“That’s kind of strange, isn’t it?” I said and cocked my head. “Most contractors get their own permits. At least, the good ones do.”
His face colored, but that grin had been stuck on with super glue.
“Naw, the owner handled it. Happens all the time.”
I made a quick notation on my pad, let him watch my pen flash over the page, then looked up. The crew mixing concrete had put down their tools, and those with the drill had left it silent, still on the ground. The kid with the fence post was slapping it softly in the palm of his hand. The wind gusted, tore a few strands of my hair loose.
“What’s this owner going to do with this land, then?” I said. “Doesn’t look like it’s fit for much of anything.”
“Can’t see that’s any of the government’s business.”
“Oh, it is. Impacts the value of the land for taxes.” I jutted my chin toward the line of posts sticking out of the dirt. “Just like this fence you boys are putting in. Say, why are you using all that wire mesh? Expensive stuff, especially if you’re going to electrify it anyway.”
The foreman shrugged. “Electricity goes down out here, it stays down. Gotta protect the crop even when that happens.”
Pen poised over my notepad, I asked, “What kind of crop?”
For a moment, he was flustered, but that wide grin was back right away.
“No idea, hon. I got no idea what they’re doin’ up here.”
“Who does?”
He shook his head. “Sorry.”
“Who do you talk to, then? Who’s your contact?”
The foreman touched the bill of his cap with one finger, then turned, his arm raised, and shouted at the crew.
“Get going, boys. We got work to do.”
* * *
As soon as I had cell reception again, I called the surveyor’s office, but a woman with a hornet up her ass told me to go to hell, more or less. Gene wasn’t much more help, but at least he told me who owned the parcel where the fence was going in. It was another LLC—Gorgon Four this time—with a Mr. Jack C. Wyatt listed as point of contact. I asked Gene to look up the contact person for the parcel where Jeremy Leamon had his ranch.
“It’s Leamon’s land,” Gene said irritably. “All you gotta do is call him.”
“Could you just look, please? I don’t have a connection where I’m at.”
He grumbled but a minute later announced in a viciously self-satisfied voice that he had been right. It was Leamon’s property, and he was the only person on the deed.
“Can you check the next parcel over?” I said. “The one to the west.” The one with the barn where I had found Patrick Beale’s body.
“Ohhh-kay.”
I heard Gene’s arthritic fingers tapping on the keyboard, heard the twangy, fuzzy strains of Merle Haggard playing from his old cassette player in the background.
“Parcel 16001-3829,” he said at last. “Owner of record: Gorgon Six LLC. Point of contact, Mr. Jack C. Wyatt.”
I mumbled my thanks, put off his questions, and hung up abruptly when he started to nag me about my manner, my professional courtesy, and half a dozen other things permanently stuck in his craw.
When I got to Chelan, I turned off the main drag and parked the truck on a side street where I could sit in the shade and watch the door of Wyatt & Johnson, Attorneys at Law. For two hours, I sat there in the truck with the windows open, trying to catch a breath of breeze, trying to figure out why I was even there. In all that time, one man entered the brick building on the corner with the big plate-glass window. He looked young, but not much younger than me, with buzz-cut blond hair, square shoulders, and a loping, relaxed kind of walk that didn’t quite hide the handgun in the holster beneath his shirt. When he left, he glanced around, took his time to put on a pair of sunglasses—just enough time to take in every car and truck in sight. Then he walked around the corner and climbed into the back seat of an old black sedan gone yellow with dust. I stayed still, slumped down in my seat with a map open on the steering wheel, like I had been for the half hour since he’d gone in. The sedan pulled away from the curb and lumbered down the street and out of sight.
* * *
I got to Crystal’s just before closing time. Her shop was the kind of place that has strings of glass beads and bells that crash against the door when you open it. It’s the kind of place where you expect a wrinkly white woman in a worn sweatshirt to emerge from racks of touristy schlock and giant half geodes with action figures glued to them. You’d expect her to assault you with sweetness and maybe even a sucker for the kiddies, but you wouldn’t be shocked when you glimpsed the knife edge hiding underneath all that sugar. And that’s what you get. Crystal doesn’t like to disappoint.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said, her bright smile fading like the Cheshire cat’s.
I continued idly picking through a bin of polished rocks. The sign on the front proclaimed, “Genuine local garnets!” Never mind there weren’t any garnets west of the Palouse. Never mind they looked like lava rock someone had dunked in a bucket of polyurethane.
“Sophie here?” I asked without looking up.
“She’s in the back.” The stink of stale cigarettes wafted off Crystal when she went past me to flip the sign on the door to “Closed.”
I straightened up, slid my hands into the pockets of my jeans. “She doing all right? Doing what you need her to do?”
“That why you’re here? Checking up on her?”
“I was in town,” I said, rolling my shoulders back. “Thought I’d save Roseann the trip.”
“Your daddy—may he rest in peace—did just fine with that girl, you know.” She turned her head away and muttered, “Better than that woman did with you, anyway.”
“What was that?”
“Oh, nothing.”
Crystal smiled. She was local, had gone to school with my father and a few other people still kicking around the Okanogan. None of them were quite like her, though.
“It’s just too bad you gotta work all the time,” she said and sighed. “It’s so hard on Sophie; she needs someone to take care of her.”
I crossed my arms. “Uh-huh.”
“But you’re just like your momma, aren’t you?” Crystal smiled again, her face creased like a dried-up apple. “Of course, she had your daddy to support her. We were all so disappointed when Sophie’s daddy ran off. Now, if I were your momma—”
I rolled my eyes. “Everyone knows you had a hard-on for my dad.”
Crystal’s eyebrows shot up. “If I were your mother, that boy would have married you. Set you right.”
Every muscle in my body tightened. Decades-old wounds throbbed. She was too close. I fell back; Crystal advanced.
“Your poor daddy,” she breathed, her head shaking like a cobra’s. “All he wanted was a good wife, a good little girl. But you and your momma …”
“He loved my mother.”
But Crystal was an unstoppable force. “Best thing that ever happened to him was that woman gettin’ herself killed.”
Without thinking, I raised my fist, pulled it back—
“Crystal?”
From where I was standing, Sophie’s voice was faint, like she was speaking from the bottom of a hole. But then the floorboards creaked, and in the corner, behind the register, the purple bead curtain parted, and Sophie appeared, smiling.
“I’ll see you tomorrow—” Sophie said, then stopped, beads falling around her dark hair, one hand on the strap of her backpack, the other holding back the curtain. The smile drained from her face. “Oh. You.”
“I—”
“Your momma’s gonna take you home,” Crystal said, turning on the syrup. She fussed over my daughter, who smiled and hugged her with the warmth and affection I’d never gotten from her. Never given either, I suppose.
Outside, Sophie slung her backpack over one shoulder, tossed her hair, and walked off.
“Hey,” I called out. “The truck’s around the corner.”
&n
bsp; Without turning around, without even looking over her shoulder, she said, “I’m not going back with you.”
“You are.”
“I’m going out tonight anyway.”
“You are not.”
Sophie whipped around, her hair flying. “I am. You can’t stop me.”
“We are going home. Now.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you. No fucking way.”
It was one of those moments that I will remember forever: Sophie, only Sophie, on the dingy sidewalk in shorts and ripped stockings, scuffed boots, and long wisps of her father’s razor blade–straight hair, dark against a tight red shirt. Sophie, glaring at me with so much independence and rebellion and—yeah—hatred that the air between us crackled. I mean, it damn near burst into flame.
“Fine,” I said, my jaw so tight it might have been nailed shut. I caught a glance of Crystal spying through the glass door, frigid disapproval on her face. I turned. And then I walked away.
“Hey!” Sophie yelled. “Hey!”
I kept walking, my legs rigid, my veins jumping.
“Hey!”
Then she was coming after me, the heels of her boots slamming into the sidewalk, the bangles on her wrists jangling.
“You can’t just leave me.”
But I could. I had. And I would again.
I kept on, went around the corner and squinted into the evening sun. Someone threw a cigarette butt from the window of a passing car, showering the street with a brief explosion of sparks. I stepped onto the tarmac, crossed diagonally, crushed the rolling cigarette butt under my heel as I went.
“Camille!” Like a toddler, Sophie stomped her foot. “Mom!”
That stopped me.
I waited with my back to her, and started walking again when she caught up. She accused me of abandoning her, threatened to call CPS. I listened for a while—grateful that at least she was talking to me—but it wasn’t long before the only sound in the truck was the steady roar of the radials on the highway.
* * *
I’d like to say it ended that night, that there was a Brady Bunch moment, a saccharine resolution—cue the theme music—and now we’re the best of friends. But it didn’t and there wasn’t. Nothing ended there.
* * *
I don’t know why Sophie expected that after a show like that, after a screaming match on the sidewalk, I would be so stupid as to believe her when she said she was going to Tracy’s, that they were going to watch a couple of movies, have some popcorn. I hope she didn’t think I was so stupid I would just believe her when she said she’d be back before midnight and that I shouldn’t wait up.
I watched from the window with the lights out, low profile like I learned when I deployed, my binoculars trained on her as she walked down the street and slipped into the yard of Tracy’s parents’ place. But the front porch light didn’t go on, and a few minutes later a low-slung car turned the corner, its headlights spraying the cracked pavement with yellow light. It drove the two short blocks that measure the width of my town, then paused and idled just long enough for the doors to briefly open and slam shut.
After I grabbed my keys, I flipped the lights on in the apartment and ran down to the truck. I followed carefully, at a discreet distance, grateful these roads were quiet, but not entirely empty, after dark. After a while, I figured we were headed toward Chelan, maybe back to Hank’s, but then the car blew past town and turned onto a long road that led into one of the fancy developments near the lake. I drove past the street where the car turned, then flipped off my lights and, in the darkness, turned around and followed the red brake lights. When the low rider slowed at the end of the road, I watched four, maybe five kids pile out of it.
Light from the house at the end of the cul-de-sac spilled out of two-story windows onto strings of cars parked haphazardly in a manicured yard. Kids in short shorts and T-shirts or no shirts glowed in the light. Loud music and shouting drifted to where I sat a hundred feet away, tapping my fingers on the steering wheel.
I had no idea what to do. Barge in and drag her out? Slink back home and pace the floor? I was damned either way. So I did the only thing that made sense: I watched. For two hours I watched, from the truck at first, then later from across the road, my knees in the dry dirt, my shoulder pressed against a tree, sweat rolling down my back inside a fleece jacket, the darkest thing I had in the truck.
It looked like a normal teenage party: cheap beer and vomiting in the bushes, crappy music and posturing, just at a nicer place than I’d ever been invited. The longer I watched, the more familiar it felt, the more I felt myself being drawn in. I half-expected Oren, my ex, my daughter’s deadbeat dad, to walk around a corner, plastic cup in one hand, blunt in the other. He was tall and rangy, like the guy from the ice cream place. But the Oren I remembered was younger, cruder, volatility always flashing in his eyes. And after Oren there would be Billy Boykin, his buddy, his shadow. Billy who was two years younger than Oren, the same age as me, and complicit in everything—everything—Oren was up to. Billy, the black-haired Irish kid from town who hung out with Oren, the bastard, whose Colville daddy had abandoned the family years before, whose white momma was a bigger basket case than just about anyone else I knew, whose little brother Lyle was safe at home, tucked up in bed, too young for even Oren to corrupt. At least, that’s what I thought then.
But it wasn’t Oren or Billy who followed Sophie out the massive front door of the house by the lake. It was a different boy—a man—who appeared in the doorway after she’d plowed through it, a couple of girls in her wake, and stalked down the road. The man had hair cut like a soldier, his arms crossed over his bare, muscular chest, a pair of jeans hanging loosely from his narrow hips.
He called after Sophie, told her to come back. When at first she didn’t return, his tone changed from smirking to commanding, and I saw her pause, saw her hesitate on the pavement. She turned, and for a moment, I thought she was cowed. But her friend opened the car door, and in the light of the cab I saw my daughter lift her chin and lift her hand to flip off the guy standing in the door. And I saw the anger flash across his face, saw him drop his arms and start down the stairs, saw the porch light glow on the muscles rippling across his back. Saw the narrow-eyed watchfulness I had seen before, outside Jack Wyatt’s.
I darted through the trees, bent far over, branches tearing at my hair, until I reached my truck. By then the low-slung car had roared past, swaying on its crapped-out springs as a kid too drunk to drive drove anyway. I flung myself into the cab, but before I could tear after that car and force it to the side of the road and pull my daughter out of it if I had to, I saw soldier boy yelling and three—no, four—flunkies pouring out of the house. One of them was the guy from the ice cream shop, the guy from Sophie’s photos. Nick or not-Nick, his long black hair stringy on his inked shoulders and a shotgun in his hand. All of them in pursuit of my daughter.
New threat. New plan.
I slid out of the truck and slipped to the rear, balanced my Glock on the tailgate, and squeezed the trigger until the safety popped.
Everyone except Nick was climbing into vehicles; he was shouting something I couldn’t hear over the music and the roar of the partiers. But it made soldier boy stop even as the headlights of the forward vehicle—another dark-colored sedan—penetrated the darkness. I took aim, his head tiny and fragile, like a ripe grape, in my sights.
They exchanged a few words and the black-haired guy shouldered his weapon and turned back to the house. Soldier boy slammed the door of the sedan and followed, his flunkies slowly trailing him.
I released the trigger and breathed again.
It was only when I pulled out of the ditch several long minutes later that I noticed the dark-colored truck parked across the road. I lifted my foot from the gas, flipped on the headlights, and read the license plate as I rolled past.
I knew that truck.
And so had Patrick Beale.
* * *
That night, I watched
the video again, upstairs, with the USB drive plugged into my work computer. It’s not like I was going to sleep. And anyway, I hadn’t watched it—really watched it, not just played “Where’s Patrick Beale?”—all the way through, beginning to end. That’s why I hadn’t seen the light-colored truck with a guy with a blond buzz cut at the wheel. It was the guy from Jack Wyatt’s office, whose shirt still didn’t conceal his weapon. Soldier boy from the party. On the video, he got out and filled the tank at the pump in front of the mart. In the passenger seat was Nick, the sunglasses on his face looking like shit had been smeared over his eyes, picking his teeth with his fingernail. And in the back seat, there was a girl. She was looking away, her long, dark hair turned toward the camera.
I slowed down the video and watched soldier boy go into the mart and pay Rhonda. I watched him walk back out into the glare of the sun, two sodas in one hand and a lump like a pack of cigarettes in his pocket. Then he climbed into the truck. My face inches from the screen, I watched while he pulled away from the gas pump, clearing the view to the back seat of the club cab. As the truck rolled out of the frame, the girl turned her head. And I saw my daughter’s eyes look back at me.
9
Sand blasted my face, skidded across my visor.
Heat shimmered off the tarmac, distorted the limbs of the orderlies jogging toward the helicopter slowly, so slowly, like insects in amber.
Sunlight danced on the table between them, flashed and played as its wheels bounced over ridges, dove into cracks from the munitions craters sunk into the airfield. Dazzled until the body bag was dragged onto the table and swallowed the light.
Then.
A tall corporal leaning against the hospital intake desk. His badge was Mortuary Affairs, but his smile blinded, his black skin gleamed. Too pretty to be an undertaker.
I said, “I’ll help.”
He frowned. I insisted. He scrutinized, then sympathized. He empathized. He mourned for me, for the loss of someone I loved.
Little Falls Page 9
