. If he can’t help me himself, I’ll count on you to act on his behalf.”
The deputy stared at her. She was afraid he would pop the nasty wad back in his mouth and ignore her. Instead, he stood up and offered her his hand. It was the same hand that had been digging around in his mouth since she walked through the door. “Buster Boggs.”
She stared at the hand, the spit-stained forefinger a shade darker than his other fingers.
He laughed. “I don’t reckon I’d shake that hand, either.” He wiped the nasty digit across the thigh of his pants. “All right, tell me what the problem is.”
Geneva waved Atul and Chandra over. Boggs pulled out chairs for them and settled back into his own chair behind the desk. He rested a pencil on a yellow legal pad. “What happened?”
“My daughter witnessed a murder,” Atul said.
Boggs looked at Chandra. “Is that true? When did this happen?”
“Saturday night,” Chandra said. “I’m not sure about the time. Maybe ten? Maybe midnight? Near where the rivers come together.”
Boggs scribbled on the legal pad. “Why didn’t you come to us then?”
“I was scared.”
Atul leaned forward. “We don’t trust you. You did nothing when my wife was killed. You don’t care about us.”
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