The bathroom at Hank’s place is on the outside wall, a steel door to a tiny unisex stall, so there’s always a line. And near it, just before you step past the big plate-glass windows into semi-darkness, is the last table, the last set of orange metal stools. That night, a group of older kids sat on those stools and on each other, the rest slouching around the edges. The guys looked like they thought they were tough—tougher than bananas Foster, anyway—and the girls had long hair and piercings and dull, flat eyes. I wondered what they were doing there, right up until I saw Sophie bend down and say something to one of them, a kid—no, a man—with tattoos up and down his ropy brown arms and long black hair that didn’t quite hide the ink on his neck. I wondered right up until I saw him grab her ass.
“—then we’ll sell the extra stuff next summer,” Lyle was saying. “I figure we’ll have like a seven, eight hundred percent profit—Hey, what’s up?”
I was crouching, one foot on the metal stool, my fingers splayed on the metal mesh table top, ready to vault over it. Lyle sat opposite, looking up at me, his brow creased, his eyes curious. Then he twisted around until he saw what I saw: Sophie bending over, talking to the man who had just grabbed her ass, her dark hair hanging in a curtain, hiding her face from me.
“Hey, who’s that?” Lyle asked over his shoulder. He turned back to me. “Do you know him?”
“No,” I said through clenched teeth. I glanced at Lyle. “Do you?”
Lyle glanced again and shook his head. I stood up, determined to deal with this, whatever this was.
“Hey, Sis.” Lyle said it so quietly I barely heard him over the noise. He put his hand on my wrist; he was gentle, his fingers barely brushing my skin, but it felt like a thousand volts. “Sit down.”
I glanced at him. He looked serious and—somehow—wise. For the first time I wondered if this loser, this complete failure, knew more about raising my kid than I did. I glanced back at Sophie, her thin wrist in the black-haired man’s paw. Slowly, my eyes still on her, I sat down.
“Look, Camille,” Lyle said. He shrugged. “Sophie’s at a weird age, right? And everything that happened this year just makes it … weirder.”
“So?”
“So … cut her some slack, alright? She’s got shit to deal with.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Yeah, like that guy, okay?”
Lyle jerked his thumb over his shoulder, to where Sophie was now standing in line for the bathroom, that man beside her, his arm curled down and around her back, his hand cupping her hip, murmuring into her ear.
“She didn’t go over there right away. I mean, he’s probably just someone she met at the shop or something like that. You know, one of these people from Seattle who come out for the weekend or something.”
“It’s Tuesday.”
“You know what I mean.”
Yeah, I did know what he meant and it made some sense, even though Lyle had been the one to say it. And, more than that, I knew what I would have done—how much worse I would have done—if my mother had dared to confront me about a situation like that. So I bit my tongue when she finally came back to the table, held it all the way back to the apartment. Instead, I drove, listening to the hum of the tires on the highway and gnashing my teeth while she sprawled in the passenger seat, her face glowing in the light of her phone.
Eventually, I pulled the truck into the dark lot behind the mart. The few streets in town were empty, the trailers and houses dark. Without a word, Sophie slid out of the passenger seat, then darted to our door, unlocked it, and went upstairs. I stayed in the truck, my hands still on the wheel, listening to the steady plink, plink, plink of the engine cooling. Time passed, I don’t know how long, but the light in the bedroom upstairs stayed on. Then the engine was still, quiet.
I opened the door and stepped out of the truck. The gravel crunched under my feet as I walked around the building, to the front. Inside the mart, the red pinprick on the security camera shone near the ceiling by the coolers, the sallow light from the streetlamp casting deep shadows behind the shelves. I locked the glass doors behind me and made my way to the office. Something had been preying on my mind all day: that helicopter owned by CLA LLC.
Half an hour later, I knew which types of commercially available helos had a range to get me from Chelan over the rough, deserted back country of the county to the first major highway in the United States, or over the Canadian border and back again. I knew exactly how much weight each of those could carry. And I knew that the model in the hangar in Chelan was one of the best for the job: fast and so common it was easy to hide in plain sight or on a dirt track in a back field next to a disused barn. Perfect for moving as much meth as Patrick and his fellow felons could produce.
I plugged in the USB and opened the video feed from the mart’s camera, then pressed “Fast-forward.” I sat motionless, my eyes wide and unblinking, while the first few days played, until the footage I had seen the day before with Darren flew past. Then I slowed it down, watched the time pass. I hit “Stop.” I hit “Reverse.” At 5:57 PM on the seventh day, a Thursday, a familiar truck, a black Dodge, parked in front of the mart.
Patrick, wearing a baseball cap again, came through the doors, then walked out of the picture right away. The next person through the doors moved more slowly, swaggered. He stopped in the middle of the floor, coolly looked around, said something, then strode to the counter.
I paused the video and enlarged it, squinting at the screen until I was sure the tattoo on his neck was the same one I had seen from thirty feet away at the ice cream place in Chelan that night. Then I saw the tats on his arm, the dark lines blurry on the video, and I remembered what Rhonda had told me, and I wondered. Why had she told me she’d seen Patrick with some Latino guy in Oroville? Here he was, in the mart, in front of the counter she lived at for ten hours a day, five days a week. Here they both were on what could have been the last day Patrick was alive.
But after the swaggering Latino guy arrived at the counter, after Patrick joined him there, two bottles of soda in his hands, I knew why.
It was me behind the counter. Me, on a Thursday evening after Rhonda had gone home. Me, who handed Patrick’s buddy a pack of cigarettes and took his money and put it in the till and smiled at Patrick when he probably cracked some stupid joke. Me. It had been the day after Sophie’s disastrous fifteenth birthday, when I’d stayed home and made her favorite cake and gotten her everything I could think of that I thought she’d love. When I tried to be the mother I thought she wanted. Because it had been the first birthday we were together. Just us. Alone.
But she hadn’t come home after work, and she hadn’t answered her phone. I’d tried to give her space, tried not to worry, tried not to fly into a rage when she came home insanely late, clearly drunk, clearly unconcerned. But I still hadn’t let go. She had gotten up the next morning, Thursday, grumpy and angry. I’d thought she was just hungover, but then she’d screamed at me about forgetting her birthday, about forgetting her. I stood there, in the kitchen, stunned. Her cake was in the trash where I had thrown it in a blind fury the night before. Her presents were in the office downstairs, still wrapped, where I had thrown them. And she dared—
She dared to be angry with me.
Even as I watched the video, I did not remember Patrick Beale or his friend, that tattooed jackass who knew my daughter, probably better than I’d ever want to know. It was like the rest of that Thursday had never happened. In my memory, there is only Sophie that morning, her face convulsed, her skin pale, her fists clenched tightly, running out the door.
* * *
I watched the rest of the video that night, watched it carefully, but Patrick didn’t appear again. Around midnight, I called Darren’s office, left him a voicemail about the sodas and the cigarettes and said I had something for him. I didn’t say I had the receipt that had blown into the bushes on the property next to Jeremy Leamon’s. I didn’t tell him I now knew when the little house that had been there burned. I didn�
�t tell him I thought I knew the last day that Patrick Beale had been unscathed, the last day he was just some stupid, foolish kid.
I shut down the computer and locked the steel office door, then the glass doors to the lot behind me. The day’s heat radiated off the gravel. A few crickets played, and I tilted my head up to the night sky: black velvet, pockmarked with stars.
When I walked into the apartment a couple of minutes later, light leaked from under Sophie’s bedroom door. I knocked quietly, then went in when she didn’t answer. She was asleep, sprawled on the bed, her phone clutched in her hand and earbuds in her ears. I leaned down and brushed her hair from her face, then gently pried the phone from her hand.
Suddenly, she was awake. She pushed herself up on one elbow, her eyes wide and darting.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
“You were asleep.”
“That’s mine. Give me my phone.”
Instinctively, I looked down at the phone, still held loosely in my hand. Sophie pushed herself into a sitting position and held out her hand, her fingers splayed, her palm flat and hard. The phone buzzed and a text message from someone called Nick appeared on the screen.
Hey, baby, it read. Where u at?
“Who was that at Hank’s tonight?” I asked without looking up from her phone.
“What?” Sophie said, convincingly confused.
“That guy, by the bathroom. With the tattoos.”
“Who?” she said, less convincingly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Give me my phone.”
I’m not proud of what happened next.
I gave her the phone.
I straightened up and tried to make light of it, tried to convince myself that nothing was wrong, that I was just being overly protective, irrational. Sophie snatched the phone from my hand and turned away from me. She clicked it on and began to type a reply. Her hair fell over her face as her skinny little fingers flashed over the screen. She hit “Send.”
That’s when I leaned down and snatched it back.
I didn’t listen to her howls or her threats or the abuse she hurled at me as I walked out of the bedroom. I didn’t listen to the pleading either, the wails that began when she realized I wasn’t going to cave to her anger. I didn’t listen to the whining or the sobs. I just put the phone in the back pocket of my jeans and laid out on the couch, stared unblinkingly at the uneven surface of the ceiling, and waited.
I didn’t know what else to do.
8
There’s a hill at the end of my run, on the way back to the mart. It starts slow and steady up the path from the lake, then it flattens out on the road. Every morning, I pound through a quarter of a mile of it fast, as fast as I can after however many laps. Then the hill climbs and I churn up it, sometimes running no faster than I’d walk. Every morning, my breath rips through my lungs until I reach the crest and see the mart off to my right, past the Mulvaneys’ blue trailer and the little white house that’s been empty and falling apart as long as I can remember. On the best mornings, the sun is just coming up, and the light is so golden and soft, even Little Falls looks good.
That Wednesday, the gold had already gone.
At the top of the hill, I stopped and panted, my fists on my shaking thighs. When I looked up, the sun was burning up the horizon. Unsteadily, I took off again, my heavy footsteps kicking up the dirt on the side of the road.
Twenty yards closer to the mart, a truck came from behind and sped past me, twangy country-pop blaring out of its open windows, a massive gust of wind trailing it, drying the sweat on my skin and pulling the doors of the mart open.
Open?
My quads screamed as I closed the distance at a sprint.
Hands cupped over my eyes, I peered through the window by the counter: unlit aisles; till drawer empty and open as usual; office door and cigarette case locked up tight. Probably Rhonda had just arrived early, but when I jogged around the corner, the only vehicle in the lot was my truck.
Only Rhonda and I had keys. So who was in there?
I unlocked the truck and retrieved my Glock from its lockbox under the driver’s seat. Chamber loaded, sun at my back, I crept around to the front and pushed the door open.
“Hello?” I called.
Inside, the floorboards creaked under my running shoes, and water rushed down the pipes from the shower upstairs. At least Sophie was up. I prowled the aisles: chips and popcorn, candy bars, and canned goods on the shelves, beer and soda in the humming coolers. Nothing missing, nothing out of place. Just the doors, unlocked.
Then I looked up: the pinprick light on the security camera was out.
My eyes shot to the office door, but it was closed tight. Had I come in during the middle of something?
Slowly, I leaned over the counter, Glock first. Nothing, just bare floorboards and the old shotgun Rhonda kept under the counter. I padded around the ice cream cooler, closed my fingers around the handle of the office door, and gently turned it. Unlocked.
I took a deep breath and flung the door open.
Just a room with an ugly green carpet and boxes of beer and cigarettes stacked up in the shadows along the wall. And a desk. With nothing on it.
Shit.
* * *
I was still on the phone with the insurance company up in the apartment when Darren showed up. I heard the car on the gravel, heard him get out and walk over to talk to Rhonda at the table she’d set up in the shade. She had gotten there a couple of minutes after I had, walked into the mart all casual, saying “good morning” in that gossipy way she gets when she’s got something good to tell. I almost shot her, but she didn’t take offense. Instead, she gently took the Glock from my hand, told me to go call someone, and locked up. Then she found a table somewhere and started hawking coffee and pastries to the folks who’d stopped by, wondering what was going on. It was just like her to make lemonade out of my lemons.
A few minutes later, the bell rang.
“Good morning,” Darren said after I opened the door to the lot downstairs.
“Hi,” I said, standing there like an idiot and staring at him in that brown uniform.
He smiled a little. “You said you had a break-in.”
“Yeah, in the mart.”
“So aren’t you going to let me in?”
I stared at him a moment longer: his sunglasses were resting on his chest, his black hair was slick and wet.
I blinked, shook my head, then pushed past him. “Don’t you want to see the crime scene?”
“I’d like a cup of coffee more. I already tried Rhonda, but she said it’s brewing upstairs.”
“Crime scene first, then we’ll talk about coffee.”
He trailed me around to the front, then grinned when I asked him if he was going to dust for prints. “You’re joking. Half the county’s fingerprints are on that door handle.”
“Uh, no. The doors stay open this time of year. No one except me and Rhonda touch them.”
Darren sighed, pulled his phone out, but then thought better of it. “Fine. Let’s see the inside, and then I might call Moreno and have him come up here with his gear.”
I crossed my arms, frowned. “Wow. You are a model law enforcement officer.”
Darren just laughed. “You gonna show me this crime scene, or what?”
I ground my teeth and glared at him.
“C’mon, Camille. I’m really looking forward to that coffee.”
My stomach boiled, my fist curled, my arm tensed with the punch I couldn’t throw.
I forced my fingers open, then put the key in the lock and used it to lever the door open without touching the handle. Darren grinned, then edged in through the door and held it open for me with his foot. While I fought down the bubbling rage, he walked the perimeter of the store just like I had, frowned at the racks of bottles and cans in the cooler just like I had.
“Didn’t even touch the beer, huh?”
“No.”
“That rules out a few folks.
”
After frowning up at the security camera for a few seconds, he turned back toward me. “You going to do your key trick on the office door too?”
I clenched my jaw and got the office open.
“What was on the desk?” Darren asked.
“Other than the laptop, you mean?” I said, my voice like battery acid.
He just looked at me, his face impassive. “You doing okay? You’re a little … angry today.”
“Yeah, Darren,” I said. “Yeah, I’m good. I mean, my place was robbed while I was asleep upstairs, while my kid was asleep upstairs. But you know, I’m fine.”
He nodded. “Okay, I get it.”
I wanted to tear into him, wanted to scream at him that he was supposed to fix it, that it was his goddamned job to fix it. But then he cocked his head to one side and smiled softly, and I noticed that he hadn’t shaved, noticed that he looked exhausted, that there was still a pillow crease on his cheek.
I closed my eyes, breathed levelly, and turned to the desk. I opened my eyes.
“The receiver for the camera.” I pointed. “The cord is there, on the wall. That’s why the camera isn’t on. No power supply without the receiver.”
Darren squatted, inspected the desk top. “No dust.”
“I like it clean.”
“That’s too bad,” he muttered. “Dirtiness can be a virtue.”
In spite of myself, I laughed. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
He stood up and fingered the cord hanging limply against the wall. “And the camera doesn’t record at the unit? Only at the laptop?”
I nodded.
Darren glanced around the room, saw my cache of extra beer and cigarettes. “None of your stock is missing from in here either?”
I shook my head.
“Great.” Darren rubbed his palms together, cracked his knuckles. “So, how about that coffee?”
Upstairs, Darren called Moreno on my landline. Pulled him out of bed, by the sound of it. I pretended not to listen, but later I wondered why Darren had told him to keep it quiet.
Little Falls Page 7
