“Uh-huh?” Libby drew out her assent, making it a question.
“I don’t think he’s who he says he is.”
12
Jordy didn’t come home at all on Wednesday night, but Sandy wasn’t alarmed until Thursday morning, when he still didn’t answer his cell phone. He’d stayed out several nights in recent weeks, but all those other times he’d answered his phone when she’d called and told her he was with friends. She didn’t know what friends. Not the old gang he and Trav had hung out with. New friends, he said. He was evasive about their identity, furtive in a way that worried her.
Leaving her cell phone on the kitchen counter, she went to his bedroom and looked inside. She didn’t know what she expected to see—a clue, a sign, something to explain where he was? She doubted the FBI could have found anything useful in all the mess. The bed was buried under an assortment of litter. Who knew if he’d slept there? Except she did know, in the way a mother knows things about her kid. She leaned against the door frame, feeling anxious, frustrated, a heavier weight of disappointment.
She’d made the mistake over the last few days of letting herself believe things were improving, however slightly. Because Jordy had stayed home and hung out with her—sort of. They’d caught up on yard work over the weekend. Done stuff like that. When Hector hadn’t been able to help her with the annual cleaning of a client’s koi pond on Tuesday, she’d called Jordy, and he came right away.
Ponds were his thing.
It was big, close to two thousand gallons, and cleaning it took longer with only two of them to do the work. By the time they refilled it and put the last fish back into the water, the sun was almost down, and they were both worn-out. Still, Sandy’s heart lifted, as it never failed to do, when they left Wyatt behind, picking up speed. The highway opened to the view, a wide-ranging panorama of hills, dipping in and out of lengthening shadows, even as they were crowned in a late-day fizz of light the color of pink champagne. Above that, a band of soft lilac held aloft ribbons of silver clouds as transparent as vapor. She turned to Jordy, to remark on the beauty, but he’d reclined his seat and pulled his old Dolphins ball cap low over his eyes. It was when she was turning her glance back to the road again that she saw the car in the rearview mirror, the one that had followed them out of the subdivision.
The sedan was midsize and light in color. Gold? Green, maybe? Sandy couldn’t tell. She couldn’t see the driver clearly, either. It could have been a man or a woman. It gave her a bad feeling, though. Worried her in the same way the car parked in front of her house last Sunday night had worried her. But it wasn’t as if she had actually identified that car, other than it had been light colored, too. Still, there must be hundreds of cars that fit the description. And while FM 1620 wasn’t a major highway, it was well traveled. She thought of waking Jordy but then didn’t. It seemed ridiculous to assume they were being followed. Who would do such a thing? Patsy Meade? A cop out of Wyatt, or a Madrone County sheriff’s deputy in an unmarked car? One of Jordy’s new friends?
Sandy checked the rearview again. A vehicle was back there, but so far away she couldn’t tell if it was even a car, much less the same one. It was the stress, she thought. It was causing her mind to run away with itself.
She hadn’t mentioned it to Jordy, not after they got home, nor yesterday morning, the last time she’d seen him, when wonder of wonders, he’d gotten up before her and made bacon-and-scrambled-egg breakfast sandwiches. That was when she’d let herself become foolishly optimistic. When she’d entertained the possibility that he’d forgiven her, or set aside his hard feelings, or somehow come to terms. What an idiot she was to think it would be—that it could be—so simple.
Picking her way across his bedroom floor now, she sat gingerly on the edge of his bed, pulling his pillow onto her lap. It smelled faintly of soap and whatever shampoo he was using now. After breakfast yesterday, when she’d asked if he wanted to give her a hand with the work she’d scheduled, he’d said no. I’ve got stuff to do, he’d said. She’d felt let down, anxious.
She hadn’t seen or heard from him since then. Every one of her numerous calls had gone to his voice mail. She’d finally given up on hearing from him at midnight last night and gone to bed, where she’d lain awake imagining every worst-case scenario: he was too drunk to call. He was with Libby Hennessey, unable to tear himself away long enough to extend his mother the courtesy of a phone call. Sandy had entertained the idea of calling Libby, and she might have followed through if she’d had the woman’s phone number. She’d thought of calling Emmett, too, but what could he do from Oklahoma other than worry?
Of course she hadn’t slept, not really. She’d gone from berating Jordy in her mind to arguing with herself. Why couldn’t she let go? He was nearly twenty-one, a grown man. Gone were the days when she had any legal right to know where he was every minute. She left his bedroom now. She wasn’t angry anymore. She just wanted him home. She wanted to know he was safe, and the sense that he was not was cold inside her, like chips of ice darting through her veins.
She could tell she’d wakened Roger when he answered her call, and she apologized. She said, “I should have waited.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
She heard rustling as if sheets were being tossed aside, and the sound was oddly intimate. She was flustered by thoughts of what he was wearing: Did he sleep in boxers like Emmett, or in long joggers the way Jordy sometimes did, or briefs? She knew even as she thrust the thoughts away, she was drawn to him. “Jordy didn’t come home last night, Roger. I thought he was with friends, or maybe at Libby Hennessey’s, but he would have come home, or called by now.”
“Have you called around?”
“I don’t know any of the guys he’s hanging out with now.” Sandy hated admitting this, hated that she didn’t know. “He doesn’t bring them here. He hasn’t even told me their names.”
“Yeah. Okay. You haven’t called the police?”
“No.”
“Good. Don’t. Not yet, anyway.”
“I don’t trust them.” Sandy paused. “Is it possible you could check with Libby Hennessey and find out if she’s seen him? Do you know her at all? I’d do it myself, but I don’t think she’ll talk to me.”
“Do you have a number for her?”
Sandy said she didn’t.
“No worries,” Roger said. “I’ll find it.” He paused, then said her name—“Sandy?”—making a question of it, and his tone caused her teeth to clench. “Has it occurred to you that Jordy might take off? He was pretty stressed last time we talked.”
“When was that?”
“Yesterday, around noon.”
“He didn’t tell you where he was calling from?”
“No, but he talked about how everyone might be better off if he was gone.”
He had said virtually the same thing to Sandy on Sunday night.
“I want to believe he was just blowing off steam. I kind of let him go on, and by the time we hung up he seemed to have settled down, so I didn’t really think it was worth telling you and adding to your worry.”
Yes, she thought, there was that, Roger’s reluctance to upset her. But there was also this awkwardness between them now. She’d felt it since they’d shared dinner, and again on Monday evening when he’d come by to repair the dishwasher. Jordy had been home then; Roger hadn’t stayed, but still there was this undercurrent of awareness between them, that he wasn’t simply Jordy’s attorney anymore. He’d become more than that. But Sandy didn’t know if it was real—at least when it came to her part, she didn’t. It could as easily be a feeling born of her isolation, the lack of anyone else to turn to. She said, “You aren’t suggesting he would harm himself, are you? Because I can’t—” She broke off. Her heart was beating so heavily, she felt the throbbing in her skull. She put her fingertips to her temple.
Roger protested that he hadn’t meant to alarm her. “He’s conflicted, you know? He wants to clear his name, but at the same time he knows
if he does, the accident will become Travis’s legacy, the thing Travis is remembered for. That’s his perception anyway, that no matter what he does, it’s a lose-lose. Do you see what I mean?”
She did, and the sense of it, Jordy’s burden, his fear and confusion, made her feel weak. She sat on the edge of the love seat. “Maybe that’s why he won’t say what it is Huck has against him, because it will somehow implicate Travis in a negative way.” Sandy frowned. Could that be right?
“Maybe.”
“But I just don’t think he’d hurt himself, Roger.” She couldn’t allow the idea; she would break into a million pieces if she did. “He wouldn’t run off, either. I think, ultimately, what he wants is for the truth to come out.” She cradled her elbow in the cup of her hand, praying she was right, vowing to herself she would do all she could to help him.
“But if you think about it, what better way is there to avoid the whole damn mess than leave? Find somewhere to hide out? The law considers him a man, but he’s just a kid, really, and he may not be thinking straight. I’m not saying he’d actually go through with it, but he could be considering it as an option. I’m not sure I wouldn’t if I were in his shoes.”
Sandy thought of the countries she’d looked up on the Internet, the ones that didn’t allow the United States to extradite. Jordy could have done his own research; he could be on a plane right now, bound for Russia, or Syria, or some other godforsaken place in the world that refused to do legal business with the United States. She bent over her knees.
“Sandy? Let’s not go off the deep end here.” Roger was rational; his voice was a soothing hum in her ear. “He’ll turn up. I’ll get hold of him, and once I do, I’ll make sure he calls you. I promise. Okay? Don’t worry.”
“Thank you.” Her gratitude to Roger made her throat tighten.
“Listen, before we hang up, I want to let you know I’ve hired a private detective, a guy I’ve worked with in the past. I don’t have much confidence in what I’m hearing from the Wyatt police or the DA. I think we should undertake our own investigation.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Just a hunch. That business with Nat Blevins backing off his witness statement. Something’s—off, and I want to know what it is.”
Sandy thought she detected an element of optimism in his voice, but she wasn’t buying into it, not this time.
She was on her knees in the vegetable garden behind the barn late that afternoon, jerking weeds from the row of poblano peppers when his shadow fell over the ground and her gloved hands. At first glance, sitting back on her heels with the sun in her eyes, Sandy thought it was Jordy and started to her feet, feeling the thrust of her fury at him pierce the swell of her relief. But when he stepped down the row toward her, she saw it was Emmett and sat back on her heels.
“Be careful where you’re walking,” she said, and marveled at herself, at her brain that would deliver an order like that to the husband she hadn’t laid eyes on in a month.
He stopped, eyeing her warily.
She kept still, too, her gaze locked on his.
They were actors on a stage awaiting direction, a prompt to remind them of the lines they were to speak.
“I don’t want you to get pissed, okay?”
“I don’t think I’d characterize that as a future event, since I’m already pissed, not to mention scared out of my mind. Jordy’s gone.”
“No,” Emmett said. “No, he’s been with me.”
There was the moment of heady lightness when her dread lifted, and she uttered, “Thank God,” but then confusion took over. “With you where? In Oklahoma?”
“No. Here. I’m back here now.” He looked uncomfortable, twitchy.
“When did you get back?” Sandy felt an inkling of alarm, as if she’d stepped off a ledge and was uncertain of how or even where she might land.
“A month ago. Since you called and told me Jordy’d been arrested.”
“My God! And you didn’t tell me?”
He apologized. He said, “I can’t be with you right now. Too much has happened, but I want to be here for Jordy. He’s in a lot of deep shit, and I’m not just talking about the legal stuff.”
Sandy bolted to her feet. “You think I don’t know that? That I haven’t been here, living it with him every damn minute?” The heat of her sudden fury seared the backs of her eyes; it licked at her temples.
“He doesn’t trust you, Sandy. He’s having a hard time trusting anyone. Have you thought about it? How it’s affected him, finding out his dad—me—that I’m not—” Emmett looked away, looked back. “Have you thought how he must have felt when he looked his birth dad up on the Internet only to discover the guy had died a few weeks before and not a hundred miles from here? He told me Beck Hennessey had property on 1620, on the other side of Wyatt. Jordy said that he and his wife are building a house there. That’s scarcely fifteen miles from here. I couldn’t believe it, that they were going to be so close. Did you know?”
“Yes,” she said, and she could have bitten off her tongue. But it was time for the truth, wasn’t it? To let the chips fall where they might? She was too tired to dodge it any longer, anyway, too weary to try and force the issue, to make Emmett come back or stay. Not unless he chose it, once he knew everything.
“I thought so,” he said. “When? When did you find out?”
“He e-mailed me—Beck did, a couple of years ago.”
“Two years ago? Are you kidding? Jesus Christ, this is all such a fucking mess—”
“Because of me. Go ahead, say it. We both know who you’re blaming.”
A breeze kicked up as it was wont to do late on summer afternoons, but it was hot, restless. There was no relief in it. Sandy pulled off her gloves. She unstuck her hair from her cheek, the corner of her mouth, lifted it off her neck.
“Jordy told me you e-mailed the guy, asking for his help—money, basically. Jordy is pretty blown away that you did that—out of the blue, you contact your ex-lover? But maybe you’ve been in touch all this time.”
“No, absolutely not, Emmett. I lied about the affair, it’s true, but not now, not about that. I was never in contact with the man until now. Even when he wrote to me two years ago, I didn’t respond.” Sandy couldn’t read Emmett’s expression; the bill of his cap shaded his face, and it irked her somehow. She was frightened, too. She slapped her gloves across her open palm. “You weren’t here, Emmett, and your advice to me was to liquidate Jordy’s college fund. Your mind was on your mother. You barely listened to my concerns. There was no discussion. Just clean out the college fund, and to hell with whether or not Jordy would ever be able to go back to school.”
“That life is over, Sandy. Face it. The family we had, the life we shared—the one where Jordy and Trav were students at UT, and you, me, Jenna, and your folks were here, their home base—that routine is not coming back. And Jordy may well get his degree, but it’ll be through some prison program, if he can even survive in one of those hellholes.”
“Jordy is not going to prison. Not as long as I’m breathing.” Sandy stepped toward Emmett. “I will take money from the devil himself to keep that from happening.”
“But you won’t cash in his college fund? You’re not making sense.”
“Do you believe him, then? Because when you left here, you acted like you weren’t sure.”
“You don’t believe him, either, according to Jordy, and it’s killing him. You could at least fake it.”
“Is that what you’re doing? Faking it?”
“You know what scares the shit out of me? That he’s got Huck and the rest of the cops in Wyatt on his ass, doing everything they can to see to it he’s convicted.”
“Roger hired a private detective. He’s hoping to find another witness since Nat Blevins changed his story.”
“Yeah. I heard. Roger’s right; Huck probably did put pressure on him. I just wish I knew why—”
“You’ve talked to Roger?” She felt faintly dizzy.
“I’ve thought of asking Mom and Dad for help.”
“They’re in deep with Jenna. If our medical bills for Jordy are through the roof, hers for Trav are astronomical. Plus, there were all the funeral expenses.”
Sandy hadn’t even considered that Jenna would be saddled with Travis’s medical bills. She wondered how they even existed. “He died,” she said, and she knew her protest was unreasoning. Still she questioned it. “How can they charge her when Trav died?”
“That’s how the system works. Showalter tried. It cost a bundle. Your dad thinks Jenna may have to declare bankruptcy.”
The fist of her tears slammed the wall behind Sandy’s eyes. “It’s so wrong. All of this!” She shook her gloves. “I should be with her—”
“It needs time.” Emmett’s voice was rough with emotion.
She looked at him, searching his eyes for a sign that if she were to walk toward him, he would meet her, with open arms, but she found no certainty of that within him or herself. “You’re in touch with Jenna, my folks?”
“Your dad, mostly. The business—between us we’ve been handling the operation. And it’s a good thing, because we for damn sure need the income.”
Sandy picked up her trowel and shoved its blade into the ground.
“I’m staying with Grant and Brenda, in their garage apartment. It’s not leased right now, and they’re letting me camp out there.”
Sandy straightened. “I saw Brenda last week at the grocery store. She never said a word about you. She barely spoke.”
“I asked her not to. She was probably afraid she might if she stopped to talk. I’ve put her and Grant in a bad spot. That’s why I came today.”
“All this time, I’ve wondered why they didn’t call or come around. I thought it was because they didn’t support Jordy. Are you telling me they do?”
“Honestly, I think they’re waiting for the trial. They think he’s a good kid, but they know like we do that he lies.”
Faultlines Page 19
