She didn’t seem mad at me, but I was mad at myself. Carl had killed Annabelle. He’d threatened to burn down Bryn’s farm. Bryn had to hate me. She must just be good at hiding it. “No more. I promise.”
I couldn’t decide how much I should tell her. About Carl. About Mom. About her pills. I didn’t want to get Mom in trouble, and I didn’t want Bryn to change her mind about helping, but I also didn’t want Carl to hurt anyone. Or burn anything down.
My head hurt with the choices, but I decided to wait. I could tell later if I had to, but I couldn’t unsay the words once I let them escape. She’d only been my aunt for less than a day.
Bryn gave my shoulder a squeeze. “You can keep taking pictures—just don’t share them with the world.” She closed the Instagram screen.
Mom would have yelled. Bryn didn’t, but that could change any minute. I took the chance anyway and asked about what was bugging me. “What did Carl mean when he talked about a gun and said ‘Don’t call the cops’? And why did he say he made Dad do what he wanted?”
Now it was her turn to decide what to tell, and from the brick-wall look on her face, I figured I wasn’t going to get much. “I don’t know what he meant about Sawyer. And the rest … the part about the gun … the rest is complicated. I’ll tell you about it later. Let’s make those phone calls about your mom.” She said the last bit like an order.
“Okay.” It wasn’t okay, and I wasn’t going to let it drop. I figured my chances were better if I let her calm down.
I got why she was upset. I kept thinking about that chicken too. I was glad I hadn’t seen her dead. Had he stabbed her with a knife? Had there been a lot of blood? I picked up my phone to find a game but set it down again. A game where I shot cartoon characters seemed sort of pointless.
Bryn pulled out her phone and called Kroger first when I gave her the number. She put Bill, Mom’s manager, on speaker and asked if he knew anything about Mom.
“Do I know where she is? Hell no.” He wasn’t holding back—his voice was seriously pissed off, and he was yelling over the noise of shopping carts rattling in the background. “I can tell you where she isn’t, and that’s here working her shift. If you find her, tell her she can look for another job. And tell her not to even dream of using me for a reference.” He clicked the phone off without waiting for Bryn to say anything else.
Bryn gave me a glance like she was sorry I’d heard it. But it was what I’d expected.
She ran her fingers through her hair, pulled a pen and one of her pads of paper over. “What about friends? Work friends, neighborhood friends, drinking buddies?” She paused a little before saying drinking buddies, like maybe I’d take it wrong, and I tried not to laugh. She had no clue.
I started giving her names, one at a time, along with the phone number. She wrote them down and called them. After the first three calls—Patsy, Phil, and Wayne, two “I-don’t-know-where-she-is” answers and one voice-mail message—she gave me a puzzled look. “How do you know all these phone numbers?”
I hadn’t been looking them up. “Mom made a list of people so I could find her if I needed to.”
“Yeah, but you don’t have the list with you.”
I studied the cover of the Python manual sitting out on her desk. I couldn’t think of a reason not to tell her and admitting this made me feel less guilty about hiding the rest. “It’s kind of weird. I look at something. I tell my head to save a picture. Then I can take the picture out again later when I want to.”
“A photographic memory?” It sounded like she didn’t believe me.
I nodded. “You have that in-case-of-emergency phone list over there.” I pointed. “I looked at it last night. The third name is John Miller, CPA.” I gave her the phone number. “The last name is Melanie Richards.” I gave her that number too.
She walked over to the list to check, but I already knew I was right. At school, I had to be careful. I never raised my hand, never acted like I knew the answer. The way this worked was too strange. Too different. I didn’t like people to know.
Bryn checked the list, and while she was up, she also checked out the window, looking down the driveway as if she was still thinking about Carl, her teeth closed tight and her face sad and worried. She came back without saying anything, and we kept making calls to everyone I could think of.
At one point, my cell phone dinged, and I lunged for it—maybe Mom?—but it was only a text from Marcus, asking how long I was going to be away because he wanted me to come over.
I loved the days when I went to Marcus’s house. His dad let us use the big plasma screen in their family room for games, and his mom baked cookies when I was there and fussed around with lemonade. Their house always smelled like something spicy, and when I stayed over for dinner, we ate at a table. With napkins. And some of the silverware, beside the plate, we didn’t even need. My visits always felt like stepping into one of my books, where everything was shiny and new, and you had to pay attention to learn the rules of a different world.
But I was stuck here and couldn’t go. My thumbs hovered over the screen, uncertain what to type. Mountains. Goats. Carl. A dead chicken. This was a book of its own, but not one where things were shiny. I finally replied to the text. Sorry, I have to help find my mom. Don’t know when I’ll be back.
Marcus would understand. He had been over at our place one Friday night when Mom came home late with her hand sliced up from broken glass. She’d been drinking and acted like she didn’t even notice the cut, but there was blood all over her sleeve and dripping onto her leggings. Marcus looked scared, but he helped me get her cleaned up and bandaged, the two of us getting her to bed and tucking her in, making sure an empty bucket was on the floor close by her head.
“Does this happen all the time?” he’d asked, and the disbelieving way he said it made me worry he’d quit being my friend. But he didn’t disappear, and it was kind of nice someone knew the way things were. He’d get it that I needed to find Mom.
I went back to helping Bryn, and by the time we finished, her list went down the whole page. No one knew a thing about Mom.
“Even people who saw her the day before she left don’t know anything.” Bryn slouched in her chair and flipped her pen back and forth. “We left a bunch of messages, but I’m not convinced anything will come of them.”
She did the table-drumming thing, then sat up straight with her shoulders back, like she was a soldier ready for inspection. She frowned, lifted her phone, and punched a number that was already programmed, not one I gave her.
I watched out of the corner of my eye, because she was so tense she wasn’t even breathing. It wasn’t until the sound of a voice-mail message came from the phone that she relaxed. “Hi, Mom, it’s Bryn.”
She’d called Grandma, which was sort of stupid, because Grandma didn’t know anything about Mom. But maybe Bryn didn’t know that.
She went on with her message. “Josh showed up here at my place … your grandson, Josh … and we’re trying to find Del. Could you call me back as soon as you get this? You may be able to help.”
She clicked off the call and stood up like she was glad to be done. “Come on. Now we go talk to the cops.”
“Mom won’t be happy about that.” She always drove the speed limit, crossed the street at crosswalks, turned the other way if a police car drove by. She would freak if she knew we were going to the cops about her on purpose.
“Any particular reason not to? If nothing else, I want to report Carl and his threats.”
There it was. Another chance to tell her more. Instead, I changed the subject. “Can we get some lunch in town?”
Bryn gave me a hard look, and I could tell she noticed I’d dodged the question. I waited for her to push back, but she let it slide. “Absolutely. Whatever you want. Let me grab my wallet.”
She went to get her stuff, and I sat and patted Tellico. For an unknown aunt, she was pretty nice, but she was also pretty easy to fool. Double points for me, which should have been
a good thing, but I couldn’t make myself celebrate. All I kept thinking about was Annabelle sitting out there in the sun, happy and alive, never suspecting a thing.
CHAPTER SIX
Bryn
How dare this total creep come to my home, to the farm I’d built up for the past ten years, and threaten me? How dare he kill Annabelle?
This was Del’s fault, all of it, and now I had yet another accusation to add to her account. I’d spent plenty of time over the years rehearsing everything I would say to her if I ever got the chance, and I’d pictured dozens of outlandish ways to punish her. I would shave her head. I would shred her favorite clothing. I would design a billboard that listed her cruelties. To hell with a scarlet letter—dousing her with scarlet paint was more like it.
But at the moment, Del was far beyond my reach, and Carl was all too real. He was the priority. For Josh’s sake, I needed to find Del. For my sake, I needed to do it fast and recover whatever it was Carl searched for. I wasn’t convinced the police could help, but it was foolish not to give them a try.
What would Landon say if he knew about Carl? I thought about calling, letting him know what Carl had done. But maybe that was too much pressure to put on a frayed and fragile friendship. He’d worry. I’d tell him not to. We’d end up arguing.
No point in calling. It was the right decision, but a small stab of disappointment highlighted how nice it would be not to always fly solo.
Time to get moving. Tellico leaped to his feet as soon as I picked up the truck keys. “Sorry boy, you have to stay here.”
Josh gave the dog a pat, obviously reluctant to leave him behind. That dog was just what Josh needed. After growing up without pets, I was astonished to discover how much Tellico added to my life. He was the ideal listener, patient and never critical, and he was always delighted to see anyone who was willing to play.
“We’ll be back soon.”
Josh climbed into the passenger seat and immediately ran his hand over the carved wooden glove compartment panel, strikingly out of place in my battered truck. “Whoa. Where’d you get this?”
“Landon made it. Beautiful, isn’t it?” I’d bought my truck used, and when I got it, the glove box was mangled—the panel that should have opened was badly dented and frozen in place. When Landon offered to fix it, I’d accepted gratefully, figuring he had some way of hammering out the metal so it would be functional. Instead, he’d created a wooden replacement—not a simple smooth panel like the original, but one intricately carved to show the landscape of my homestead—the mountains, the orchard, the barn, my cabin.
Josh ran a finger across the long line of mountains. “I like it. Now he just needs to add some goats.”
It was carved out of cherry, and the deep reddish glow of the finish made me think of the way my farm looked at sunset. When he showed it to me, he said, “This way, wherever you go, you’ll remember to come home.” This land was the first place that had ever truly felt like a home worth returning to, a place of retreat and comfort, my personal sanctuary. It wasn’t just buildings that Carl was threatening; it was my very existence.
Landon’s carving captured the peace of this homestead, but when I looked through the windshield at the cabin and barn, I had a sudden vision of what they would look like after a fire: black and twisted timbers, scorched fencing, my stone chimney standing as a lonely sentinel beside a burnt ruin coated in ash.
I thrust the image aside and turned down the driveway.
Josh was quiet as we started winding our way down the mountain, but not for long. “You said you’d tell me later. About Carl and a gun. This is later.”
My stomach tensed just thinking about having to explain, but I’d told him I would, and if I didn’t play fair, neither would he. It was weird that Carl had brought up that particular evening. I sorted through the details, trying to figure out what to say and what to keep to myself. “I told you I knew your father when I was in college, and we stayed friends after graduation.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, your mom knew Carl back then too, and one time the four of us were in a car late at night. A Saturday night, in the middle of a January ice storm. You know how it gets in Memphis—not enough ice and snow most years to justify the right road equipment, so when storms hit hard, it’s a mess. This night, the roads were in bad shape.”
“This was before Mom and Dad were married?”
“Right.” Sawyer and I were engaged when it happened, but I wasn’t about to tell Josh that. Sawyer was working for a bank in Memphis. I had a programming job in Nashville and had come to visit for the weekend. We got a phone call around midnight—Del had gone east of town for a party, her car wouldn’t start, she needed a rescue. I wasn’t happy about it—it was just like Del to strand herself—but Sawyer and I bundled up and went to pick her up.
We fought our way through the storm to the address Del gave, and it was only when we arrived that we learned Carl was with her. I was shocked—didn’t want anything to do with him—but the two of them had climbed right in and were already huddled in the backseat of our car. It seemed simplest to just drive back to town and get rid of them.
“Your dad was driving, hanging onto the wheel like it was trying to escape, with me up front and Carl and your mom in back. Power lines were down, snaking along the roadsides like sparking deathtraps. The streetlights were out. A sheet of ice coated everything. The car slipped and slid all over the place, hard to control, veering from one curb to the other on the bad spots.”
Josh twisted in his seat, hanging on every word.
“Your mom never told you any of this?”
“Never.”
I couldn’t help but wonder what else she had never bothered to tell him. “We were outside of town and coming back, and there was a car ahead of us in serious trouble. Taking curves too fast, fishtailing around corners—we hung way back, worried it might crash. The driver had to be drunk or stoned to drive like that. Sure enough, we reached a heavily wooded stretch of road with thick black ice, and that other car spun out of control. It did a three-sixty, smashed into a telephone pole, flipped into a ditch. Your father slammed on the brakes and slipped into a long skid—your dad yelling, “Hang on, hang on,” your mom and I both screaming, I was sure we were going to smash right into that other car, but your father got us stopped. The four of us got out of the car to check, but the driver of the other car was dead.”
That was as neutral as I could make it for my fourteen-year-old audience, but my heart raced as I revisited that moment. Icicles hung from every tree branch. Steam rose in a scalding cloud from the smashed engine. Treacherous ice crunched underfoot. The driver had been thrown all the way through the windshield. His head landed on a sharp rock and his skull had cleaved open the way a jack-o-lantern fragments when dropped onto concrete.
Blood splattered the pavement, the grass, the telephone pole, everything within reach. I took one look, dove into the bushes, and threw up. Del went hysterical, screaming her head off, flailing around like a lunatic. Sawyer and Carl checked the car, making sure no one else was there. Both of them were acting tough but shaking bad.
“Back then, cell phones were expensive, and Sawyer was the only one of us who had one. He pulled it out to call for help, and that’s when Carl pulled a gun and stopped him.”
The gun appeared from nowhere, and I could still see that horrifying moment—the barrel far too close to Sawyer’s chest, the expression in Carl’s eyes a look of cold desperation. Del and I huddled together, speechless, and Sawyer dropped the phone into his coat pocket and lifted his hands. No problem, no problem. Get in the car and we’ll leave right now. We dropped Del and Carl in town, but I was still shaking by the time Sawyer and I returned home.
“Why did Carl tell Dad he couldn’t call the police?”
I shrugged. “Not sure.”
“Probably had drugs on him.”
Exactly what I’d thought at the time, and I still believed it was the most likely explanation. I gave Jos
h a quick look. He’d thought of that in record time. He looked like he regretted saying it, and he got quiet and stared out the window.
That night of the wreck was the beginning of the end for Sawyer and me. A week later, I was stuck in Nashville for a conference, and Del went to Sawyer in tears, trying to forget the horrors of that mangled body. Two bottles of tequila and some mutual consoling followed, and Josh was the unexpected result.
I was never sure if she’d gone with seduction in mind. She’d always wanted whatever I had, and I wouldn’t have put it past her to have plotted the whole thing. But intentional or not, Del had never apologized, moving on like pregnancy and marriage to Sawyer were ordained from on high. Sawyer was the one who’d been guilt-ridden.
I’d told Josh the story of Carl pulling a gun, but Carl had also said he’d threatened Sawyer later and used me as leverage. What was that about? I had no clue. But I needed to find out.
Josh and I reached the edge of Madisonville. It was the county seat, and I hoped its police department was large enough to be of some help. I found an open spot, parked the truck, and we headed in.
A big room filled most of the compact cinderblock building, brightly lit, overly air conditioned, and smelling vaguely of bleach. A woman in a green shirt sat at a reception desk in front, and a man in uniform was working at a computer toward the back.
“Hi.” I stepped up to the desk. The woman—a girl, really, with stiff, jagged hair and a half-dozen earrings—set aside a three-ring binder and gave me her full attention. “I need to file a missing person report. And I need to report a man who’s making threats.”
She nodded indifferently as if requests like this came in every day and pulled a multipage form out of the file drawer of her desk. “Fill this out, and then I’ll have you talk to one of the officers.”
Josh and I sat on a metal bench in the front of the room. He glanced around at the utilitarian surroundings and shrank into himself, looking profoundly unhappy to be there. I started on the paperwork, tossing questions his way when I hit the ones I didn’t know how to answer. “Exact time when you last saw your mother? Address of her workplace? Social Security number?”
Over the Falls Page 5
