Heaven, My Home

by Attica Locke

  And speaking of hard-hearted provincialism, Darren looked over the balustrade to the street below and saw Clyde opening the back door of Rosemary King’s silver Cadillac, saw the older woman emerge in a crisp navy dress that was belted in silver. As she started for the restaurant’s front doors, her guest exited from the other side of the car. Darren recognized the hair first, that dandyish swirl on the top of his head. Sandler Gaines entered the restaurant just a few feet behind Rosemary. Darren tossed his napkin on the table and excused himself while Lisa and Greg were reminiscing about their time together as undergraduates at Southern Methodist in Dallas, retelling a story that involved a burst pipe in Boaz Hall and an RA literally caught with his pants down in the second-floor men’s toilet, a story that Darren had heard too many times to count. He couldn’t remember when the three of them had last been in a room together, let alone seated at the same table. Darren, Lisa, and Greg. Now might have been the time to ask how Lisa knew Greg was in Jefferson, when the two had spoken about it, and how and why this dinner had been arranged. But that string of questions felt weighted, anchoring something in his mind that was just floating out there in the blue, harmless and without aim.

  He was glad for the distraction of Rosemary and Sandler Gaines.

  They were seated at a private table, behind a dark curtain; a black server was standing against the wall at attention in anticipation of their every need. Darren asked the brother to bring him a bourbon neat but to otherwise leave the three of them alone. Rosemary half rose from her chair to object to the intrusion, but Darren showed his badge to the black waiter and that was all it took—he slipped behind the curtain. Darren sat in the empty seat across from Rosemary and said, “So you two are buying the land out in Hopetown, is that it?” Rosemary slid back into her seat. Darren noticed a sudden flush of pink across her skin. It whitened the pearls around her neck so that they resembled a second set of teeth at her throat. She pinched her lips together and reached into the leather satchel on the chair next to Darren’s for her cell phone. Without saying a word to either of them, she dialed a number, pointedly ignoring Darren.

  Gaines turned to him with a lank smile and said, “I looked at the property, that’s true, but I’m afraid I was outbid in the end.” He gave a tiny shrug that was nearly lost in the puffy flesh around his shoulders and chin. “My loss, I guess.”

  “And the fact that you’re breaking bread right now with the actual buyer is just, what, a coincidence?”

  Gaines raised the glass of burgundy he was drinking. “I believe you’re mistaken, Ranger. That land is being put into a trust.”

  “That you arranged,” he said, addressing Rosemary.

  She was whispering into her cell phone, so low that Darren couldn’t see how anyone on the other end of the line could make out a word she was saying.

  Gaines spoke for her. “Rosemary and I have known each other for years.”

  “Don’t say anything,” she said to him. “Not till Roger gets here.”

  “You called your attorney?” Darren said, almost impressed by the move.

  “Sheriff Quinn is next if you don’t see yourself away from my table.” She dialed a new number on her phone, finally looking at Darren directly, her blue eyes nearly as dark as the blue-black color of her dress in the dim cove of their private room. “I know my rights. According to Sheriff Quinn, I am in no way under investigation in the disappearance of my grandson, and I am not obligated to say so much as boo in your direction, Ranger.” Someone must have answered on the other end because she went back to speaking as softly as a person could and still be talking. She was right. The Levi King case was Quinn’s or else the FBI’s by now. But it wasn’t wholly Darren’s business.

  He threw up his hands to show he was backing off and glanced over his shoulder in search of the bourbon, his tongue already burning in anticipation of it. Then, as offhand as he could, he turned to Gaines and said flatly, “Why did you lie to me about renting one of the rooms next door to yours at the Cardinal?”

  Rosemary looked up right away, the flush in her neck deepening.

  “Room two-oh-seven was occupied by another guest, a woman,” Darren said. “Not, as you told me, by you. And yet you had a key.”

  “I believe we discussed all of this in the wee hours of this morning, when you burst in like a crazed man, half naked, chasing ghosts and phantom noises and the like. The story is as simple as it is unremarkable. I met a lady, we had a dalliance, she left when the transaction was complete. That is all. That she let me hold on to her room key may be testament to my generosity.”

  Was Darren missing something or was Gaines insinuating that the woman was a prostitute? He thought of his drive past Rosemary’s house the last night, of seeing the lit chandeliers inside, the sense of grandeur and old money. “What would a hooker, a call girl, even, be doing inside your house, Ms. King?” he asked. Then he looked at Gaines. “I saw you two leaving together.” Rosemary set down her phone.

  “If this has nothing to do with Levi, I’d like you to leave,” she said.

  The sheriff arrived before the bourbon.

  He was still in uniform and out of breath, as if he’d run straight from his office. He put his hands on his hips and looked around the table like a harried mother who’d walked in on a mess and was unsure which child to scold first. Darren made a show of rising to leave. He would go before he had to watch a local sheriff embarrass himself by dressing down a Texas Ranger in public. But he used the presence of the sheriff to put a little heat under his next question to Sandler Gaines. “And the commotion I heard in the room next to yours last night?”

  Gaines looked at the sheriff and then at Darren with an affected expression of befuddlement. “What commotion?” he said. “You saw the room. If it was goings-on like you say there was, there’d have been show of a struggle, wouldn’t it?”

  Darren noted that it was Gaines who used the word struggle.

  But he had nothing else to go on, just a feeling that everyone in this little county excelled at obfuscation and misdirection. Marnie King and Gil Thomason, Rosemary and Sandler Gaines, Leroy Page, hell, even Margaret Goodfellow. Not nary a one of ’em will tell you a story straight, he thought. There was something shrouded about the place, like the grayish moss hanging on the cypress trees in Caddo Lake. It was impossible to untangle the truth, to follow a local’s response to a simple inquiry in a straight line. But he did believe Marnie King’s desperation. He did believe Dana’s tears about her brother. Even Bill King’s pleas for help felt as real to Darren as the same man’s history of racial vitriol and violence. Darren didn’t respect a one of them, wouldn’t cross the street to spit on Bill King, but he knew Bill and Marnie and Dana loved Levi King, and they wanted him home.

  When he returned to his table, it was empty, the entrées barely touched. The herbed butter on his cheap steak had melted and was now running in a cloudy river toward the edge of his plate. Pools of grease had opened in Lisa’s bowl of étouffée, staining the accompanying white rice an acid orange. Darren was about to summon their server to ask where his fellow dinner guests had gone, find out how and why they’d fled so quickly, when he heard his wife’s voice float up from the street below him. “No,” she was saying, a hint of bass, of force, in her voice. “We are not doing this right now. We’re barely holding shit together as it is.” Darren glanced over the railing, saw Greg reach for his wife’s arm, and heard him call her name in a way that wasn’t so much possessive as petulant, as if he believed she owed him something. “We were just kids then anyway,” she said.

  When Darren made it downstairs to the front steps of the restaurant, Lisa and Greg were no longer touching. In fact, they were no longer standing anywhere near each other. Greg gave him a limp pat on the back and said they’d talk soon and then walked off in the direction of the blue Ford Taurus he was driving. Lisa turned to Darren, reflections of the Christmas lights twinkling in her watery eyes. Her earlier fury with him was now drowned in whatever these tears we
re about. “Don’t hate me,” she said. He reached to embrace her, ready to absorb whatever she was about to say.

  Lisa stood stiffly in his arms and lied to him. “I have to be in court tomorrow. We finally got a hearing in front of Judge Caselli, and I have to prep my team before we present oral arguments.”

  “You’re leaving?” he said. “Now?”

  “I have to.”

  “Lisa . . .” He searched his wife’s face. No secrets, right? But she had already pulled out her phone. She apologized for needing to make a call—that minute, apparently—and then stayed on her cell phone through all the time it took to pack up her things in Darren’s hotel room and have him walk her to her car in the lot around back. She hung up in time for him to say, “Drive safely, Lis. And call when you get home.” She nodded and gave him a cool, dry kiss on the cheek. Without saying anything about it, he followed her all the way out to Highway 59 and past Marshall as she headed south. At some point in the evening he’d lost sight of Bo and his rusty van, and he wanted to make sure his wife wasn’t being tailed.

  There was a hurt coming, he knew that, a rumble of dark clouds that had gathered strength when Darren wasn’t looking, when he’d left Lisa and Greg alone at the table with their secrets. Still, he felt an odd gratitude for the pain on his horizon, for what it signified, for what it freed him to do.

  16.

  HE’D HAD her phone number for weeks.

  There’d been contact since Lark, since their goodbye in Dallas, when he’d touched her for the first time, holding both of her hands outside the medical examiner’s office where the body of her estranged husband waited to be claimed. But it had always been her reaching out to him, leaving a message to let him know she was burying Michael in his hometown of Tyler after all, that she’d brought the East Texas boy home, and asking if Darren would like to be at the service. It would just be the two of them, she’d said. His parents were gone, his uncle Booker too, of course, and the memorial service with law-school friends and colleagues from his firm had been at the North Shore home of his managing partner, a kind man who wore a dark cardigan instead of a suit and didn’t know enough about Michael to even utter the word Texas in his eulogy. That’s what sold it for Randie, the moment she decided Darren had been onto something about letting Michael’s soul rest in East Texas. And then there was the postcard she’d sent just a few weeks ago, writing that she was working a gig with a designer in Dallas. Which was only a couple of hours from where Darren was sitting, alone on the edge of a hotel bed that still smelled of the last act of his marriage, rank and faintly sour. Fermented came to mind, a sweet that had turned. He looked down at the cell phone he’d been holding for ten minutes.

  And then he called her.

  He didn’t recognize the voice at first and thought maybe all this time he’d actually had the number wrong. But he’d woken her, that’s what it was. She was not, in fact, still in Dallas; she was across the world in Florence, Italy, where it was at that very moment four o’clock in the morning. Darren was mortified. He began apologizing profusely—feeling also a quiet disappointment over the distance between them—but Randie stopped him and said, “It’s okay. I’m glad to hear from you.” Her voice was rough with sleep, but it took him back. Boy, did it take him back. To that juke joint just over the Shelby County line in the town of Garrison, the night they’d gotten drunk and talked about their lives and loves. He could still see the colored bar lights playing across her skin as she told the story of Joe and Geneva Sweet, the tale of a love that was fate or happenstance, depending on your point of view on that sort of thing. Either way, it was the story of two people whose lives crossed unexpectedly in the town of Lark, Texas, and the love that had pulled them off the road they’d been living on, sat them down, and whispered, This. Pay attention to this here. Through the phone, he could hear her moving around in the bed, could picture her in her hotel room reaching over to turn on the lamp, something porcelain and hand-painted, then sitting up and resting against the padded headboard. “You called,” she said. And with no hint of playful rebuke, nothing to suggest she wasn’t utterly serious about having been made to wait for him, she added, “Finally.”

  “Can I ask you something?” he said, speaking quickly, before he lost his nerve. “And you just answer me and not ask me anything in return?”

  “Yes,” she said in a way that suggested she’d been waiting for this. This question, this phone call, this moment.

  Darren lowered his head to the floor until he found his voice again. “How did you know Michael had cheated on you?”

  “Oh boy.” It was a whisper followed by a length of silence so devoid of breath and speech that Darren thought he could hear the sounds of early-morning delivery trucks on some Florentine street below her room. “Oh no.”

  “Greg,” he whispered.

  “Your friend?”

  And then, because he felt ashamed—not just of the possibility of being a cuckold but of the quiet knowledge that he’d used this as a pretext to call another woman—he said, “I don’t know.” What did he know, really? Only that he’d walked into this hotel room alone and wanted to talk to Randie.

  “I don’t think I can do this, Darren.”

  Darren shook his head and apologized. “I wasn’t thinking,” he said. “It must be painful to talk about, all of it.” It had been only a couple of months since the investigation in Lark, when she’d had to reveal that Michael had been unfaithful while also trying to deal with the gut-punch reality of his sudden death.

  “No, I mean I don’t think I can talk about your wife,” she said.

  She was quiet on the line for a while. Darren saw flickers of candlelight between the velvet curtains, heard a few giggles through the glass. The ghost tours were starting up again. So . . . he told her about them instead, about the whole business of selling the past that made up a good portion of the economy of Jefferson, Texas. He even flicked back a corner of the curtain to describe the current tour group, which included one woman who was dressed in full antebellum regalia, a butter-yellow cinched-waist confection that on second glance might actually have been a Halloween costume for Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. This made Randie laugh. And so he kept talking. He told her about the ghost that supposedly haunted his room, told her about waking up from the dream and thinking he saw Penelope Deschamps standing with a gun at the foot of his bed—anything to break the tension that had sprung up between them, which he found he could bear no better than she could. She talked about where she was staying, a boutique hotel near the Ponte Vecchio, talked about the leather goods she was shooting for a spread in French Vogue and the fact that she’d eaten her weight in gelato the first few days she was in town, lonely and trying not to pick up her old habit of smoking, difficult when there were so many people around her looking impossibly beautiful and glamorous while smoking in every piazza, in every street. She remembered how he used cigarettes in Lark to play a part, to look harmless and insignificant, to gain entry into places like the parking lot of the icehouse in town, where they’d been shot at, “for fuck’s sake.” Darren groaned, but there was something playful in it, the pleasure of recalling an improbable survival. He reminded Randie of how ridiculous she’d looked driving his truck, and they both laughed until the silence crept up between them again, the air charged with things that weren’t being said.

  “But you never smoked for real?” she asked. “Not even in college?”

  “No. My mother smokes. That killed the idea of glamour right there.”

  She asked about his mom, a woman she’d never heard him mention. He told her about his childhood, of the uncles who had raised him and why. He didn’t have to go so far as to tell her about Bell hiding a potential murder weapon for her to get the gist of his complicated relationship with his mother, for Randie to understand Bell and her petulance, the danger of a grown woman who felt she was owed shit that deep down she knew she’d never have. Randie’s parents were still living, divorced, but both in DC, and there w
as distance there on all sides, she said. “They must be proud of you,” Darren said. Randie grew quiet again, and this time there was a note of melancholy in her voice when she changed the subject and asked why he was in Jefferson. He told her about the missing kid and the tangled aspects of the case. “His dad’s a killer, a known member of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas.” He told her about Hopetown and the little bit of history he understood so far, the mix of Negroes and Caddo Indians living together for generations. Randie said she’d like to film it. “Before it’s gone.” And this saddened Darren so much that he opened up the room’s minibar, hoping it had been replenished at some point during his absence today. But by then they’d been talking awhile and Randie said the sun was rising in Florence. Somehow his body felt more connected to her room in Italy, where he’d been picturing her for the past hour and a half and where it was just after dawn, and he lost his taste for the liquor. After she described the rush of gold that was lighting up the Arno at that very moment, this country boy tried to best Europe with a description of the sunrise from the back porch of his family homestead in Camilla, how dawn started in the pine tops in the surrounding woods, light the color of butter freshly churned eventually rolling down to brighten the East Texas thicket, the rising sun making diamonds of the dewdrops on the lush green lawn of the back eight acres, where on any day of the week you might see a fawn poke its white-capped head out from the trees, eyes a glassy green, its black button nose sniffing at the same honey-sweet scent of wet grass and pine as you, or you might hear prairie warblers in the trees or find a bluebird perched on the porch railing if you were lucky.

  “I’d like to see it someday.”

  “Yeah,” he said slowly, the word like air leaking out of a balloon, the fantasy losing its shape almost as soon as it was spoken. They both knew this would never happen. He was a Texas Ranger who’d solved the murder of her husband. What did that make them? Friends? Certainly no more than that. “Thought you hated Texas,” he said, pushing away even the thought of seeing her again, reminding himself there was no reason for it. He’d done his job, and that was the end of it.