“Hey,” he said softly, trying what was probably meant to be a warm smile. “Camille. We’ll get them. You’ll be fine.”
“No, I won’t. They broke into my store. They stole the fucking evidence, the fucking evidence that I found. And they—they sprayed that place down. They bleached it, erased it. They erased Patrick’s blood and shit and, and … and …”
Darren stepped forward, but I went rigid, my muscles coiled to fight. He stopped, held a hand out, appeasing.
“It’s okay. They’re not going to get away with it. They’re not going to do anything to you.”
“Do you know what they did to him?” I said, fighting myself, fighting the urge to scream. “Can you even imagine?”
He nodded. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “I saw the doc’s report.”
“Then you know what they would do to me. You know what they’ll do if they saw me, if they know who I am and what I saw.”
Then, suddenly, a new panic shot through my veins like ice water and pulled me through to the other side, the side where I had lived for years in the desert. The side where everything is black and white and afterward … Afterward, everything is fragments.
“Oh my God,” I breathed. “Sophie.”
* * *
That afternoon was blurred fields and hills receding in my rearview as I sped to the next place I thought I might find her, damning her for not answering her phone the first time I called, then the fifth and the fifteenth. I went to all the places to eat in Omak, in Okanogan, all the way down to Chelan. I went to Crystal’s shop and Hank’s, the ice cream place where she’d flirted with that tattooed motherfucker. And then I went to the first place I should have gone.
It was one of those perfect days at Lake Chelan: dry and sunny and hot, the sound of motor boats and distant, distorted music ricocheting in the hills. I turned onto the street where I had followed Sophie the Wednesday before. During the day, it was quiet, the street deep in the shade of ponderosa pines, the yards perfectly sculpted around the huge houses set back from the road. But there was the driveway where the black Dodge truck had been parked, and there were the shrubs that had picked my fleece jacket apart, and there was the house my daughter had stormed out of late that night, the night when she’d had a shotgun at her back.
I stopped the truck on the street, and for a long time I watched and waited. The entire street seemed deserted, but no house more so than the one where the party had been. All the blinds were drawn, the driveway empty, the yard pristine. Eventually, I tucked the Glock in my hand, held it rigidly at my side, and walked slowly to the front door, the nerves in my body so tight, a feather would have made them snap.
I knocked on the door with my left hand, my right forefinger hovering over the trigger. Out on the water, someone whooped and a speedboat engine roared with all its cylinders, but the house remained silent. I knocked again. Nothing. So I walked the perimeter, keeping my head low and my guard up while trying to be as inconspicuous as a woman in a little black dress in the middle of the day can be. Finally, I found a window where the blinds weren’t completely shut, but there was nothing to see: no plastic cups, no overflowing ashtrays, no empty beer cans, not even furniture. Nothing to indicate that anyone had ever been there.
I circled back around to the front, wondering if it was the wrong house, if I had driven down the wrong road, if I had dreamed the whole thing. There are times when I can’t trust my memory, can’t trust my mind. But then I saw it: a cigarette butt tossed aside and missed under a shrub beside the front walk. And I remembered when, at the party, the blond lieutenant was angry, how he shouted at my daughter and threw aside a cigarette hard and fast, orange sparks exploding on the pavement in the dark. And I remembered watching the glowing butt roll off the pathway and wink out.
Faintly, I heard my county phone ring, and my heart almost exploded as I sprinted back to the truck. When I picked it up, the caller ID was for the mart, and I guessed it was only Rhonda Faye, irritated that I’d destroyed her entire Saturday.
I answered, apologies at the ready, and—“Camille?” Sophie’s always irritated voice said. “Camille? Are you there?”
I’d like to say I read her the riot act. I’d like to say I raced home and at least hugged her or told her I loved her. But I didn’t. I couldn’t.
On the phone, I told her to stay put, to stay at the apartment, that I’d be home soon. Then I tore up the highway, my heart bursting with fear and relief and joy that she was okay, that they hadn’t gotten to her, that she hadn’t been punished for my sins again.
But when I opened the door, the apartment was silent, the air suffocating and stale. Only a wisp of her shampoo—green apple—lingered.
“Sophie?”
The bathroom door was open, the one to her bedroom closed. Padding across the floor, Glock in hand, I approached the far end of the apartment at a wide angle. Reflected in the bathroom mirror were the plain white wall and the rose-colored toilet. Half a step further and I saw the shower curtain hanging limply, gathered at one end of the tub.
“Clear,” I breathed.
I advanced to the bedroom. Shoulder blade against the doorframe, I reached around the corner and turned the knob of the bedroom door slowly before flinging it open. Silence. Blood pounding in my temples, I pivoted into the opening, pointing the gun into every corner of the room. Sheet twisted at the foot of her empty bed, laundry piled on the floor, pink backpack slouched beside the white desk. Disarray. Normal disarray.
She was gone.
I flipped open my county phone, the one she had called an hour and a half before, and dialed her number. It went straight to voicemail. Pacing hard, the heels of my pretty black pumps ripping into the carpet, I tried again and again. Where the hell had she gone?
That’s when I saw the note.
It was on the counter, on top of the day’s mail. In Sophie’s loopy scrawl, it read: I need a new phone. And there, beneath it, was the phone I had been calling all afternoon and again only minutes before. It was broken, mangled, crushed under the tires of a car. Or a truck. Or a Chevy Suburban.
She was with them, those assholes in the black and red Suburban. The note didn’t say it, and she hadn’t said it on the phone, but I knew it was true. Willingly? Maybe, but that wasn’t any better.
On the table, the screen of my work laptop reflected the last burning rays of the sunset. I snatched my phone off the counter and sat down, booted up the computer, and opened the files I had taken from Sophie’s phone after confiscating it earlier that week. Then I dialed.
He answered after three rings, fumbling, scratching like he had his hand over the receiver. And in the background, there was thumping bass almost drowned out by a roaring fan.
“Yeah,” he drawled, distracted.
My free hand tightly fisted on the table, I demanded, “Where is she?”
“What?”
“Where is my daughter?”
“Who is this?”
There it was, a slight accent, like a slant in his voice. It was him, the black-haired, tattooed Latino from Hank’s and the mart video and Oroville. I had been right: this was Nick.
I stood up, grabbed my keys, prepared to run wherever, to do anything for her, for my girl. “Where is my daughter?”
“The fuck are you talking about?”
“If you touch her, if you … I swear to God, I will rip your throat out with my teeth.”
He laughed, giggled like a little boy tormenting a fly.
“You some crazy bitch,” he said and sighed. Then, his voice hardened, sharpened. “But you got no idea who you messin’ with.”
The line went dead.
* * *
Sophie came home later. I wanted to rage, wanted to scream. Instead, I cried. Ran to her.
She pushed me away.
15
Just after the boom, after the orange flash and the heat on my face, the screams piercing my ears. Just after the horror, I was on the floor, my rifle in my hands, locked and loaded. The
corner: it was the most secure point. I low-crawled, my weapon in front of me, then crouched against the wall, high enough to see out the window, low enough to not get shot. The long steel barrel of my rifle balanced on the ledge.
Outside: an inferno.
A rocket. It must have been a rocket.
But I hadn’t heard the whine of its entry, hadn’t heard the alarm. A moment later, that didn’t matter because below me, outside, someone was running toward the flames, running with something in his hands, another bomb, another incendiary. Something. And when I saw, I screamed in Arabic: Get away! I will shoot! But before I could aim, before I could trap the asshole in my sights, the screaming was closer, louder, the crying panicked, shrill.
I pivoted on my knee, aimed my weapon at the immediate threat: a little brown girl, her huge eyes wide with terror, rags hanging off her too thin shoulders, hands held high, begging. Ya Allah.
Outside, another blast. More shouts, running. Then the roar of a fire extinguisher briefly eclipsed the crackle of burning oil.
Inside, the freckles on the girl’s face danced in the light of the flames. And I remembered that I have freckles, that my daughter, my baby, has freckles too.
I looked down at my rifle, but it wasn’t my M16. I looked at my hands and saw the fine wrinkles. Looked at my legs and saw bare skin.
I looked up at the girl, cowering, quivering.
And then I saw.
My daughter.
Myself.
The rifle fell from my hands.
16
That night was terrible: the fire and explosions and filthy black smoke rising from my bombed-out truck quickly faded under the onslaught of a circle of neighbors with fire extinguishers. Then the sirens and wild red lights when the sheriff’s boys finally arrived, the whole population of Little Falls standing huddled in their pajamas, drinking beer because there was no point in letting a spectacle go to waste. But I couldn’t watch.
Instead, I threw Sophie’s clothes into a duffel bag while she sat, shaking and white-faced, her eyes wider than wide, on the edge of her bed. Then I picked up the phone. Booked her a flight to Detroit in the afternoon. Called my aunt, Martha, who I hadn’t talked to since calling to say Dad had died. Before I could ask, she said she would be at the airport to collect Sophie. Before I could explain, before I could say anything, she said she would do anything. Because blood is thicker than anything else. Just like it had always been between me and her.
Then I called Lyle to take Sophie to the plane in Seattle. I didn’t want him involved, didn’t want to explain, didn’t want to trust him. But he was the only person I could think of at two o’clock in the morning who I thought loved Sophie as much as I did. And I had to get her out of there, had to get her out of danger, away from me.
When Lyle arrived an hour later, when he pulled into the front lot in the crappy old car he was driving back then, I hustled Sophie down the stairs, threw her duffel into the back seat, pushed my cell phone into her hand, and slammed the door. She looked like a refugee. Staring, but not seeing, her knees drawn up against her chest, the seat belt cutting into her neck. She looked like a little child.
I stood there in the raging darkness long enough to see Lyle fire the engine, but then I turned away. I didn’t watch her leave.
It was the first time she’d ever obeyed me.
The next morning, long after my truck had stopped smoking, long after it had been towed away to the Sheriff’s Office in Okanogan and everyone had gone home, I went downstairs and sat down on a milk crate at the edge of the parking lot. My head was pounding, fogged. All I wanted was sleep, but sleep would bring dreams—of the explosion the night before and other explosions from nights and days long before.
I couldn’t handle any more dreams.
“You sure you don’t want me to make some coffee?”
I shook my head.
“A couple of eggs? Toast?”
I leaned farther forward, cracked my spine.
“Bowl of cereal?”
I yawned, hid it badly. Then I looked over my shoulder at Darren, sitting beside me on another milk crate.
“You saying you’re hungry?” I said.
“Yeah, actually.”
The skin under Darren’s eyes was puffy and dark, and his jaw was peppered with stubble.
Slowly, I sat up, cracked my neck. “I didn’t ask you to stay.”
“What are friends for?”
I arched my back, reached behind me, and tightened my ponytail. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Darren watching me.
“You don’t have to stay.” I leaned forward again, forearms on thighs.
He pursed his lips, slapped his hands on his knees, and for a second I thought he would just leave. Panic, burning like battery acid, rose in my chest. Instead, he reached back, pulled his phone off his belt, and started typing. I balled up my fists, breathed deeply, forced myself to stare at the singed branches on my neighbor’s tree.
“Don’t look so relieved,” Darren muttered.
Startled, I jerked my head around. “The hell I do.”
He grinned, kept typing.
“So, what now?” I said after a while.
“You call your insurance company, I guess.” He lifted his hip, tucked the phone back into its holster. “I wonder how much they’re gonna raise your rates now. I mean, if they don’t just drop you. You make two claims in one week and I’d drop your ass.”
“Thanks,” I snarled. “You’re such a good friend.”
I heard a vehicle pull too quickly into the lot out front, gravel grinding under the tires, popping and bouncing in the wheel wells. I rocketed to my feet, ready to run. There was a blast of classic rock when the door opened, the engine left running. Then boots grinding the gravel, then knocking on the glass doors. “Rhonda?” the guy yelled when he realized the doors were still locked. A few moments later, the truck’s door slamming shut, and its engine revving, then its thick, throaty roar, like a big man gargling whiskey, when it shot out onto the road.
Wearily, I sat down, said, “We’re closed.”
I pulled up my knees, put my head down, but the explosion was still there on the inside of my eyelids. When I opened them again, Darren was standing, looking down at me, his eyes worried, thoughtful.
“Moreno should have something for us today,” he said quietly, then sat down again. “About the explosion, I mean. It won’t be complete, but he should have a good idea of what set it off.”
I nodded.
“We’ll have to get the feds involved.”
“Good.” I nodded again. “When do you want me to talk to them?”
“They’ll only talk to me. They just review the evidence.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah,” he said, like it was obvious. “Standard operating procedure.”
“Jesus,” I muttered.
“What?”
“Oh, come on,” I started, then thought better of it. Instead, I leaned down and pried a piece of gravel out of the dirt, dug it into the skin of my finger and thumb.
“Tell me,” he said.
I swallowed hard. He had looked at me the day before like I was nuts. Had gone to draw his gun because he thought I was cracking up. And maybe I was. Fuck. Maybe I was just jumping to conclusions, letting the paranoia surge. I mean, engines burn sometimes, don’t they? Spark plug goes and poof. Up in smoke. But in the middle of the night? I ground my teeth, tried to sift through the thoughts swirling in my mind, to spot the ones that were crazy, so I wouldn’t say them out loud.
Finally, I said, “They’re connected. The laptop and the truck.”
Darren frowned, then stooped to pick up his own piece of gravel. He tossed it at one of the potholes in the lot, and it smacked into another loose piece; both shot off like BBs.
“I know they’re connected, Darren.”
“What’s your theory?”
“This is about fear. They’re trying to scare me.”
“You said yesterday they
were going to kill you.”
“They must think I don’t know enough to kill.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
Nick. But I didn’t want to explain, didn’t want to admit to Darren what I had done.
“Whoever killed Patrick Beale,” I said instead, which I thought was the truth anyway.
He tossed another piece of gravel, then another and another. The silent treatment.
“Darren.”
“Yeah?”
“This is about Patrick Beale.”
“He blew up your truck?”
“Ha,” I said. Neither of us laughed.
Darren threw another rock out into the lot.
“It’s about the video. And …” I paused, then plunged on. “And that trailer: the bleach and the … the equipment. I was right. And they want me to back off.”
“You don’t know that.”
“They know who I am, Darren,” I snapped. “You know it and I know it.”
“You said no one saw you,” Darren said quietly.
“What?”
“At the trailer.” He jutted his chin toward the trailer across the road—a dead ringer for the one I had found in the trees two days before. “You said no one saw you at the trailer. That there was no one there.”
“No, but I …”
I couldn’t tell him that I’d brought this down on myself, on my daughter. That I had called Nick, threatened him. Or that I wasn’t sure anymore, not sure about what I had seen or not seen. That if I hadn’t remembered about the truck that had almost run me off a cliff, then maybe I was forgetting other things, more important things. Of course, it didn’t help that I had so little information to start with—
“Camille?”
“I don’t know what they”—I threw my arm wide—“whoever they fucking are—know. I don’t know what anyone knows because no one will tell me a goddamn thing.”
Darren grabbed my hand, ducked down, hissed at me to keep my voice down.
“It’s just meth, Darren,” I said, ignoring him, snatching my hand back. “It’s been here forever. Why string up a kid over it?”
Little Falls Page 14
