The Familiar Dark

by Amy Engel

  Frustration rose up in me, a black, swamping wave. I didn’t have time for this bullshit. To jump through Marion’s hoops. My daughter was dead, and people could either get on board and help me or get the hell out of my way. “Are you going to tell me or not?”

  Marion blew a plume of smoke in my direction. “Yeah, I’ll tell you.” She reached out and snagged my wrist in her hand, tightened her fingers until I winced. “But don’t go getting too big for your britches, you hear? I tell your mama how you talked to me, and she’s liable to teach you a lesson on respecting your elders.”

  I stared back at her until she dropped my wrist. “I’ll take my chances.”

  I don’t know what I expected, but Marion’s big booming laugh definitely wasn’t it. “Well, look at you,” she hooted. “I thought maybe that mouth of yours was gone for good.”

  “Nope,” I told her. “Just been in hiding.” That mouth one more thing I buried when Junie was born. Wanting to teach her a better way to approach the world. One that wouldn’t leave her judged as poor white trash and not much else. But now I wondered if maybe a mouth like I used to have might have helped save her. Maybe she’d have been more likely to scream. To tell someone to go fuck themselves. To fight back. Or maybe it would have only made the knife move faster. Truth is, there’s no good way to navigate being female in this world. If you speak out, say no, stand your ground, you’re a bitch and a harpy, and whatever happens to you is your own fault. You had it coming. But if you smile, say yes, survive on politeness, you’re weak and desperate. An easy mark. Prey in a world full of predators. There are no risk-free options for women, no choices that don’t come back to smack us in the face. Junie hadn’t learned that yet. But she would have, eventually. We all do, one way or the other.

  Another snort from Marion. “In hiding. You always did have a way with the words, even when you was little.”

  I drummed my knuckles on the countertop, something gritty sticking to my skin. “Izzy?” I prompted.

  Marion took another drag from her cigarette. “Getting right down to business. I can respect that.” She paused, pointed at me with one nicotine-stained finger. “Don’t ask me how I know because I ain’t gonna tell you.” She swirled her cigarette through the air. “A magician never reveals her secrets.”

  “I won’t ask,” I said, trying to hurry her along. My God, she loved an audience. My mama was right about that.

  Marion leaned forward. “She was seeing that Matthew fellow. The one works for Jimmy Ray. Has that stupid-looking ponytail. Heard she was like a cat in heat around him.”

  “Matt?” I said, momentarily struck dumb. The bartender from the strip club. The absolute asshole. The worst of all possible bad choices. Oh, Izzy, what were you thinking? “How did they even meet?”

  “Got no idea,” Marion said. “Figured they crossed paths at some point, liked what they saw. Don’t know how far it had gone or nothing like that. But I have it on good authority that he wasn’t exactly telling her no.”

  “She was twelve.”

  Marion shrugged. “And he’s an asshole with a pecker. This shouldn’t be news to you. It’s the oldest story in the world.”

  I wanted her to be wrong. I wanted to live in a world where grown men didn’t prey on twelve-year-old girls. But she was right, of course. It was nothing new. Nothing that wasn’t done every second of every day in every corner of the world. Little girls were never safe. I should know; I used to be one of them.

  SIXTEEN

  Originally Barren Springs had been a dry town in a dry county, the band of ragtag settlers still determined to put God first in thanks for his having saved them from starvation and ruin. Their resolve hadn’t lasted long; soon as folks figured out how rough life was around here—discovered that just because land is pretty doesn’t make it farmable—they realized liquor was vital to take the edge off, make the days bearable. But most of the drinking in Barren Springs was still done in private, as if God wouldn’t count it against you so long as you didn’t throw it in his face. Beer bought at the Piggly Wiggly and consumed by the case down by the creek or flasks of whiskey tucked under car seats for swigs on the way home from work. Other than Jimmy Ray’s strip joint, the only watering hole in Barren Springs was Cassidy’s, a tiny bar wedged between the laundromat and the questionable sub shop. It had a leg up on Jimmy Ray’s place because it served a couple of actual cocktails and smelled like dryer sheets instead of strippers. Of course, at least half the town would say those were knocks against it. I’d only been inside a handful of times, mainly with Louise, whose husband, Keith, worked the bar most nights. Cassidy’s only held about thirty people at capacity, the space long and narrow. Bar running the length of the right side, liquor bottles always shaking slightly when the dryers on the other side of the shared wall were in full spin, and a few two-top tables lining the left. Tonight, at half an hour before closing on a Tuesday, there was only one man bellied up to the bar and Keith cleaning up behind it.

  “Hey, sweetheart,” Keith said when I came through the door, sweatshirt thrown over my pajamas and flip-flops on my feet. “Hated to bother you, but I didn’t want him driving. I tried to get his keys, but he wouldn’t hand them over.”

  Keith’s call had woken me from the first deep sleep I’d had in what felt like years. Actual slumber, not simply skimming the surface of rest with thoughts of Junie floating against my closed eyelids. “It’s okay,” I said. “How long’s he been here?”

  “Most of the night,” Keith said. He was wiping down the bar and paused where Cal’s head rested on the wood. “Poor fucker. I think it all caught up with him. I wasn’t gonna bother you, but the usual suspects were sniffing around. Brenda Longmont, that Candy girl you went to school with. I figured he was gonna have enough regrets in the morning, didn’t need to add waking up next to one of them to the list.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Good call.” I slid onto the stool next to Cal’s, ran my hand over his hair. “Hey, Cal. Come on, wake up.”

  Cal had never been a drinker, not even when we were younger and I was a little too friendly with the bottle. He’d watched our mama and went the other way, a decision I mimicked as soon as I got pregnant. But while I’d given up drinking for good, Cal still had the occasional beer after work or while watching the game. But I’d only seen him really drunk once before, when his high school girlfriend, long since moved away and on with her life, had gotten married to some lawyer in St. Louis. I don’t think it was a broken heart over her that made Cal hit the bottle so much as it was the knowledge that the life he was living in Barren Springs—working for Land, helping me raise Junie, taking Mama groceries once in a while to keep her from starving—was the one he was most likely going to live forever. We’d never talked about it, though, because Cal would have never admitted that to anyone, probably not even to himself.

  I pushed gently against his shoulder, said his name again, and he raised his head, fastened his bleary eyes to the right of me. “Eve?” he said, and I leaned backward, out of the range of his whiskey-fume breath. “What’s going on?”

  “You’re drunk,” I told him, trying to lay hands on my patience, my kindness. Because if anyone deserved a night of oblivion, it was Cal. It wasn’t fair to always expect him to be the strong one. I wondered how many hours he’d been putting in since Junie’s death. Cal was the one who always worried about me, but who worried about him? Made sure he was eating and sleeping, gave him a hug even when he tried to shrug away? Told him everything would be okay? I made a vow to myself to do better by him when all this was over. Assuming I was still around to keep such a promise. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get you home.”

  “No,” he said when I gave his arm a tug. “Sit with me for a minute, Evie.” He smiled at me. “Please.”

  I shot Keith a helpless look. “It’s okay,” he said. “I gotta go in the back and wash up some glasses, lock things up. I’ll give you two a few.”
<
br />   “Thanks, Keith. We won’t be long.”

  Cal squinted up at the clock behind the bar. “What time is it?”

  “One thirty,” I told him.

  “Aw, shit,” he muttered. “I’m sorry. Keith didn’t need to call you. I’m fine.”

  I laughed. “Definitely not fine, cowboy. You can barely keep your eyes open and your ass on that stool.”

  Cal clutched the bar with both hands at my words, sat up a little straighter. “Have you seen the papers?” he asked me.

  “What?” I shook my head. “What are you talking about? No.”

  He loosened one hand from the bar and reached inside his jacket, pulled out a folded-over newspaper and slapped it onto the bar. My own face blared up at me from the front page of the Kansas City Star, my skin pale, eyes wild, mouth a snarl. Caught midsentence at the press conference. Nobody who looked at that photo would care about the person who killed my daughter. I was the monster now.

  “This one’s from a few days ago. Look familiar?” Cal asked, tapping the photo. “Because if I didn’t know better, I’d say that was Mama. Spitting image.”

  He wasn’t wrong. Younger, less used up, maybe. But my mama all the same. “I already said I shouldn’t have done it. What more do you want from me?” I turned the paper over so I didn’t have to see. “Is that what caused this? Seeing me splashed all over the front page looking like a psycho? As far as I’m concerned, you should be thanking me.”

  Cal squinted, processing my words. “How you figure that?” he asked finally.

  “Thanks to me and my total fuckup at that stupid press conference, all those reporters are gone. Chasing more interesting stories.” I said it flippantly, but inside it stung. I didn’t like having them here, following me around, ambushing me with their nosy questions. But having them gone meant they no longer cared, the wider world forgetting Junie already. Tragedy’s attention span was short to begin with. Add in a white trash victim and an unsympathetic mother, and it shrank to almost nothing.

  Cal scrubbed his face with one hand, the pulling motion making his skin sag, a little preview of his future. “You ever think we’re still stuck in that trailer with Mama?” He didn’t wait for me to answer, to point out he’d taken a conversational U-turn I could hardly keep up with or make sense of. “’Cause I do. Sometimes I’d swear all this is a dream and we’re still kids who never got away.” He shook his head, drained the dregs of his whiskey before I could stop him, set the glass down with a clank. “When I think back to growing up, to being around Mama, you know what always sticks out the most? That time we were out playing, building a fort or some shit. I’m guessing we were about five and six. Thereabouts, anyway. It was winter, cold, and I had a new hat and mittens. New to me anyway. Who the hell knows where Mama got them. Knowing her, she stole them from some other kid. Anyway, we were out in the woods and that little shit Randall . . . What was his last name? You remember?”

  “Goff,” I said. Remembered the whole story and wished I didn’t have to hear it. But Cal was on a roll now, liquor loosening his tongue. “He was always a pain in the ass.”

  Cal nodded in agreement. “He took that hat right off my head. Snatched it and dared me to do anything about it. And when we got home, Mama took one look at me and asked where the hat was. Woman never cared what the hell we got up to, could be passed out drunk ninety-nine out of a hundred times we walked through the door, but that one time she had to be paying attention.”

  I remembered, too, how my stomach had sunk when she’d asked the question. There’d been a quick glance between Cal and me, followed by the inability to come up with a lie fast enough to ward her off. Her bony hand gripping Cal’s arm, whipping him around to face her while I melted away into the wall, praying for invisibility.

  “God, I’ll never forget the look on her face when I told her. The total disgust and disappointment.” His voice morphed into our mama’s nastiest drawl, and my skin rippled. “‘You let somebody take what’s yours? You walk back in here still standing upright? Still breathing while that little asshole is out there wearing your hat? What’s the matter with you, boy? Nobody takes something of yours, not if you’re alive to stop them.’”

  The real lesson had started after the tongue-lashing, when she’d grabbed the mittens off Cal’s tiny hands, told him to get them back, not to let her have them. What kind of weak, pathetic pussy was he to let her take his mittens? It had ended only when she’d beaten him to a pulp, thrown the mittens in his busted-up face. Crouched down in front of me where I cowered in the corner and slapped me hard. “Never let anybody take something from you. You hear me? You get it back or you die trying.” One thing you could say about our mama: Her lessons stuck. I’ve never forgotten a one.

  Cal pulled his wallet and his badge from his back pocket, threw some twenties on the bar. “You know, she’s the reason I became a cop,” he said, rubbing his fingers over his badge. “Mama.”

  “Because you were hoping that someday you’d get to arrest her sorry ass?”

  Cal smiled, but it didn’t touch his eyes. “You and I both know, she’d kill me with her bare hands before she let me fasten cuffs on her wrists. Nah, I did it because I wanted to go a different way. Prove to her, and myself, that she doesn’t know everything about the world. That not everything is ugly. Not everyone is bad. That I could still do some good.” He heaved himself off his stool, shrugged away from my hand when I tried to steady him. His laugh was like a cracked branch as he staggered toward the door. “Turns out it was a colossal waste of my time. Because that old bitch was right. About all of it.”

  “What happened to Junie wasn’t your fault,” I said to his retreating back. Because even if he wasn’t saying it, I knew what this bender was really about.

  Cal stopped, looked at me over his shoulder, gaze skating from me to the newspaper he’d left on the bar and back again. “I wasn’t talking about Junie,” he said. “I was talking about you and me, Eve. Turning out exactly how Mama raised us.”

  SEVENTEEN

  I was well aware that showing up at Jimmy Ray’s compound without an express invitation was something akin to suicide. But I had to find a way to speak to Matt alone, without the protective cover of the strip club, where he could have me tossed out or simply walk away. I’d spent the last couple of days trying to come up with alternative ideas, but I needed to catch him off guard if I had any hope of getting him to talk. I did think about calling Land, letting him know what I’d discovered. But I had a feeling the cops were already privy to my information and that there was a less-than-nothing chance they’d been able to get Matt to say a single word. I had serious doubts I could get him to talk, either. Would probably leave this encounter with a black eye or some broken fingers, if I was lucky. But I had to try.

  I wasn’t so far gone, though, that I went in blind, with no hope of rescue if things went completely sideways. Cal sounded harried and exhausted when he answered the phone. We hadn’t talked since I’d driven him home from the bar two nights ago. I’d been waiting for him to contact me first. I wanted to give him a chance to decide how he’d play it, suspecting he’d prefer to pretend his moment of weakness had never happened. He wouldn’t want to be reminded that he’d needed me for a change. Or that memories of Mama still had such a hold on him after all these years.

  “Hey,” I said, pinning the phone between my ear and shoulder. I rolled up my car window as I drove, silencing the roaring wind.

  “Hey,” Cal said. “Everything okay?” He sounded a little surprised, and I realized I never called him anymore. Before Junie died, I’d talked to him at least twice a day, to shoot the shit, check in. But that lifelong routine had stopped along with my daughter’s beating heart. Truth was, I didn’t have anything to say and didn’t have the energy to pretend to care what anyone else said, either, unless they were telling me who’d killed my girl.

  “Yeah, everything’s fine,” I lied
, half my brain calculating how far I was from Jimmy Ray’s versus how long it might take Cal to get where I was going. “But listen, I got a lead on the guy Izzy was fooling around with and—”

  “Eve,” Cal said, sharp and loud. “What are you doing?”

  My teeth clattered together as my car jounced over the uneven ground toward Jimmy Ray’s compound. It was starting to get dark, and I felt spotlighted and vulnerable, my headlights and choppy engine announcing my arrival. “Don’t worry,” I told Cal, his disbelieving gust of breath telling me how likely that was. “I’m fine. I won’t do anything dumb.” The lies were rolling off my tongue like water now. “I wanted you to know I’m out at Jimmy Ray’s, in case anything happens.”

  “No,” Cal said. “Turn around right now. Eve, I’m serious. Turn—”

  I hung up on him, powered off my phone, and threw it onto the passenger seat. I figured I had thirty minutes, maybe, before Cal caught up to me. That would be enough time, because Matt was either going to talk or he wasn’t.

  Up ahead I could see the tiny guard station Jimmy Ray had built out of plywood and scrap metal. It stood on the edge of his property, and there was no way to drive down his lane without passing it. A spotlight shone from its lopsided roof, and the whole jury-rigged look of it would have been funny if not for the armed redneck I knew waited inside.

  But when I pulled to a stop next to the guard station, it was empty. I’d been practicing my speech in my head, the collection of words I’d hoped would get me past this barricade, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself now that they weren’t needed. The thick metal chain that usually barred entrance to Jimmy Ray’s compound when the guard station was unmanned lay coiled in the brush. The apparent ease of my entry left a hissing snake of worry in my gut. I’d never known Jimmy Ray to be careless with security. But a trap didn’t seem like his style, either. Jimmy Ray wasn’t sneaky. He didn’t plot out ruses to get at you sideways. He came full throttle and right in your face. Maybe the guy manning the entrance had to take a leak and forgot about the chain. Maybe something at the compound required his urgent attention. Which might end up working in my favor. If everyone was distracted, that gave me more time with Matt.