“What are you going to do?” Harry said urgently.
“Log in at unipoint dot cn. Address is Indian Valley Meats. Password is one niner six three kennedy.”
“And?”
“At twenty-three twenty-two precisely.”
The line went silent.
“Harry?” Frantically, I shifted the phone. The call had ended, the screen just a black background with the county seal. I scrolled through my calls, wanting to call him back, but you can’t call an unlisted number. That’s the point. I had a feeling no one would answer now anyway.
I spent that night in the basement of the county building, pawing through property records—tax filings, deed transfers, tax inspection records, parcel maps—everything. What I found on the computer, I checked in the files. What I found in the files, I checked on the computer. And the longer I spent, the deeper I dove, the more confused, the more on edge I became. Because everything had changed.
Sure, Jeremy Leamon’s ranch was still deeded in his name, but where the parcel map had been blank before, there was now a barn. On the neighboring property, the one with the burn circle, the one where Don McEnroe had lived until he sold up to Leamon’s bogeyman, there was no barn. And the other properties, all the places on Harry German’s list, were registered in the names of ordinary people, a bunch of Bobs and Sues and Mikes, not Gorgon Four or CLA or any other LLC. But those names, that barn—they were all in my memory, clear and bright as day. Hell, they were written in my notebook, the one that had quickly filled with scrawled notes on Patrick Beale’s murder, the one I had gone back out to the truck to retrieve hours before it went up in flames. In the property tax records, nothing. No records for CLA LLC; no trace of the helicopter or the forklift or the black Dodge truck that Patrick Beale had driven.
But that was impossible. Even Harry had records. Even Harry found those names—
Harry.
I grabbed my phone, checked the time: 11:07. I turned to my laptop, entered the site, and waited for it to load. After it had, I typed the address and the password into the only boxes that made sense on a page full of Chinese. The screen changed. An email account opened, everything labeled again in Chinese. I clicked on the folders, clicked on everything with a link. The minutes on the clock slowly turned over. 11:18, 11:19. There was nothing there. Nothing behind the links. Just more Chinese. I glanced at the clock in the corner of the screen. 11:21. I went to a web translator, typed in “draft,” and matched the characters to what I saw on the screen. Found the right folder, clicked on it. But there was nothing.
Reload. Reload. Reload—and then, there it was. One draft email. No text. Three attachments, all jpegs. Three photos of sheets of paper arranged on a deeply scratched wooden table. Government issue. And when I zoomed in, I saw the name: Kingman, James Lionel.
I plugged my USB into the laptop and saved the photos. Two minutes later, they were gone.
For hours, I stared at the screen, squinting at the grainy photographs of Captain James Kingman’s personnel record, then plotting points on a map, then diving back into the county databases again. Each time, I came up empty-handed.
The personnel record was a model: physical fitness outstanding, educational achievements unsurpassed. Record-breaking advancement in ranks. More medals than I wanted to count. All in eight years of service: 2002 to 2010. But this Kingman, this version of him, had never been to Iraq. I searched online for that record, the obituary that stated he had survived in Iraq while his brother died at home in Oklahoma in 2005. The last year I was in Iraq, the last year Havers had been alive. The obit I would swear on a Bible I had seen before—but there was nothing. Not even a historical record.
I searched for Nick, for a Latino called Nick in California or Washington, then searched Victor Calzón, the name I had found in Darren’s records, the name that Billy Boykin had used at the prison. Still nothing.
The maps were just scattered dots. No pattern. No rhyme. No reason.
The county databases were blank. There were no companies registered under the names Harry had found less than a week before. There were no records of anything I had seen or heard or written down and saved to the same USB that flashed green every time I dumped more files onto it.
I buried my face in my hands. I scraped my nails through my hair. I pounded my fist on the table. And then I got up and paced back and forth across the cold concrete floor.
The files were wrong. They had to be wrong.
The data was there, the information was there. It was. Why else would I have written it in my notebook? Why else would I have gone out to that trailer where Patrick Beale had been tortured? Why would I have gone to the lake house and the airfield? Why would I have gone all the way to see Billy Boykin in that concrete prison? Why would I have gotten Harry to dig up Jimmy King’s records at all?
I wouldn’t have. No way.
I wasn’t just crazy.
I couldn’t be just crazy.
I couldn’t be broken.
Not like that.
In the numbing silence, deep in the back of my head, the whirr of rockets, the staccato burst of M16s, the buzzing of the desert wind began. But at the fringe, at the edge of hearing, a tiny voice spoke: Think, Camille. Don’t just react. Think.
Who could change the records? A lawyer, someone like Jack Wyatt. But that would take too long, that would leave a trace. To hide your tracks, you’d need someone on the inside.
Who had access?
I jerked my head up from my keyboard, scanned the room, scrutinized the dark corners, my nerves on fire. There was the guy in charge of records. His coffee cup—always half empty—was on the wide oak desk by the door, the one with an old desktop computer on it. Maybe. Who else? IT. The mousy woman with hair the same dirty gray as her cardigan and glasses thicker than the bottom of a high ball. Yeah, right. Who else? The land use guy, who sat in the office next to mine, who had back issues of some hippy magazine stacked on his desk. No way. The assessor, my boss, my father’s boyhood buddy—an old man who didn’t know how to turn on a computer. No. Gene. Ha. Me.
Me.
I looked down at the screen of my computer. The cursor flashed on and off—green, then nothing—in our old database program. It was at the end of someone’s name. Not just someone, a property owner. A name that could have been Gorgon Six LLC the week before. Off and on. All I needed was the delete key. On and off. And a new map shoved in the file drawer late at night. Off and on. And then, boom.
No fucking way. No fucking way I was that crazy.
But the records on my laptop—
That was it, that had to be it. The laptop. It had logins and passwords, but how hard would they be to break? How hard would it be to hack into the records of a backwoods county with systems that had been around longer than me? Not hard at all. And if someone went looking, if they dug through the ones and zeroes, would they find my fingerprints? Would they see my login? Would they believe me when I said that I didn’t do it?
I slammed the laptop shut.
21
The eastern horizon was just starting to lighten when I stopped the car outside Omak: the moon was still out, the stars were fading fast, and the sky was that velvety blue-black you get before the hottest days. The clean scent of the Okanogan at dawn mingled with the funk of gasoline as I filled the tank.
My brain buzzed, trying to make sense of the cover-up —because that’s what it was, what it had to be. But why? It wasn’t like the Sheriff’s Office was any closer to the truth. It wasn’t like I was any closer. Or maybe that was it; maybe I was closer to finding out what had really happened with Patrick. But what did it matter now? I had seen the originals, I knew the records on the system and in the drawers were fake.
But I couldn’t prove they were fake. I couldn’t prove anything. Every time I went looking, at every place I visited, with every person I spoke to … it was only me. Alone. There was no one to back me up, no one to corroborate what I had seen. Not Darren. Not Harry. Not Sophie. Not even Lyle
. If I went to Darren with what I knew, with just my memory and notes about what the record showed, I’d look like just another damaged vet. Seeing things. Hearing things. Believing things that weren’t real.
The pump handle clicked; the gasoline stopped flowing.
It was Iraq again. It was Havers again.
I held my head in my hands and sunk to my heels, my ass sliding down the side of Rhonda’s little red car.
Could I even trust myself?
The night I sent Sophie away flashed through my head. Had I done something like that before? Had I dreamed something and made it real? Had I blacked out and done something terrible? Stolen my own laptop, blown up my own truck, changed the county records? Purged the evidence of Patrick Beale’s torture? Trashed the recording he made? Was it me?
I rocked on my heels, slamming my head against the steel quarter panel of the car, my arms crossed over my knees, my fingers digging into my shoulders, my thumb digging into the scar under my left clavicle, willing it to hurt, willing it to scream like it did in the desert, something else to focus on, something else to worry—
The hospital. There were machines everywhere: whirring, beeping, clicking. And it smelled. Bleach and BO and that soap we used—chemical bubblegum. I moved my head to the left, opened my eyes a crack, as far as I could. Bandages. My shoulder was covered in white gauze bandages, wrapped tightly and stained with blood. My blood.
Then.
The hospital again, but this time I was sitting up, this time I was in the first sergeant’s office. He was saying something about access to records—no, he was denying me access to records. And I was reporting that something was wrong, that documents were missing, that I just wanted to see if what I remembered was real. I just wanted to know if the other soldiers, the three who were with me when I found Havers, remembered what I did.
He shook his head, glanced at the door. I stood and shut it. He closed his eyes. He sighed, then said, “You know nothing about this, understand? This never happened.” And I nodded and hoped. But then, a few minutes later, his brow creased, his eyes darkened. He looked up from the computer and said, “They’re dead.”
I shook my head, wouldn’t believe it.
But the first sergeant said, “Their convoy was attacked. A few weeks ago. All three of them, they’re dead.”
Then.
The mortuary, the front entrance, a heavy steel door painted gray. Inside, a tiny office with a photo of the president next to the door. Bush the Second. No one there remembered me; I didn’t remember them. All new. They were all new, rotated onto base the same day the surgical team extracted a bullet half an inch away from my heart.
Then.
The first sergeant’s office again. “I’m not obsessed,” I said.
But the first sergeant frowned; he wasn’t convinced. “Take it easy, find something else to focus on,” he said. “You’re almost healed. You’ll be off light duty soon.”
Then.
A few days later, Major Brittan’s beige steel door again. The major himself, sitting behind his scratched desk again, his intense, crackling blue eyes again, ordering me to stop asking questions, to stop interfering. With what, I wanted to know. Was he saying there was an official investigation into Private Havers’s death?
“I’m doing you a favor, Sergeant,” he said. “You won’t like the answers anyway.”
I countered, “I want the truth.”
The major smiled, a patronizing smile, a Sunday school teacher’s smile. “You’ll feel better after you get back to work, Sergeant. Work makes you free.”
The next morning, a sheet of paper delivered to my desk: new orders, temporary orders, signed by Major Brittan. Germany. No argument. No resistance. So I went to Germany, and for five weeks of rainy mornings, I cut grass and raked leaves and polished brass, my fingers itching for my M16. And for an hour every afternoon, I sat on a scratchy yellow sofa and stared at the wall of an Army psychologist’s office, never opening my mouth. Then I went back to the sandbox.
Then.
In Iraq, I was shunned, ignored. I was that big, bad monster, the one we all feared we would become: a broken soldier, battle-crazed and shipped off to the shrinks. No one would talk to me, no one would even look me in the eye. And every record, every document I could get my hands on had been purged. The bare facts about Havers were there, yeah, but nothing else. No flight record for when we went out to retrieve him, no journal entries in the hospital for when we brought him in. It was like his corpse appeared out of nowhere, a bloated gift left on the doorstep of the morgue.
I stopped asking questions, but I didn’t stop looking for answers.
Then.
I got the message to go home. The message that my mother had been smeared across the highway.
I don’t remember driving from the gas station to the cemetery, but I remember being there at daybreak, staring at Patrick Beale’s tombstone. It’s small and gray. Granite, I guess. And carved into it are his name and his dates and a baseball diamond. It’s out in the open, near the edge of the cemetery, not far from the edge of the bluff. If he had been alive just then, alive at the end of August, he could have stood on his grave and looked out over the valley, looked out at the blue river and the lines of green and gold and red climbing up the flanks of the hills.
The valley had been white when we buried my mother. White and pink and pale, pale green, the color of apple orchards blooming, the color of pear trees unfurling their first leaves.
When we buried Dad, it was electric green, the green of trees pumping sap into branches and leaves and new fruit.
They were there too, rotting under headstones like Patrick Beale’s: small and gray, flush with the grass. The white lilies on Patrick’s had browned in the sun. And someone had left a six-pack of cheap beer, all the bottles empty except one. I didn’t know what was on my parents’ graves, whether there were flowers, whether they were real or fake. I didn’t remember what was written on their stones—can’t remember what I’ve never seen. But I knew they were there, fifty yards away on the other side of the cemetery, lying in the dirt under the camellia I could see from the parking lot, the camellia my father and my daughter had planted one Saturday long, long before, while I sat alone with a bottle and the memories screaming through my head and my mother’s voice echoing, telling me that someday, someday, I would understand. Someday I would stop looking for revenge. Someday I would regret—
“What are you doing here?”
I jumped, turned fast, my hand on the holster just inside my jacket, the M9 almost out before I stopped myself, before I realized who was there.
“Todd,” I said. Patrick’s brother. I slid the pistol back into its holster, slid my hand out of my jacket, casually, like I hadn’t been about to blow him away.
“I asked you what you’re doing here,” Todd said. His voice had more menace in it than he could ever deliver.
“Just paying my respects,” I said between ragged breaths, fevered blood still racing through my veins. I breathed again, forced myself to focus, to calm down.
“Yeah?” he said sarcastically. His face was screwed up, creased with anger. He turned his head to the side, spat on a grave.
“It was a nice funeral,” I said. “Lot of people there.”
“Why do you even care? You didn’t know him.”
I frowned, studied the kid in the pale light of the rising sun. He was panting. Sweat shone on his face, dampened his dark blond hair, soaked his gray shirt. Out for a run. I could relate.
I shrugged. “My daughter did.”
His jaw tightened, his eyes narrowed. “You didn’t even know that until I told you.”
“Yes, I did.”
“No, you didn’t. I told you.”
I stiffened, clenched my fists.
“Look, kid—”
“You didn’t know he was fucking her,” Todd snarled. “That’s illegal, you know. It’s called statutory rape. You didn’t care about that.”
I ground my teet
h, flexed my hands. I tasted the rage—metallic, raw, like fresh blood—rising quickly in my throat. And I wanted to let it go, wanted it so badly. I wanted to rage at him, the little punk, questioning me, condemning me. Rage at Sophie for putting me in that position, for being the little bitch she had been for months—hell, for years. Rage at Sophie for being so goddamn stupid, so selfish. So much like me.
Todd stepped forward. He was breathing in short bursts, a vein in his neck throbbing. He felt the rage too. But why?
“Do you even care about Sophie?” he shouted.
He took several more steps forward, got up in my face. My lungs burned; stars burst in my vision. I sucked down air, closed my eyes, and saw Sophie at the funeral, her glossy black hair flashing in the sun as she moved through the crowd. And I saw Todd sitting on the bench. He should have been staring at the casket or his parents or the brown-haired girl next to him, the one who held his hand like she wanted to own it. But he wasn’t. He was staring out at the field, at the people. Wait. No. He was staring beyond them. He was staring at Sophie.
I opened my eyes and he was glaring at me, his eyes hard and red, vicious, his mouth twisted.
Oh.
“You—” Todd said.
“You hated him, didn’t you?” I interrupted.
“What?”
“You hated your brother,” I said, nodding. “He got Sophie and you hated him for it.”
Todd’s face reddened. “He was my brother.”
“Yeah. Made you hate him even more.”
“He was my brother,” Todd said, anger and resentment surging through every word.
“How did you even know they were dating?” I said. “Sophie can’t drive. She couldn’t have gone to your parents’ place.”
“I saw them. In Omak. At his—” He grimaced, realized his mistake too late. “I saw them at school.”
“You saw them at his apartment.”
Todd’s chin jutted forward, his fists shook like an infant’s. “I said at school. And at graduation,” he added hurriedly, his face lighting up like that information was his ace. “She was at his graduation.”
Little Falls Page 22
