A Crooked Mile (Rust Book 1)

by Samantha Arthurs

  “I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough,” Ramona decided, nervously picking at her thumbnail. The police were now unrolling caution tape, the kind used to mark off a crime scene and the sort of yellow color that could be seen from a distance. Or that’s what she surmised it was for anyway, having watched a lot of CSI on cable at night. Her and her father stayed out back on the porch until dinner time, until they were finally called in to eat. By the time they ventured back out, once the dishes were washed and everything put away, it was too dark to see much, though the roped off area was now illuminated with bright lights.

  It was a strange and eerie sight, that night time view of Tucker Monroe’s place, and Ramona slept uneasily that night. She tossed and turned in her bed, waking up multiple times for drinks of water or to peer out the window at the far away fields where the lights were still burning bright. She wasn’t sure what time she actually fell asleep, she only knew that her rest was fitful at best and that she had a series of very unpleasant dreams.

  They found out what happened that next morning while watching the seven o’clock news. Ramona was still in her pajamas despite it being a school day, eating her cereal out of a plastic bowl in front of the television set. It had started with Tucker Monroe going out to inspect his fields, preparing for the upcoming planting season as most farmers did this time of year. He had driven his four-wheeler out to the farthest field and then worked his way back in, stopping in the adjacent pasture that he kept for his cattle to graze in during the summer months. He had found Alec’s boots first, sitting pristine by the side of the pond that ran the length of the far side of the pasture, a place for cows to have a drink on hot days and a good water source if his plants needed a little extra help in the dry months of summer.

  Upon further inspection he had then found a cell phone tucked into one of the boots, shut off and ruined beyond repair by the weather. He had inspected the area without touching anything and then he had let panic set in, racing back to the house to call the police, requesting that the get there as quickly as they could. From there it had just been a matter of marking off the active crime scene, and then they had begun their search for Alec himself. If his things were there, then he hadn’t gotten very far. Not in the dead of winter and most certainly not without the boots he’d left behind.

  They had pulled Alec’s body from the pond late in the night, still wearing the suit and tie he had worn to the New Year’s Eve party. His wallet was still in his back pocket, his watch still on his wrist. His parents had positively identified his body mere hours after his body was recovered, and he was now in the hands of the medical examiner that would perform an autopsy to confirm the cause of death. Though it seemed rather obvious what had happened, it was procedure and had to be taken seriously none the less.

  Speculation was that Alec Davis had drown, and that it had been very much intentional The theory went that he had walked the mile and a half across open empty fields from the Davis home to the Monroe’s pond. He had taken his personal things with him so he didn’t leave any tell-tale trail behind; not wanting to give anyone a reason to think that he might not be coming back. He had left the house likely between four a.m. and six a.m., which put both his last conversation with his brother and his last text to Ramona on the timeline. They were the last people to have heard from him, as he had left no letter or notes behind that the police could find.

  Tucker Monroe’s pond was long and deceptively deep, coming in at nearly twelve feet in the middle. It had iced over but was still rather thin in the middle, since Tucker tried to keep it broken up when he could for days when the weather was nice enough to let the cattle out of the barn to roam a bit. It was not a pond used for recreation like skating, and that was likely why Alec had specifically picked it. It had likely held his weight as he had walked out in his sock clad feet, leaving his boots behind for reasons they would never fully understand. Perhaps he had just wanted to leave a clue behind, a hint to his whereabouts that someone would eventually stumble upon when the time was right.

  As if there would ever, truly, be a right time for such a thing.

  When Alec had gotten to the middle of the pond, the deepest part, it wouldn’t have held his weight for very long. The ice would have cracked underneath him and eventually given way, and then he had fallen through. He had died there in the cold, dark water, trapped beneath the surface. He had likely been disoriented and afraid, unable to find the opening he had created with no sun to shine through the ice, the earth almost as dark above his head as it would have been all around him in the water.

  Alec Davis had taken his own life, having finally had all that he could stand. Even with his father backing off, and with Ramona finally admitting she wanted to perhaps be more than friends, it hadn’t been enough. He was broken inside, and he hadn’t ever been quite able to get the pieces back together again after he’d first shattered. His sessions with Doctor Linn and the medications had slowed down the inevitable, but those things hadn’t been able to cure him. They had been a temporary fix, just like he had said that they were, and while he had tried his best he just couldn’t continue to fight his own demons. In the end, like so many others, he had merely given up.

  Life had been a battle for Alec, and it had not been one he could win. They had all held out hope, wanting to wholeheartedly believe that he had simply walked away from his old life and into a brand new one somewhere. This was not the ending any of them had wanted, and it hurt. It hurt so badly that Ramona didn’t think she’d be able to breathe again, her chest constricting and her heart aching so horribly she feared it might burst. She had never experienced a real loss in her young life, this was the first, and it was the heaviest thing she had ever felt.

  When they had told the Davis family his mother had screamed, just screeching his name over and over again until her throat was raw. His father shut himself up wordlessly in his office, and Bryson had thrown up the contents of his stomach before dry heaving so hard his stomach muscles became sore. It had always been a possibility, Alec’s history alone had dictated that, but it was not a possibility they wanted to accept. Only now there was nothing to do but accept it; Alec Davis was never coming home. He was not a barista in Fort Benton, or lazing on a beach in California. He would not play basketball for Oregon, or anywhere else, but he had found a way to escape Rust. He had left it behind him, had shut it out, and he would make just one final return.

  They arranged a funeral service for him to be a held a week after the recovery of his body. The state medical examiner ruled that he had indeed drowned, and there was no foul play suspected in the case. Suicide was the most likely scenario, and though it wasn’t put officially on paper, everyone knew and nobody spoke it aloud. Alec was brought back to Rust for his closed casket service, which was held in the gymnasium of the high school to accommodate the crowd. The entire town seemed to show up, including his former teammates and friends with whom he had battled in the last months of his life. Several teachers and his coach spoke of him fondly, trying hard not to cry, and then Bryson stood up to say a few words to the crowd.

  Alec’s little brother, whom he had defended so fiercely, managed to get out a few sentences before his sobs overcame him. Their grandmother, who had arrived from Georgia just that morning, stood up and escorted him off the stage and back into his seat. While Bryson cried Ramona Sanders stood up and made her way to the podium that sat near his sealed up casket. There were flowers everywhere, in pots and vases and tubs, covering the gym floor like some sick garden. A large picture of him, smiling that big smile with his bright eyes gleaming, sat on a pedestal and she stared at it as she made her way to the front.

  You could have heard a pin drop as she stood behind the microphone, clearing her throat. She had made a few notes and she glanced at them now before staring out at the crowd, her eyes sporting dark circles beneath them and blood shot red from her near constant crying. She sucked in a deep breath for strength, curled her fingers around the edges of the podium, and began to sp
eak.

  “I just really got to know Alec in September, when we were paired together for an English project,” she said, her voice booming out into the room. There was a bit of feedback so she moved back a little, not speaking so close to the mic. “I always thought that he was like the others that he spent time with. Mercilessly cruel, snobby, probably very full of himself. I had never given him a chance because in my mind I already knew who he was, and then I was proven wrong. Alec had a kind heart, and he had good intentions. What he also had was a lot of demons that he tried so hard to overcome. In his last months he talked a lot about how he felt, about how he couldn’t seem to turn it around. He felt so isolated here in Rust, like he was caught in a cage with no room to run. His dream was to get out of this place, to find something better, but he never really saw what that better place might look like. I want to be angry at him, to let my hurt take over, but I can’t. Alec deserves so much more than that, and it’s the last thing I can do for him. To not let him go in anger, but to remember the few weeks of his time that I get to keep with me forever.

  “Emily Bronte wrote in Wuthering Heights the quote, “she burned too bright for this world”. There is no better way to describe Alec. He was loved, envied, cherished, and hated in equal measure, all just for being the person that he was. He burned so bright that some of us couldn’t stand to look at him directly, while more of us still found ourselves in his gravitational pull. It doesn’t matter if you knew him for weeks or years, every person he touched will carry a piece of him forever. That’s just the kind of person that he was. He burned too bright, and then he burned out. The world, his own mind, couldn’t continue to contain him, and that happens to the best of us. They burn out too soon, and leave the rest of us behind in the dark.”

  She stepped quietly away from the podium then, hearing Alec’s mother gasping hard to catch her breath as she cried. Ramona touched her shoulder gently as she passed on the way back to her own seat, easing into the folding chair with her hands shaking. Bryson turned around to look at her then, reaching out to touch her hand with his. He was slow to turn back around, reluctant to face the front of the room and the horrible truth that came with it, but he finally did. There was nothing else to do now but face what came next, and to meet it head on.

  The Davis family left that evening on a flight that would take them back home to Georgia, where Alec would be laid to rest. Though his father had grown up in Rust, and he had many relatives buried in the town cemetery, his mother could not stand to leave her boy in the place that had seemingly driven him mad. It was no surprise to Ramona when neither Mrs. Davis nor Bryson returned to Rust after the burial, deciding that the best thing was to stay in Georgia where they could try to put their lives back together again one little piece at a time.

  Just weeks later, as the wheat was beginning to rise from the earth towards the sky in little green shoots, the Davis’ house went up for sale. Mr. Davis was gone too, though nobody was sure exactly where he had gone. Perhaps he had moved back to Atlanta to be with his family in an attempt to right his wrongs, but he had more than likely gone somewhere new to start over just as they had. His marriage, his family, was well and done and he was a man with a lot to atone for. With all of them now gone nothing remained of the Davis family at all in Rust except a house on the market and a lot of whispering behind closed doors.

  Graduation day came soon after and a chair was left empty for Alec in the spot where he would have sat, had he lived to see the day come. They laid his basketball jersey and some photographs on the seat, and the valedictorian spoke of him during her speech. Here they were, a room full of possibilities and promises, mourning a boy who hadn’t been able to see this moment just ahead of him. He had been hurting so badly that the idea of it had seemed so far away and unreachable and all of them, even those who had begrudged him in those last weeks and months, felt the sorrow of it.

  Life went on in Rust, like life always does. Fields were tended and fresh grads left on camping trips and adventures before they would depart for collage life or prepare to step up to take on a role on the farm. Slowly people began to forget about Alec Davis, about his life and his subsequent death. They forgot about the Davis family all together, the people who had lived in the big house at the end of Route Four that now belonged to the Dearborn family instead. The only person who seemingly didn’t forget was Ramona Sanders, who thought of Alec as she helped feed cows, run the tractor, and pack for school in bits and pieces.

  Her life continued on, but it also felt a bit stalled. She felt like she would never shake what had happened, and how Alec had come and gone so quickly from her life. Every day she worked hard, and every night she lay in bed, touching her Christmas pendant and wishing that things could be different somehow. She almost asked her mother once how you just stopped chasing after a ghost, but she held back and kept it to herself instead. Someday she would find herself thinking of him less, that she knew, and her life would start to pick up steam again. For now was it really so wrong to cling on to a boy who was just a memory? It didn’t seem so wrong, and so she let herself indulge in it, for just a little while longer.

  Epilogue: Survivor's Guilt

  The wheat grew taller, and life kept on moving forward. Summer seemed to disappear too quickly, and the heat of August was slowly ebbing toward giving way to the cooler temperatures of September. Ramona sat in her bedroom in the rambling Sanders house on Route Four, surrounded by cardboard boxes and plastic totes that now held her entire life. Or at least held the pieces of her life that she intended to take with her to college. They would be leaving in the morning, her things strapped onto a trailer pulled behind the family van.

  It was strange to sit in the middle of her childhood bedroom, staring at the empty bookcases and bare walls. In just twenty-four hours she would be unpacking in her dorm room, trying to make a new place feel as homey as the old one had. It was such a surreal thing, especially when she tried to imagine coming home for holidays and breaks. It would still be her room, her parents had promised her that, but at the same time it would feel foreign and strange. Her room at the university in Missoula would be the place that felt like home, and this room would be the empty shell that she couldn’t quite find comfort in. It was a thought that gave her a feeling of intense displeasure, so she shoved it aside as she rose from the floor to flop down on her bed instead.

  Would Rust feel the same when she came back to it? She didn’t know. It was possible that it might feel smaller, after being out in the world a little more, or perhaps it would be so chock full of nostalgia that it would instead be larger than life. It was something that only time could tell, and she would be finding out sooner rather than later. There would be a lot of things she missed, besides her family, and she sighed wistfully as she thought about the town that had made her who she was.

  She would miss the wheat, that great golden ocean that engulfed her small town every spring and that faded away every fall. She would miss game nights with her family, burgers at the diner on those rare occasions that they could afford to go out, and the way the stars seemed to go on forever on clear nights. Her life in Rust had not always been easy, in fact at times it had been downright horrible, but she would still long for it more often than not. Her experiences, both good and bad, had molded her and she had to be thankful for that.

  Reaching up she touched the pendant resting against her chest, letting her eyes fall closed. Life without Alec still felt so strange, and she found herself thinking about him often. Sometimes she let herself imagine that he was still out there somewhere, and that there was still hope for him coming home again. Or perhaps she might run into him in Missoula, and they would finally be reunited. They were silly thoughts, thoughts that could never come to fruition, but she thought them nonetheless. It was easier than accepting the truth, which still felt like an impossibility to her. Reality eventually always set in though, and she would cry quietly and try to give herself room to breathe.

  She cried now, fingers clut
ching her necklace as she tried to compose herself. There had been nothing that anyone could do to help Alec, and she knew that. He had been lost to himself, and therefore lost to everyone else around him. What had happened was not anyone’s fault exclusively, and though she was quick to want to blame his father she knew that wasn’t entirely fair either. The man had been cruel and crude to his son, had put too much on his shoulders, but he hadn’t pushed Alec into that pond. He was doing his own suffering, feeling his own loss, and that would ultimately be his punishment.

  That night after dinner Ramona made a phone call to Atlanta, speaking to Bryson for the first time in a couple of weeks. They talked about her move, about her college course load for her first semester, and about how life was going now that he was home again. He sounded happier than he had in a long time, and he felt as though he was finally getting back into a good place. He had been seeing a therapist to help him work through everything, and he felt like he was ready to tackle school once it got started. They avoided the very obvious topic of the person who they were both desperately missing, and when they finally said goodbye Ramona felt a little heartsick. Bryson was her last tie to Alec Davis, and she could tell that this was the beginning of their short lived friendship drifting apart. He was in Atlanta, starting his sophomore year of high school and trying to recover his own life. She would be in Missoula, trying to do the same while starting over all on her own. They couldn’t be expected to stay in contact, but she hoped that maybe they somehow would anyway.