The Wolf Wants In

by Laura McHugh

  He tucked the blanket around her and carried her out to her car. As he readjusted her so he could open the door, one of her arms slid down and swung loosely, and his stomach lurched, tears and anger welling up all over again. He set her on the floorboard in the back, where she wouldn’t be seen, found the keys still in the ignition, and headed toward town to get on the highway. Halfway there, he started to feel light-headed, like he couldn’t breathe, and realized the heat was on high. He rolled down his window and sucked in the sharp night air. When he switched off the heat, he noticed the gas gauge was low—too low to get him into the city without stopping somewhere. He crushed the brake pedal, and the car shimmied. He pounded his fist on the steering wheel.

  If he got gas, he might end up on camera with Henley’s car. There’d be a timeline. Would he be able to get back before Earl got home? And how would he get home if he dumped the Skylark? If he was going to drive it back, was there even any point in taking her body somewhere else?

  He swung the car around on the empty road and drove until he reached the next gravel turnoff, following it to the private lane that marked the Gundersons’ old farmstead, where they had gone swimming that summer, where the current flowed wide and deep. He cut the lights and passed through the screen of trees that lent privacy from the road, parking on the hill above the river. The water was black and fairly smooth, reflecting a fingernail moon.

  Jason closed his eyes for the worst part, reaching back to snag the blanket that covered her and tugging it free. Then he shifted the car into neutral and pushed until it gained enough momentum to roll down and drop off the bank. When the current caught it, it began to turn and drift. He waited near the crest of the hill while it floundered, slowly filling; then it finally bucked and began to sink.

  His muscles burned as he ran back home, cutting through the fields and edging ditches slick with dead leaves. It felt good to run with purpose, the cold air searing his throat, his body finding a powerful and familiar rhythm from his days of intense training, back when he was the town’s star athlete and Earl was briefly proud of him.

  His mind began to clear as he neared the house. He wondered if Henley had told anyone about her encounter with Earl. She hadn’t spoken much lately to Missy or Charlie. Even if she hadn’t mentioned it, though, there’d be proof—the calls Earl had made to her would show up on phone records. The money he’d given Henley must still be in her car, at the bottom of the river, waiting to be found. It would be best, of course, if she wasn’t found at all, but if she was, it might not look good for Earl.

  * * *

  —

  He couldn’t bring himself to lie on his bed where Henley’s body had lain, so he stretched out on the floor, sleepless, until dawn.

  A small part of him thought that it hadn’t happened. He imagined Henley driving, the sunrise in her rearview mirror as she sang along with the radio, a habit she and Missy shared, though when Henley sang, it was more of a whisper, like she was telling a secret, her lips softly mouthing the words. Her lips, lightly parted, were the last thing he’d seen before he’d shrouded her with the blanket.

  He took a long shower, tried and failed to eat an energy bar, which chalked up his mouth and made him gag, and waited for Earl to leave, driving in to work right behind him. His dad sat ramrod straight in the driver’s seat of his truck, his hands always positioned carefully at ten and two, the farm report most likely droning on the radio. Earl obeyed the speed limit and came to a complete stop at each intersection, waving other vehicles to go ahead even though it wasn’t their turn, always doing his damnedest to appear as a model citizen.

  Jason mulled the idea of blackmailing him, telling Earl to give him his trust fund and cut him loose. He could threaten to tell everyone that Earl had killed Henley. If that didn’t work, he’d promise to destroy the one thing his father might care about more than his personal reputation: Sullivan Grain. Earl lived in fear of an explosion at the grain elevator, like the infamous tragedies at Continental or DeBruce, the kind that took over the newspapers and courtrooms and tore communities apart. After Emily, he didn’t want to be responsible for any more dead bodies. Each death at the elevator over the years had sent him spiraling down into a whiskey bottle. He maintained an impeccable safety record, doing whatever was necessary to avoid negative publicity and paint himself as the savior of the town.

  Earl had always wanted to be the good guy, despite his obvious flaws. Do good things, Earl had told him, day in, day out, without fail. Make good choices, do good things, and you become a good person. As though it was a choice to be made, like his actions could somehow shape his character instead of the other way around. Like Jason could do it if he just tried hard enough, no matter what he felt on the inside. Earl couldn’t accept what Jason inherently understood—that a person’s nature, like an animal’s, couldn’t be changed.

  “We have to give it to Kendrick,” Becca said, staring at the note. We huddled on her front porch in the dark, a lighted inflatable Santa looming over us, fan whooshing to keep it aloft. Icicle lights hung down from the gutters, flapping in the wind. I’d waited until Sunday night to talk to Becca, after Lily had gone home. I’d known what she would say, and I knew she was right, though it didn’t make the thought of walking into the police station any easier.

  “What if they just assume he’s guilty?” I said.

  “That doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s what he wanted us to do. Why else would he have left it for us to find?”

  “Then why didn’t he do it himself? He could have sent it straight to the police, gone there in person.”

  “I don’t know. But he wanted to be sure it would come out eventually.”

  Through the front window, colored lights blinked on Becca’s Christmas tree, illuminating all the glittery handprint ornaments Colton and Logan had made in their short lives. Becca and Jerry and the boys always went out to cut their tree the day after Thanksgiving, without fail. It was something she and Shane and I had done growing up, sawing down an unwieldy cedar from our own land, dragging it home through the fields. The cedars were usually too fat and rarely stood up well on their own, so we’d have to anchor them to the wall.

  “He may have made some mistakes,” Becca said. “But he was a good person. He was always helping people. Whatever he did, whatever went wrong—once he realized the mess he was in, he must have tried to fix it, to do the right thing.”

  I remembered what Theo had said about the prank that had gotten Shane in trouble back in school. How Shane had confessed without ratting Theo out. How he’d set off the firecrackers in the first place to get back at someone who’d hurt his friend, and accepted the punishment he had coming.

  “I still don’t think he could have killed a child,” Becca said.

  “Not on purpose.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t think he could have shot Macey, either. He couldn’t have looked at her and pulled the trigger. But what if it was an accident?”

  I’d been thinking about what Hannah had said, about the recent change to Roger’s visitation, how he’d fought for that extra night. If someone had thought he was taking Macey home Sunday night instead of Monday morning, they might have come after him not realizing she was there. I’d assumed that anyone who cared about Macey or had qualms about shooting a child wasn’t likely to have committed the murders, but now I wasn’t so sure.

  * * *

  —

  I kept Shane’s note folded in my coat pocket as I drove to work. Three days in a row, I parked downtown near the courthouse and walked straight past the police station, intending to stop and unable to convince my body to comply. When I got home from work on the third day, I found a beautiful handmade card from Hannah in the mailbox. A bright red cardinal adorned the front, and on the inside, in embellished script, she thanked me for bringing her a plate at Thanksgiving and told me she was grateful for our fri
endship. I was glad to see that she had gotten out her craft supplies, and I was touched by the effort she’d put into the card, though her gesture made me feel extra guilty for not telling her about Shane’s note.

  The next morning, the sun shrugged off a veil of clouds as I exited my car, one of the few times I’d seen it unobscured in recent days, and the light angled between the buildings to shine in my eyes. I told myself it was a sign, that today was the day I would give the note to Kendrick, that I would feel better once I had done so.

  I heard shouting as I passed the post office and looked up the sidewalk to see a slope-shouldered man in oil-stained coveralls throwing his arms up, hollering at Detective Kendrick, who stood firm in the face of his ranting.

  “I’m telling you, I know who did this.”

  “And I’m telling you to calm down and come inside so we can talk. I promise we will do our jobs, we will look into it, and we will find out what happened.”

  “You don’t arrest him now, he’ll run.” He gestured toward the street, and I saw his silver beard in profile, a thick mass of steel wool.

  “I can’t just arrest someone without any proof, any reason,” Kendrick said.

  “I told you, they were seeing each other. There was something going on between ’em.”

  “We will look into that, Mr. Pettit. These things take time. We are taking every tip seriously, and we are investigating.”

  He moved closer, towering over her like a posturing grizzly, and then he stomped off across the street, got into a pickup, and slammed the door.

  Kendrick watched him go, hands on her narrow hips, catching sight of me as I was about to pass by. She nodded hello, her jaw clamped tight, and I nodded back and kept walking.

  When I got to work, Rhonda, the administrative assistant who was married to Brody Flynn from the dispatcher’s office, hovered in the break room making coffee, breathless, her face pink and dewy like she’d worked up a sweat holding in a secret. It burst out of her before I could grab my coffee mug. “Did you hear about the car they found in the river?”

  “No.”

  Rhonda nodded vigorously. “Found it yesterday, and they drug it out early this morning. It was Henley Pettit’s.”

  Charlie’s friend. Crystle’s cousin, the one who liked Shane.

  “They were looking for Roger Calhoun’s truck and found her Skylark instead. They didn’t find the body,” Rhonda said, barely pausing for breath, “but they found some of her things. I guess her family thought she’d left town, didn’t know she was missing.”

  My stomach twisted, knotting itself. I wondered if she’d already been gone when I’d tried to call her, if the phone didn’t pick up because it was lost underwater.

  “This county, I swear.” Rhonda shook her head mournfully. “It’s all the drugs. Just keeps getting worse and worse. We need to get prayer back in schools before it’s too late.”

  Prayer clearly wasn’t enough, considering the staggering number of churches in Cutler County, but I didn’t say anything as I filled my mug and backed away.

  I sloshed coffee on my desk in a rush to set it down so I could text Hannah and ask if she was free to meet up that evening. I didn’t know if what had happened to Henley Pettit had anything to do with what had happened to Shane, but I didn’t want to hold on to the note any longer. I’d give it to Kendrick in the morning, and I’d tell Hannah about it first. It had been selfish to wait.

  She didn’t text back until I was leaving work, telling me I could join her and Chad at the Barred Owl. I asked if I could stop by and see her before she went out instead, but she replied that it was too late—they were already there for happy hour. I had to drive all the way home first, to let Gravy out, and while I was there, I changed out of my work clothes into jeans and boots. I hadn’t been to a bar in a long time, and I didn’t plan on staying long or having much to drink.

  The Barred Owl was out on the highway, a country bar, the kind with a mechanical bull and peanut shells on the floor. Happy hour was ending when I got there, the early crowd filing out as the night crowd began to arrive, snippets of an old Rascal Flatts song blaring out the door each time it swung open. I found Hannah and Chad in a booth near the restrooms with a near-empty pitcher of Bloody Mary beer and four shot glasses upturned on the table between them. Chad emptied the last of the pitcher into a plastic cup and pushed it toward me.

  “Sit by me,” Hannah said, her voice syrupy. “And look out for that guy!” She wiggled her fingers at Chad. “He doesn’t have an alibi. Watching TV by yourself doesn’t count.” She started an old grade-school chant. “U-G-L-Y, you ain’t got no alibi!”

  I remembered her saying that Chad had offered to take care of Roger for her. I glanced at him and he laughed.

  “Nothing to see here,” he said. “She went to talk to Kendrick today. Got her a little worked up.”

  Hannah hugged my neck when I slid in next to her, her hair smelling of onion rings and hair spray. I worried she’d had too much to drink, though Chad didn’t seem concerned. She wore a peach halter top and glittery eyeliner, her hair styled in tousled waves. Seeing her like that took me back to the night of her accident, before everything changed. She’d stopped by my house to return the stuffed Barney doll Lily had left in her car. She was dressed up, on her way out for a drink. Hey, why don’t you come with me? she’d said. Greg can watch Lily for a couple hours, can’t he?

  I had wanted to go, to carve out a space for our tentative friendship, to talk about grown-up things without filtering our conversation for tiny ears. I’d been hesitant, though, to ask Greg to watch his own daughter. He’d been working long hours, and he was tired, and I knew he would try to make me feel selfish for wanting to go out and enjoy myself.

  A young guy in a stars-and-stripes cowboy hat strutted past our table and Hannah whistled at him, admiring his tight Wranglers. “God bless America!” she hollered. Two women at the bar glared in our direction, whispering, scowls contorting their heavily made-up faces, like Hannah had no business going out, getting drunk, flirting with random men. I wondered how much time had to pass before she would be allowed to do normal things. Could the mother of a murdered child ever go out and enjoy herself again? Hannah was undoubtedly mourning, but everyone needed a break at some point, the grace to smile or laugh, or why carry on living?

  “I gotta go to the bathroom,” she said, climbing over my lap before I could scoot out of the booth. “Can you grab some more drinks?”

  “Sure,” I said. Chad and I watched her stagger toward the restroom, the ladies at the bar tracking her every move. “Is she okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, rubbing his hand over his red beard. “She hasn’t even had that much to drink, she’s just a lightweight these days. Really needed a night to relax, let loose. She’s stretched so thin you can see through her.”

  “Do you know what she wants to drink?”

  “I’ll come with you,” he said. “I think we need some shots.”

  I didn’t think Hannah needed any more shots, and I didn’t want any, either. The place was filling up, the music painfully loud, people shouting over it. It was starting to look like I’d have to find a better time to talk to Hannah.

  Chad ordered Alabama Slammers and a pitcher of Bud at the bar, and on the way back to the table I bumped into someone, literally, spilling beer onto her boots.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, looking up to see who I was apologizing to. Detective Kendrick looked back at me, her mouth set in a tight smile. She had lipstick on, a dramatic brick red, and wore a silky burgundy top and jeans, her hair swept back in a ponytail. I wished that I had put slightly more effort into fixing myself up to go out. At least brushed my hair.

  “Lacey!” Chad stepped up, threw his free arm around her shoulders. Kendrick smiled a real smile, and I realized I’d never seen so much of her teeth. Her hand lingered at Chad’s wais
t after he let go. “You know Sadie Keller? She’s a friend of Hannah’s.”

  She nodded, her eyes on him, not bothering to glance at me. “Yes, I do.”

  I felt someone brush against my elbow and turned to see Theo. “Hey,” he said, looking genuinely happy to see me. “How are you?” He shook hands with Chad and introduced himself. It didn’t occur to me, until he explained to Lacey how he knew me, that they had come to the bar together.

  “One thing I love about small towns,” he said. “I think everyone I know is here.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s great.”

  “Hey, why don’t you come sit with us?” Theo offered.

  I was about to say that I should check on Hannah, but Chad beat me to it.

  “Sure, I’ll be back in a minute,” he said, handing me my shot, downing one himself, and threading into the crowd to take the last one to Hannah.

  I followed Theo and Kendrick to their table and sat down opposite them. I hadn’t wanted a shot, but it seemed like a good idea given the circumstances. I tipped it back, cringing as the Southern Comfort seared its way down my throat.

  “So,” I said, trying to think of a topic of conversation that wouldn’t be too personal or awkward. “I heard about the car.”

  “Yeah.” Kendrick nodded. She seemed to be looking past me, over my shoulder. “And you heard me talking to Pettit this morning, I imagine.”

  “That was a little tense.”

  She shrugged. “He was upset.”

  “Was he asking you to arrest someone?”

  She rolled her head to the side, cracking her neck. “Well, he said Henley’d started working for the Sullivans not too long ago, and she’d been hanging around with Jason. Claimed they were romantically involved, but I haven’t been able to confirm it. No one’s so much as seen them in the same vicinity, aside from the Pettits, apparently. Earl couldn’t even say for sure whether Jason had ever been in the house when she was over there cleaning.”