Faultlines

by Barbara Taylor Sissel

  Breathe. You have to breathe, said the voice in her brain, and she managed it.

  She had her phone in her hand, and she was in the midst of dialing 911 when she heard Jordy shout for her, making her heart veer out of control again. She dropped her phone. Reaching to pick it up, she shouted back at him, “Stay there, Jordy.”

  But he didn’t listen to her. Of course he didn’t. She blocked the kitchen doorway, thinking she could keep him from entering the room, save him from having to see it: Huck’s corpse on the floor to her left, lying in front of the kitchen sink. The hole in his right temple was so small and neat, almost surgically precise, and yet there was so much blood. It haloed his head, a thickening pool; it glazed the knuckles of his right hand, his shooting hand, and stippled the gun, Huck’s service revolver, which lay nearby. Above him, the cabinet, sink basin, and adjacent marble countertop were flecked with bloody bits of tissue and fragments of bone, the brain matter Huck’s bullet had reamed from his skull while on its deadly path. Sandy guessed the bullet was lodged in the wall somewhere. Her stomach lurched. She jerked her gaze away.

  When Jordy appeared in the doorway, she slammed her flattened hand into his chest, growling, “Don’t come in here,” even as she bit down on a sob and the rush of her emotions, some complex mix of overwhelming love and relief at the living sight of him, combined with an urgent need to spare him seeing the carnage. There was her lingering horror, too, her shell-shocked numb amazement, the disbelief: Was it a dream? Please, God, would she, could she waken now?

  “Are you all right? What happened?” Jordy searched her eyes, then looked past her at Jenna. “Aunt Jenna?” The way he addressed her, it was almost a plea.

  But she didn’t respond, didn’t so much as look his way. She was staring fixedly at the wall, gripping the edge of the kitchen countertop, as if it alone kept her upright. Except for a white line around her mouth, her face was gray, the color of ash.

  It was inevitable that Jordy would see it: the body on the floor. Sandy marked the moment. His breath went out in a whoosh, a kind of groan. She braced him with her arm, wrapping his waist. Not that she could hold him, or even that he was close to falling. It was the need to touch him, the need in the moment for physical contact between them. A way to say, I’m here.

  “It’s Huck? He’s dead?”

  “Yes.” Sandy tried to steer Jordy back into the hallway, toward the front door. “C’mon,” she said. “We’ll go outside.”

  But he said, “No! Mom, for God’s sake, what the hell happened?”

  “Jordan? Sandy? I hope it’s all right, my coming in. I—”

  “Libby?” Sandy said. “Libby, wait. Something’s happened here. You should stop right there.” But Libby was no better than Jordy at heeding Sandy’s warning. She came past him and around Sandy, and she gasped when she saw it, the body of a man on the floor. “Is that Sergeant Huckabee?” She looked at Sandy.

  Did you do it? Did you shoot the man you suspect of framing your son?

  The questions blazed in Libby’s eyes, as vocal and stark as if she had asked them out loud, and Sandy realized how Libby could make the assumption. Even Jordy, or the police when they came, which they surely would, might assume she had killed Huck. God knew she had a motive. “He did it,” she said. “He shot himself.”

  “Did you call the police?” Libby asked.

  “I was trying to, but I don’t think my phone is working.”

  “It’s not,” Jordy said. “It called me. That’s what got me worried. I could hear you and Aunt Jenna, and a man—Huck, I guess—talking, so I hung up and tried calling you back to see if you’d answer, but it didn’t even ring.”

  “Maybe I did something to it.” Sandy looked at the phone. She remembered getting it from her purse before Huck drew his gun, and randomly, frantically, hitting the numbers. Maybe she’d speed-dialed Jordy.

  Libby said, “He called me when he couldn’t get hold of anyone else.”

  “She gave me a ride here,” Jordy said.

  Sandy looked unhappily at Libby, and it wasn’t reasonable, blaming her that Jordy was here, a witness to this horror, but Sandy did.

  “I tried to talk him out of coming,” Libby said, and Sandy knew her feelings must show on her face.

  Jenna came up behind Sandy. “We have to call for help.” Her voice was cold and flat, too flat, and Sandy wondered if she was in shock, physical shock, the kind she would need treatment for. She wondered how much more Jenna could stand.

  Libby had her phone out, tapping numbers, saying she would do it, and when the dispatcher answered, she said, “I need to report a shooting.”

  Sandy led the way outside, and it wasn’t long before they heard the wail of the first siren. Soon after, there were multiple emergency vehicles clogging Jenna’s street. A 911 call in Madrone County never failed to generate a full-scale production, starring a cast of what seemed like thousands of first responders, from firemen to paramedics to police officers to sheriff’s deputies. Neighbors came out of their houses, looking alarmed, and yet they seemed avid, too, for the story, the details. What happened? As bystanders they would have the luxury of knowing the answers without having to suffer the consequences of actual involvement. Whatever the nightmare was, thank you, Jesus, it wasn’t theirs.

  Go home, Sandy wanted to shout at them. It’s none of your damn business, she wanted to say.

  The yard was cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape. A few of the officers began questioning the neighborhood folks about what they might have heard or seen, and at what time. Sandy would read in the local newspaper that the sound of the gunshot had wakened Lyndsey Abrams’s newborn baby and caused Marva Duerksen to spill iced coffee down her shirtfront. Dawson Pate, who was resting on his back deck after mowing the lawn, thought a car had backfired. It was the sort of newsy detail folks expected to read in the Wyatt Times and Record, the local biweekly newspaper.

  A group of officers entered Jenna’s house.

  While Jordy and Libby were questioned where they stood on the front walkway, Sandy and Jenna were led several feet away by a detective from Greeley. He began by asking their names. He wanted to know who owned the house, who made the 911 call, how Sandy and Jenna were related, how they knew Huck. What Sandy was doing at Jenna’s, why Huck had come there. He didn’t question it when Sandy called it a suicide. He didn’t even look at her.

  He closed his notebook and, pocketing it, thanked her and Jenna.

  She asked if they could go into the house. She felt under scrutiny from the growing crowd of onlookers.

  “We need to get my sister’s things,” Sandy said to the detective. “I’m taking her home with me.”

  “Yeah. Okay,” he said. “Just wait until the coroner removes the body. Shouldn’t be much longer.” He looked at Jenna. “There’s a biohazard and crime-scene cleaning service out of Austin that handles this sort of thing. I can give you the information, if you want—unless you wanted to tackle it yourself.”

  “Oh no, no, no,” Sandy said, emphatically.

  Jenna shook her head, hugging herself.

  The detective pulled out his notebook again and wrote down a company name and phone number. Tearing out the sheet, he handed it to Jenna. “Ask for Pat,” he said.

  Jenna thanked him, and when he was gone, she said, “We should call Mom and Dad before they hear about it somewhere else.”

  “Let’s get out of here first.” Sandy walked with Jenna over to where Jordy and Libby waited on the sidewalk.

  Sandy put her arm around Jordy. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Are you?” He looked intently at her, and she knew he must feel as conflicted as she did about Huck’s death. He was gone now, and so was his grudge against Jordy and his campaign to make Jordy the guilty one. Who knew if it would make a difference, but Sandy had hope now where she had not before. But at what cost? Hope in exchange for Huck’s life? Wasn’t there some better way?

  Jordy said, “We overheard a couple of
the cops talking. They were saying somebody found a letter Huck wrote back at the police station in Wyatt.”

  “A letter?” Sandy said. She was thinking suicide note. She was thinking if he had left such a thing, it meant he had planned to come here and do this on purpose—in front of Jenna. The idea horrified her.

  Libby said, “We may have misunderstood.”

  “It’s so messed up, you know?” Jordy sounded angry. “Why would he kill himself? I don’t get it.”

  Sandy gave her head a slight shake. This wasn’t a good time to talk about Huck’s reason, not when emotions were so raw. She was unsure how Jenna might react, what she was feeling. It wasn’t regret. Sandy wasn’t feeling that from her.

  “Do you realize none of these squad cars are from Wyatt?” Libby made a small arc with her arm.

  It seemed as if she posed the question deliberately, as a distraction, and Sandy was grateful for it. She turned to Jordy. “Did the detective who talked to you just now say anything about the accident?”

  “Yeah, he told me Ken Carter, Huck’s buddy, would be in touch, but it’s like, who cares? Carter’s the same as Huck. In his mind I was driving.”

  Sandy glanced at Jenna; Jordy did, too, but she kept her face averted, and it seemed willful. It seemed to suggest she wasn’t giving up on the idea that Jordy was responsible for Travis’s death. It didn’t matter to her that Huck had admitted to having pressured witnesses. Maybe it wouldn’t matter to local law enforcement, either.

  A police force was a brotherhood. They protected their own. They were even more likely to protect Huck now after his death. They would want everyone to think well of him, to honor and respect his memory—the way Jenna, and Huck, before he shot himself, wanted Travis to be remembered. And to hell with the truth, Sandy thought.

  To hell with my son, and his reputation, his future.

  Anger warred in her chest, backed its heat into her throat, but anger wouldn’t help, and she bit down on it. If she could find Ricky Burrows, if she could talk to the Detroit-based long-haul trucker, Nat Blevins, herself, and tell them Huck no longer posed any threat to either of them, maybe they’d tell the truth. Thinking of this steadied her.

  The fire trucks were the first of the emergency vehicles to leave. Someone came and drove Huck’s squad car away, then several of the Greeley squad cars left, and finally two attendants from the coroner’s office wheeled the gurney bearing Huck’s bagged remains to the hearse parked at the curb.

  Sandy went with Jenna into the house and helped her pack an overnight bag. When they came back outside, Jordy said he would ride with Libby.

  “Her house is on the way,” he said. “We can stop there and I’ll unload the boxwoods. She can bring me on home after that.”

  Sandy said it was all right; she wouldn’t argue. But she looked at Jenna, unsure of what she wanted from her. A sign that she was aware of how far they had fallen apart as a family, a family that couldn’t even ride together in the same vehicle. There was nothing of the sort in Jenna’s eyes, though. They were as vacant as the windows in an abandoned building. She looked shell-shocked, as if the slightest nudge would send her cartwheeling into some distant pocket of space from which she might never return. Sandy felt her earlier fury dissolve. She opened Jenna’s door and, stowing her tote, told Jordy to come home as quickly as he could.

  She thanked Libby. “I am so in your debt,” she said. “For everything today.”

  Libby looked at her truck. “It feels like a lifetime ago that we were at Inman’s.”

  “I know.” Sandy’s laugh was rueful. Someone else’s lifetime, she thought, one she didn’t recognize anymore as her own.

  17

  Thanks,” Jordan said, getting into the cab of Libby’s truck. “I couldn’t ride with my aunt. I don’t know what it’s going to take for her to believe me.”

  “Maybe in time,” Libby said. Hard evidence, was what she thought.

  Jordan’s phone rang. “It’s my dad,” he said, looking at her, and his eyes were worried.

  “You need to let him know you’re okay,” she said.

  From Jordan’s side of the conversation, Libby gathered his dad had spoken to his mom and was aware of Sergeant Huckabee’s suicide. Libby felt bad for Emmett, for his shock that would be profound, and his concern for Jordan that would be sharper still. Suppose she and Jordan had walked into Jenna’s house minutes earlier? Suppose Huckabee had shot either Sandy or Jenna as he’d threatened to do? He might have taken Libby and Jordan hostage; he might have barricaded them all in the house. These days, perfectly normal-appearing people went over the lip of sanity in an eye blink, spraying bullets with abandon, mowing down whoever was in their path. For little to no reason.

  Libby thought of the last time she’d seen the sergeant, wearing his sunglasses with lenses like mirrors, and his cocksure attitude. The boy has finally got his story straight. He spoke in Libby’s brain.

  Jordy ended the call. “Dad says he’s going to the house, that Roger wants to meet us there.”

  “Your attorney?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll turn around, then.”

  “No, we’re so close to your place now. I told him I was going to help you, then I’d be home. It won’t take that long.”

  Libby was hesitant. He needed to be with his family. But she guessed he could also use breathing space. She didn’t turn around.

  “I called my friend Ruth before we left your aunt’s house,” she said, breaking a short silence. “She was in Greeley, at the police station, when the call came in about the shooting.”

  “Did she find out anything? About Ricky Burrows, I mean.”

  “She seemed to think the cops there were giving her the runaround.” I have a bad feeling, she’d said. It was nothing she could put her finger on. I’d be willing to bet a year’s worth of my commissions that Ricky’s still in the area, though.

  Libby felt he was nearby, too. A person seized by an obsession didn’t ordinarily give up easily. Sergeant Huckabee being a case in point. And Ricky Burrows was supposedly not only obsessed but insane. How could she have been so duped by him? She had felt his anger, but she had assumed it was rooted in despair. He’d seemed a sad case to her, a guy who’d not been dealt a particularly promising hand in life. She’d felt responsible, in a way, that his truck got keyed on her property. Now that she knew he’d done the damage himself, she felt like a fool.

  “I think we need to keep an eye out for Ricky,” she said, but pulling up to the cottage, she didn’t feel any particular fear.

  Jordy hopped out, and rounding the rear of the truck, he lowered the tailgate.

  Knowing she’d be taking him home shortly, Libby left her purse in the cab. “You want a sandwich, something to drink? You must be starving.”

  His head popped up. “Do you have any more of that lemonade you made the other day?”

  She laughed, going into the house, and said, “Coming right up.”

  She didn’t see Ricky at first.

  He was standing behind the front door. Then he was there, square in front of her the moment she closed it. Inches from her. Close enough that she could smell peanut butter on his breath. Fear clamped her heart. Her eyes darted past him, and she saw the open peanut-butter jar on the kitchen table, alongside a torn wax sleeve of Ritz crackers. The sweating jug of homemade lemonade was there, too, mostly gone now. It irked her, that Ricky had helped himself to the last of it, and it was ridiculous, but she was thinking of Jordan’s disappointment.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” Ricky said. “I been waiting awhile, and I got kind of hungry.”

  “It’s fine, Ricky.” She struggled to breathe normally, to appear as if finding him in her house were normal, a daily occurrence.

  “I thought maybe you could help me.”

  “Help you?” Libby looked past him toward the bedroom, where her dad’s loaded shotgun was propped in the corner beside the old chest of drawers. If she could somehow get across the living room,
and into the bedroom—

  “I don’t think you knew when you bought this property that it was mine, right?”

  Libby met his gaze. “Yours?”

  “Yeah.” He gestured toward the kitchen, inviting her to come and sit with him as if he were the host. “I want to finish my crackers.”

  She held his gaze for a moment, disbelieving she had heard him correctly, afraid she might laugh in his face at the utter outrageousness of the situation. “Okay.” She managed to get the word out and waited, hoping he would go first. But no. The look on his face, the tight way he held himself, put every atom, particle, and cell of her body on alert. Crazy like a fox. The phrase jumped into her mind.

  He fell in behind her.

  She went to the table and, pausing, let her glance run quickly over him, hunting for a sign that he had a knife, but if he did, he could have it concealed anywhere on his person. He could grab one out of a kitchen drawer. It occurred to her he could have found the shotgun. She looked out the kitchen window, but she couldn’t see Jordan or the truck. She was listening so hard for his step on the porch, the sound of the front door. Did Ricky not know Jordan was here?

  “Sit,” he said.

  She sat, gingerly, on the edge of the straight-backed chair.

  “I know that once you know the truth—” He sat opposite her, and picking up the knife, he slathered a cracker with peanut butter, wiping it clean, licking his thumb, smiling at her.

  He had a nice smile. He’d never smiled at her before that she could remember. He’d always seemed sad, pissed at the world. One of those down-on-his-luck young guys . . . That’s how she’d thought of him. How badly she’d misjudged him.

  He topped the buttered cracker with another and popped the tiny sandwich into his mouth, working his tongue around, washing the sticky mess down with the lemonade. “So, here’s the thing,” he said, making another cracker sandwich. “I’ve got the deed and my grandparents’ will that shows how they wanted the Little B left to Aunt Fran and my mom. Not just Fran.”