by Attica Locke
Softly, Darren said, “And if she doesn’t?”
And that’s when he saw the fear, saw that beneath her repeated insistence that the boy’s grandmother had taken him, Marnie King wasn’t so sure, that it was merely a theory she was clinging to because the alternative, when it flashed across her mind just now, made her shudder. Darren could feel her struggling to hold on to her outrage; he saw a quiver of terror in her knitted brow. It was radiating off her body. She glanced up at her boyfriend, Gil, standing next to the stairs, and clamped it down quick. “This was Rosemary’s doing,” she said.
Gil nodded, scratching at his hairline, the thick tufts of loose curls just starting to go gray. He had on a loose pair of black Wranglers that were hanging on by a belt with a brick-size buckle that, if it were real silver, could have put a new paint job on the trailer, got it a new set of wheels. He was barefoot in the rocks and dirt around his home, as if he were afraid to go inside for his boots for fear the sheriff would scuttle in behind him. Whatever was in that trailer, for Gil Thomason, it was worth burning time that Levi King didn’t have. Darren looked up and saw a teenage girl standing in the front window. She had milky-white skin and eyes ringed in black, and she was wearing a leather jacket two sizes too big. She was staring at the whole scene, Gil and Marnie in front of the trailer door, the sheriff and the deputies, and Darren. They locked eyes, the girl and the Texas Ranger, and now he saw quite clearly that she was crying, had been for some time.
“This is some shit Rosemary King cooked up, trust me,” Gil said with the authority of a man who knows his way around a scam. “Take the boy, get the sheriff involved, and then get that judge she put on the bench to cook up some reason to poke around here, some reason to say we ain’t fit, and lickety-split, Marnie loses custody, and Rosemary don’t gotta pay no more child support.”
Sheriff Quinn shook his head. “Y’all the ones called about a missing boy.”
“He’s not missing,” Marnie said, her voice shrill and ice cold. “You go talk to that old bitch in Jefferson, and you bring me back my son.” Her voice cracked on the last word, cracked something in her wide open. Marnie started to cry, fat drops falling on the pink tank top, darkening the fabric to a deep blood red.
Briggs had been right: Hopetown was hard to find.
It was an unincorporated sliver of land tucked at the end of a one-lane dirt road so choked with vegetation—pines and pin oak shrubs, chickweed growing every which way—that anyone who didn’t know what was back here would give up and turn around within the first few yards. The only other way to access the tiny village was by boat, across the northern part of Caddo Lake. But the nearby lakeshore was lined with ancient bald cypress trees draped in Spanish moss the color of an old man’s whiskers, the trees’ knobby roots standing up out of the water like a line of troops keeping outsiders away. There were people living out here completely hidden from sight by both land and water. The air smelled of peat moss and dead fish and the damp, boggy soil at the shoreline.
And horseshit. Which was odd, because the only four-legged creature in sight was a mangy dog nosing through a Hostess cherry-pie wrapper in the grass.
Darren, Sheriff Quinn, and Deputy Briggs had moved their vehicles to a spot near a row of boathouses a few yards from the shore, so the men could speak freely. Quinn was walking Darren through the boy’s last day. “The mom and the boyfriend were running errands out to Jefferson and Marshall, which, knowing Gil Thomason, could mean anything from stopping at Kroger for hair cream and toilet paper to selling credit card numbers under a bridge somewhere. Guy’s a total piece of shit. Fake IDs, credit card numbers, and drugs, of course. He’s a real jack-of-all-trades lowlife. That’s why he don’t want us inside.”
“Surprised the judge hasn’t signed off on a warrant yet.”
“I think everybody’s hoping there’s a simple answer to this deal, that the boy took off or maybe the grandmother is involved some way. There’ve been no shortage of domestic problems coming out of that household,” Quinn said, nodding toward the blue and white trailer in the distance. Standing this close to the shoreline, Darren had a wider view of Hopetown. Behind the rows of trailers was a shallow dell, green and lush, verdant to the exact degree that the trailer park was dry and desolate. There was a house or two back there. Not mobile homes, but actual houses built on foundations more stable than bricks and wheels. There was a thatched hut of some sort too, round like a domed mushroom made of grass. Darren thought again of the smell of horses and wondered what was back there, in this other Hopetown. “The kid’s had problems,” Quinn said. “Skipping school, some petty vandalism. My deputies been out here more than once.”
Darren made a face. “He’s nine.”
“And got a daddy in the pen and a mama shacking up with a criminal. Ain’t nobody gon’ say it out loud, but I will,” the sheriff said. He glanced at the squad car parked behind them, where Briggs sat with his feet out the driver’s-side door. He was texting on his phone. “But the Kings don’t necessarily inspire a lot of sympathy in these parts. Except for Rosemary. She’s a different story.”
“Her son Bill King, he’s a captain in the Brotherhood.”
“Lot of folks willing to forget that. Rosemary King is big shit in Jefferson.”
“What about Thomason? Is he ABT?”
“Wannabe,” Quinn said. “But those are the worst ones.”
Darren nodded. He liked Quinn, felt the guy was shooting straight with him, and the sheriff didn’t appear at all resentful of Darren’s presence in his county. “Bill King seems to put this on Gil,” he said, “thinks Marnie’s boyfriend might have done something to the boy or put Levi in danger in some way. Folks is all kinds of hot right now. Hell, I got two kids at home, and I’d have torn this county limb from limb looking for ’em if they were gone. There’s something wrong about Thomason for sure, straight trouble. But so far there’s no sign of any foul play, nothing like that. The boy just up and disappeared.”
He’d left his house in the afternoon, Quinn said. His older sister—the girl in the trailer window—had let Levi take out their granddaddy’s boat, even though they both knew Marnie wouldn’t have allowed it. The boat hadn’t been touched much since Marnie’s father died sometime in the fall, and no one was taking any real care of it. But Dana King had a boyfriend over and wanted some privacy. She told Levi to stay gone for a few hours. The boy got himself all the way to Karnack on the other side of Caddo Lake—a body of water so big, Darren came to understand, that parts of it had names unto themselves, as did the handful of islands—some several miles long—that rose up among the water lilies and moss-draped cypress trees. Quinn, who kept a map of the lake in his cruiser, spread it over the hood of the car. He ran his hairy pointer finger across the inlet called Clinton Lake, past Goat Island, and through the bay of Carter Lake to the west, where Levi had spent most of the afternoon at a friend’s house, playing video games. The boy, CT, was the first person Dana called when her brother wasn’t home by dark. Darren took a closer look at the map. Even on paper, Caddo Lake was bigger than he’d imagined. It looked like a beast with a fire-breathing head to the north—the bayous and creeks shooting from its mouth resembling a forked tongue and flames—and a body so massive it claimed parts of Louisiana. It was a gnarled inland sea, wholly untamed. Darren looked out past the boathouses to Hopetown’s craggy shore. Only a skilled sailor could navigate the fortress of bald cypress, the tree roots—or knees, as they were called—like billy clubs sticking out of the water. Caddo Lake was both majestic and macabre. “That’s a long distance for a nine-year-old in a shoddy boat.”
“It’s a different world out here. I’ve seen seven-year-olds driving fifteen-foot bass boats. They put ’em in canoes out here soon as they can walk. Hell, the old-timers on Caddo like to talk about boating to school, trying to keep their homework dry. The water is just part of everything for folks on the lake.”
“Still, something could have happened to him out there.”
�
�Naw, we got an eyewitness says he got the boat home,” Quinn said as he glanced back at Deputy Briggs in the other squad car. “Neighbor out that way,” he said, pointing past the trailers and vans to that other Hopetown, the green valley and houses across the way. “He says he saw the boy locking up the boathouse. Didn’t see the boat itself but assumed he was just coming in for the night. Marnie and Gil wouldn’t let us inside that either, but you can see it’s locked.” He pointed toward an unpainted clapboard shed with a tin roof and a thick padlock looped through the handles on the door. Darren looked up. He saw no streetlights, no lamps affixed to any of the boathouses, no lighting of any kind. “He’s sure it was Levi King?”
“You wanna ask him yourself?”
Darren smelled horses again, heard the clop of hooves in the dirt. He knew there were three of them before he turned his head to see the posse on horseback. The first man was black and easily in his late seventies; the other two were younger and astride twin mustangs with coats the color of charcoal. They were Native—Texas Indians—one in his late teens and the other nearing forty, his skin leathered and bronze, his hands on the horse’s reins, communicating by tiny movements, gently holding his stallion in place. They were all armed, the men with a .45 revolver each and the teenager with a rifle hanging by a leather strap on his back. The black man looked at Darren and gave a nod and his name. “Leroy Page.”
6.
THEY WERE from that other Hopetown.
The original residents, it turned out.
“Some kind of freedmen’s deal, black folks been living back there since after the Civil War,” Quinn said as they sat on an ornate sofa in Rosemary King’s sitting room, as the black maid had called it when she invited the sheriff and Darren to wait for Madame. They each had a cooling cup of tea in front of them, matching china cups on the gilded coffee table. Neither had touched the tea in the twenty minutes they’d been waiting to see Mrs. King.
Back in Hopetown, Mr. Page had confirmed his account of Friday evening. As the community’s oldest resident, he’d taken it on himself to keep the peace in town. “It’s been some problems with the new folks moving in,” he said without getting specific. “So I make it a point to keep my eyes open.” He’d been doing patrol on horseback, he said, “when I saw the boy locking the boathouse there.” He gestured to the same rambling shed Quinn had pointed out. “I gave him a nod, but he ain’t speak. The way they raised him, you know,” he said, looking at Darren. Turned out, Leroy Page didn’t like the boy much, didn’t like his mama or the trash she’d been bringing around Hopetown.
Still, he and the men were offering to help.
The older Native man, Donald Goodfellow, said he could get a search team together in less than an hour. Word had spread, and Donald would wish the same thing done if it were one of his kids. The teenager on the other horse was his son Ray. Sheriff Quinn said everybody was getting a little ahead of themselves.
“Heading to talk to the boy’s grandmother right now,” he said. “Probably get this straightened out before the sun sets.” His manner was relaxed in a way that Darren couldn’t understand or entirely abide. He asked the old man to describe what the boy was wearing, to be crystal clear about what time of night it was.
Leroy Page frowned, working to get the answer just right.
It was the watery look of the cataracts in his eyes that made Darren realize the man was probably in his eighties. When he’d come off the horse to give his account of Friday night, Darren had read the age in his bones, the slight droop in his posture. He was an elderly man with poor vision upon whose recollection of seeing Levi the sheriff had set a theory: Levi had made it home on Friday night and disappeared around here. Darren thought the sheriff was relying too heavily on unverified facts. He mentioned the water again, but Quinn waved it off. “It only looks deep,” he said. “But Caddo ain’t but about four feet in some parts. Ain’t been nothing you could drown in since the steamboat days, when the water table was higher.” Still sounded pretty deep for a nine-year-old.
Quinn took one of the butter cookies on a serving platter, made a face after one bite, and put it back. Whatever, Darren thought. It was Quinn’s investigation. Darren was here to fish for what he could on the Brotherhood connection, to find intel for the task force. All he needed was to get in a room alone with Gil, Marnie, or Bill King, and he’d make his plan work. Not a one of them was worth the horseshit he’d had to scrape from the soles of his boots at Rosemary King’s front door. That the woman in whose palatial Victorian colonial Darren now sat had raised a captain of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas—a man who now sat in a Texas penitentiary—made about as much sense as a freedmen’s community sharing real estate with Nazis. Meaning it didn’t. Not one bit.
Darren had gotten two texts since they’d been waiting.
One odd—his old friend Greg asking, U where i think u are?
And one ominous—Mack texting, We need to talk.
Darren was sliding his phone away when Rosemary King entered her parlor followed by a rakish man slightly younger than her, in his late fifties. Rosemary was a broad-shouldered woman with a head of blondish-gray hair that was coming loose from a chignon. She was flushed. Her cheeks and sternum—peeking through a crisp white shirtwaist dress—were both pink with heat. The same could be said for her guest. The man was wearing a suit jacket—linen, even though it was December—and no tie. Darren had no knowledge of the layout of the house, but it sure appeared they’d just come from upstairs. The curved staircase was behind them, the banister wound with Christmas holly and white poinsettias.
Rosemary asked Mary, her maid, for two glasses of water. “With ice,” she said, sitting down and shooting a sidelong glance at the man beside her. There was something intimate and conspiratorial about the look that made Darren uncomfortable. What exactly had they walked in on, and why hadn’t this woman been ready to receive the sheriff who was looking for her missing grandson? “Sheriff, can I have Mary fetch you anything else? Would you prefer a Coke or some coffee?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Ranger?”
“I’m sure Mary’s done enough,” Darren said.
Rosemary turned her attention back to the local sheriff. “Steve, I told you when you called yesterday, I haven’t seen the boy since before Thanksgiving. Marnie doesn’t exactly make it easy for me to have a relationship with my grandson.”
Darren leaned forward and said, “Perhaps this is something better discussed in private.” He gave a courteous nod to the man sitting in the King Louis armchair across from him. The man smiled, tickled in some way.
“Oh, he can stay,” Rosemary said, reaching for the glass of water Mary proffered before it even hit the coffee table. “Roger Pressman’s my lawyer.”
Darren shot a look at Quinn, who nodded and said, “Roger.”
“Steve.”
The two men knew each other.
Roger Pressman drank his ice water in three gulps and then held out the glass for Mary to get another. The black woman, who’d made no direct eye contact with Darren, returned from whence she’d come without saying a word.
“Any reason why you felt the need to have your attorney present?”
Rosemary waved off the thought. “He just stopped by.”
Again, that look between the two.
Roger smiled and said, “But as long as I’m here.”
Rosemary fiddled with the pearl-drop necklace she was wearing. “Roger handles all personal and professional matters for the King family. This business with Levi is of concern to him as well. I’d feel more comfortable if he stayed.”
Quinn nodded.
But Darren thought the whole thing had an air of cunning. He even wondered if the apparent interrupted afternoon liaison was a put-on. Hadn’t she known Quinn and Darren were on their way? Deputy Briggs, who was sitting in his cruiser outside by the mansion’s carriage house, had phoned ahead.
Darren looked into the older woman’s eyes. They were a robin’s-egg blue, nestl
ed in the pale crepe of her skin. There was something probing there. She was watching Darren Mathews as closely as he was watching her. Twice, her gaze darted down to the badge on his chest. The fact of its presence, of Darren in her house, seemed to catch her unawares each time she looked at him, made her shift ever so slightly in the gilded chair she was sitting in. For that reason, maybe, she addressed Sheriff Quinn alone; Darren was as invisible as the black hands that brought her ice water. “I haven’t seen him,” she said to Quinn. “And I wouldn’t put it past his mother to make up a story like this just to get my attention, to find some way to get more money out of me.”
“I’m sorry,” Darren said. “But how would your grandson going missing be a way for Marnie to get money from you?”
Rosemary directed her answer to Quinn. “Who’s to say she doesn’t have the boy holed up somewhere just to scare me and demand more money?”
Roger put a cautioning hand on her knee. “Let’s not open ourselves up to a charge of slander. We know how opportunistic Marnie and Gil can be.” He had a ruby signet ring on his right hand and a diamond pinkie ring on his left, but no wedding band.
“She gets two hundred a month from me and still has her hand out.”
“Two hundred is not that much money for two kids,” Darren said.
“The older one is not my kin,” Rosemary said. “Marnie is looser than a circus tent in a windstorm, as my mother used to say. Two hundred is what the judge ordered Bill to pay in the divorce. Child support for Levi. I’m just covering the cost until he gets out of jail.” She shot a glance at Roger. “Soon, we hope.”
“Your son wrote a letter to the governor,” Darren said.
The mention of her son from Darren’s mouth lit a match to Rosemary’s already simmering dislike of him. She again refused to address him directly, telling Roger, “I don’t want to talk about Bill.”
“Bill has been writing to the governor for the past three years,” Roger answered for her, a chivalrous act to keep her from having to talk to Darren, as if he’d gently escorted her by the elbow around a puddle in the road. It gave Darren an odd feeling of dislocation; for a second he actually didn’t trust his visibility. He felt as if he’d wandered onto a movie set. He could see the actors, but Darren was reflected in none of the action around him. “Bill King has changed inside,” Roger said. “He’s gotten right with Christ. He’s renounced his former ways, the ugly things he’s done. We have every belief that the parole board and the governor himself will see fit to consider him for early release.”
