Sleeping in Eden

by Nicole Baart

  Ten steps from the sanctuary of the barn, Dylan heard a door slam behind him.

  “Who the hell do you think you are? Get off my property!”

  Dylan wheeled around, hands in the air. “Sir! Corporal Sparks, sir!” Dylan’s voice snapped to attention and boomed across the space between them. “Private Reid, reporting for duty.” It was a ridiculous thing to say. No one called Jim sir, neither his rank nor his character warranted it. But as soon as Dylan saw the shotgun in Jim’s hands, he knew he had said the right thing. The tip of the gun wavered as the drunken man regarded Dylan through slitted eyes.

  “It’s me,” Dylan said, trying to sound nonchalant though his heart threatened to throb right out of his chest. “I brought you home a couple months ago. Remember? After we had a few too many at the Rooster?” It wasn’t we who had a few too many, and it wasn’t just a few. But Dylan wasn’t about to split hairs.

  The nose of the gun dipped a little lower and Dylan took a few wary steps toward the sagging porch of the house. Jim was dressed in a pair of faded jeans and a white T-shirt that was more gray than white and bore yellow stains beneath the arms distinguishable even from a great distance. He looked homeless. Homeless and sick.

  “I know this is really unexpected, Corporal Sparks, but my girlfriend and I got caught in the storm last night.” A twitch of surprise at how natural it felt to call Meg his girlfriend made the corner of Dylan’s mouth curl. It was fine, for now. He wanted to call her more than that. But he couldn’t think about that with crazy Jim before him. Dylan tried to focus. “We were in a bad way, sir, and when I realized how close we were to your farm, well, I figured we didn’t really have a choice. That was quite the storm we had last night.”

  Jim still hadn’t said anything, but a cloud seemed to pass over his face. He put the gun down, propped it against the porch railing, and sat down heavily on the top step. Dylan was afraid for a moment that he would slip right off the edge and smash his head on the cracked cement of the sidewalk, but Jim righted himself and heaved a congested sigh. “Get the hell off my property, you son of a bitch.”

  “I will. I will right now, sir, but I have to get Meg first. She’s still sleeping . . .”

  Dylan was already several paces away when something about the grotesque way Jim cleared his throat made him turn around.

  “She’s not here,” Jim said.

  Dylan froze, uncomprehending. “What do you mean, she’s not here?”

  “Are you deaf? I said she’s not here. She’s gone.”

  It felt like flashbulbs were going off in Dylan’s head, and he stumbled over a patch of uneven ground. Jim’s words didn’t make any sense, and yet a dark feeling seemed to descend over the farm, a faint awareness that everything was not as it should be. Dylan shivered.

  “What do you mean, she’s gone?”

  Jim shook his head in disgust. “You really are the stupidest . . .” He trailed off, spilling the last of his tirade down his own chest like liquor he forgot to swallow. He looked up suddenly. “She left you. How hard is it to get that through your thick skull?”

  “Meg wouldn’t leave me,” Dylan said. He sounded hoarse, even in his own ears. “She wouldn’t. Not now.” He glanced around the farm, barely taking it in. “Where would she go?”

  Jim shrugged. “It’s what women do,” he slurred. “They go. They up and leave you.”

  “No.” Dylan shook his head, and found that he couldn’t stop shaking it. “No. She wouldn’t. She didn’t.” He spun around and ran for the barn, calling her name as he went. “Meg? Meg!” Bursting through the barn door, he shouted into the stillness, but even before he climbed the ladder to the haymow, he knew the barn was empty.

  There was nothing on the wooden platform but the blanket where they had fallen asleep twined together. He could still smell her skin. He could still feel the weight of her head on his chest. Dylan stumbled uncertainly to the edge of the open haymow and scanned the barn as if it held the secret of Meg’s disappearance. There was nothing to see. A soft mound of loose, fresh hay on the ground beneath him. An old plow. A cluster of rotting bee boxes.

  “She’s gone.” Jim sounded out of breath, and he leaned on the frame of the barn door as if he doubted his own ability to stand upright.

  “You keep saying that,” Dylan whispered. It didn’t matter that Jim couldn’t hear him. He didn’t care.

  He wanted to scream. He wanted to throw things and hit someone and jump from the brink of the ledge where he found himself teetering, toes curled over the edge. He wanted to do it all again. He wanted to take it all back.

  For a sharp, agonizing moment, he wanted to die.

  His heart broke, but in mere minutes, he learned that a broken heart can turn into a bitter heart before it even has the chance to grieve.

  “I don’t believe you!” Dylan screamed. But the truth was, he did. He could feel that Meg was gone as surely as he could feel the crumpled corner of the blanket when he stumbled over it and almost tripped. A rush of vertigo made him light-headed, and Dylan fell backward onto the dusty planks of the haymow and sat with his head in his hands for what seemed like the remainder of his miserable life. But when he looked up, it was still morning. Jim was still framed in the door of his cursed barn.

  Dylan scrambled to his feet, leaving the blanket and the memories it held. He half slid down the ladder and landed hard on the packed floor of the barn. “I’m going to find her,” he rasped, his throat sore from dust and heartache.

  “Good luck,” Jim said. Up close, Dylan could see that the older man’s eyes were red-rimmed and haunted. He couldn’t focus on anything for more than a second, but he met Dylan’s gaze once. And in that one look was a lifetime of hurt and anger and regret and hell. Dylan thought for a moment that Jim was going to vomit at his feet, but instead he doubled over and pulled something from the pocket of his jeans.

  “She had this.” Jim tipped the object into Dylan’s outstretched palm, but as soon as Dylan realized what it was, he dropped it into the dirt at their feet. Meg’s ring felt like it had the power to burn. It was a slap to the face, a cruel reminder. A burden he had no desire to carry.

  “I don’t want it,” Dylan said.

  He was too broken to realize that Jim’s words didn’t make sense. She had this. Not, “She gave this to me.” Or, “She wanted you to have it.”

  Maybe, if Dylan had been listening, he would have known.

  “So you left?” Lucas could hardly choke out the question, he was so absorbed in Dylan’s tale. It was heart-wrenching. It was wrong. And it was wrong that Dylan had just hopped in his truck and driven away.

  “Of course not.” The telling had obviously exhausted Dylan, and he pinched the bridge of his nose between trembling fingers. “I drove up and down the gravel roads for hours. I traveled the route between the interstate and back half a dozen times, and stopped at every gas station and truck stop within a thirty-mile radius. I figured she couldn’t have gotten too far.”

  “And you just, you just trusted Jim? You believed him that Meg had left?”

  Dylan paused before answering. “Yes. And no. I did at first. I mean, she was gone. And I was so shocked and hurt, I wasn’t thinking straight. But I came back late that afternoon and parked in a field driveway about a mile from the farm. I circled back and combed his property. Looked through the groves and outbuildings. Tried to find something that would tell me where she had gone. What had happened to make her leave.”

  “But you didn’t find anything.”

  Dylan scoffed. “I’m no detective.” Then all at once his face crumpled, his gaze darting back and forth as if he was scanning the interior of the barn in his mind’s eye. “But there was fresh hay on the ground.”

  “So?” Angela sniffed. “It was a barn. There was lots of hay.”

  “I wasn’t gone that long,” Dylan said, ignoring Angela. “He wouldn’t have had enough time to bury her. But he hid her. It must have been so simple . . .”

  “You’re insane.
”

  “Something happened. He covered her.” He spoke evenly, logically, but his hands trembled on the table. “I looked everywhere except beneath my own nose. If I had just looked. I should have . . . I should have known . . .”

  “You should have known that my dad killed your girlfriend in cold blood?” Angela’s fury was so unexpected, Lucas started. He had almost forgotten that she was there.

  “Nobody said that,” Lucas said calmly. “Dylan didn’t say that. We don’t know what happened. I’m starting to think we may never know exactly what happened.”

  “He just implied that my father shot a young woman and covered up the murder.”

  Dylan didn’t say anything, so Lucas stepped in again. “She didn’t die of a gunshot wound, Angela. She died of a broken neck.”

  “An accidental broken neck? A broken neck that apparently my father felt the need to cover up?” Angela was working herself into a lather. “Are you telling me that you believe this shit? He’s lying through his teeth, Lucas! He killed her and dumped her body in our barn, and now he’s trying to frame my father! Why would Jim do that?”

  “Maybe Jim woke up drunk and realized that there was somebody in his barn . . .”

  “How?” Angela asked.

  “The door was open,” Dylan said. “I didn’t bother to shut it when I left for town. Maybe he heard me start the truck that morning. It screamed to wake the dead.” He swallowed hard, apparently conscious of his role in alerting Jim to the trespasser in his barn.

  Lucas didn’t need to remind Angela about her father’s history of violence. In the years before he closed in on himself and more or less lived the life of a hermit, Jim had accumulated a long list of misdemeanors, including an aggravated assault from a bar fight that landed one man in the hospital overnight. And Alex had been down to talk to him on more than one occasion about his fondness for chasing teenagers off his property with a loaded gun. There were rumors of undiagnosed PTSD from events that Lucas could only begin to guess at, but he knew that the death of Jim’s wife and a stint in the Middle East had to have left indelible marks. The truth was, trying to untangle the gnarled rope that was Jim Sparks’s life was like attempting to undo a constrictor knot: impossible.

  But, knowing what he knew about Jim, could Lucas believe that the fractured man had gone too far the morning that Meg died? Could he have snapped and done something that he regretted, and then tried to cover it up? That, Lucas decided, was sadly, and distinctly, possible.

  “Angela.” Lucas said her name softly because she still looked ready to flay Dylan alive. “Jim had Meg’s ring. It was tucked inside his suicide note.”

  It wasn’t proof of anything, but it was enough to poke a hole in the hot bubble of Angela’s rage. She sagged a little, and bit her bottom lip so furiously Lucas was afraid she’d puncture the skin.

  “What happened that night?” Lucas asked, directing the question at Angela. He already knew the answer.

  “I left,” she whispered.

  “And can I presume that you were telling the truth about everything? The fight, the whiskey bottle, the final straw?”

  It took her a few seconds, but she nodded. Her eyes were tortured, and Lucas could tell that she was drawing the same conclusion he was.

  “I was there.” Dylan studied Angela as if seeing her for the first time. “It was dark, and I had come to the farm one last time.”

  “Why?”

  Dylan was still staring at Angela when he said, “I was trying to . . . get rid of Meg’s things. Her overnight bag and her carry-on. The toothbrushes that I had bought and the doughnuts. All of it. I threw it on the porch because I couldn’t stand to have it in my truck. And Angela was just stepping out the door.”

  “He wouldn’t take me any farther than the truck stop,” she muttered.

  Dylan shook his head. “I couldn’t.”

  Something struck Lucas. He reached across the table and grabbed Angela by the wrist. Waited until she gathered the courage to look him in the eye. “You just spent days scouring his house, Angela. They’re there, aren’t they? Meg’s bags.”

  “There were no bags,” Angela hissed.

  Lucas thought for a moment. “He dismantled them. There were strange clothes in your closet, weren’t there? Stuff you didn’t recognize, but that DCI would simply assume was yours.”

  The fact that she wouldn’t answer was affirmation.

  After a minute Lucas said gently, “It works, Angela. His story works.”

  Angela’s eyes flashed and she turned on Dylan. “Why didn’t you step forward when Meg turned up missing? Her parents had to have filed a missing persons report. If you’re so innocent, why didn’t you tell them your story?”

  “I’ve spent the last eight years running as far as I could from any connection I ever had with Meg. When I left Sutton, I didn’t look back. I didn’t really have friends in Iowa besides her, and I worked hard to keep it that way.”

  “That’s very convenient.” Angela sniffed.

  “I’m not proud of it.” Dylan hung his head for a moment before lifting it to gaze out the darkened window. “I feel like I’ve lived half my life trying to forget Meg Painter. And after she left me, I didn’t want to know about her happy ending and how she had reunited with Jess.”

  “Jess Langbroek?”

  “How do you know Jess?” Dylan asked suspiciously.

  Lucas held up the ring. “We did a little investigating. He was the person we were looking for. Not you.” Suddenly Lucas remembered his visit with Mrs. Langbroek and the cell phone clip that had brought them to the Gaslight Inn and Dylan. He had pocketed the clip in the midst of the uproar, and as he fished it out, he felt deeply indebted to Mrs. Langbroek and the part she didn’t even know she had played. He slid the phone clip across the table and Dylan caught it. “You left this at the Langbroeks’.”

  Dylan fingered the plastic accessory but didn’t seem to register what it was or where it had come from. His mind was on Meg. “I thought she was with him all this time,” he whispered. “I had no idea Meg was missing until I saw that piece on the news about Jim.”

  “And you put it all together.” Lucas realized he was still holding Angela’s wrist, and he released her belatedly. She rubbed her forearm as if smoothing away the evidence of his fingers.

  “Parts of it. Enough.” Dylan’s shoulders rounded and he sank into himself. “I came to see Greg and Linda—her parents. To tell them what I know.”

  Dylan didn’t have to admit that he had never made it to the Painters’. His shame was palpable. He must have considered the Langbroeks a sort of stand-in, a step between him and the people whose lives his story would change forever. Lucas noticed a slight tremor in Dylan’s hand, and wondered what caused the involuntary motion. Fear? Horror at finally learning the ugly truth? Or did Dylan medicate himself to forget? He didn’t smell like booze, and he didn’t seem like an addict. But Lucas was all too aware that there were many different ways to numb the pain. Some more subtle than others.

  Lucas studied the ring that he had slipped on his pinky, taking in the curve of leaves and the cracked opal, the iridescent beauty split down the middle. He had spent his life striving to do the right thing. To help people. To promote justice. But after hearing Dylan’s tale, he couldn’t see clearly enough to determine what that was. He couldn’t help thinking of what Angela had said in the car only hours before: Maybe it’s not always about being right . . . It’s about being good. Maybe this time what was right and what was good were not the same thing.

  Dylan would be questioned mercilessly, maybe even suspected of a role in Meg’s death—Angela certainly seemed convinced of his guilt. His life would definitely never be the same. And maybe that was the point. As Lucas looked between the two of them, he accepted that everyone had to be held accountable for the things that they did—and didn’t do.

  “It’s not my story to tell,” he said eventually, and he slid the ring off his finger and handed it to Dylan.

 
Angela gasped, but Dylan accepted the ring without pause. He seemed grateful to hold it again, and for one of the first times in his life, Lucas couldn’t predict far enough ahead to assume an answer. Black and white didn’t seem so clear.

  “Thank you,” Dylan said, and when he began to cry, Lucas had to look away. “Thank you, but it’s not mine. It never was.” He closed his fist tight around the ring for a second, then released it onto the table, setting the gold into a spin that Lucas stopped with the weight of his palm.

  Dylan had made his choice.

  “Okay,” Lucas said, picking up his cell phone. “I’ve got a call to make.”

  Alex was beyond livid, but Lucas didn’t care.

  While they waited nearly two hours for the DCI team to arrive, Dylan found his way to an empty booth and laid his head down on the table, face turned toward the wall. His arms arched over his head like he was trying to hide himself from the world, and Lucas wondered, from the slow, deep way he breathed, if he was crying. Lucas knew that kind of grief. That kind of crawl-out-of-your-skin, kill-me-now, I-can’t-stand-it grief. He had seen Jenna curled into the same ball the day they buried Audrey.

  Lucas wanted to tell Dylan how sorry he was. How deeply he felt the younger man’s loss, and how he knew what it was like to believe you that had been forsaken by the world. By a cruel God who didn’t care and refused to help. Though it wasn’t logical, Lucas fought an urge to touch the top of Dylan’s bowed head. He raised his hand a little, maybe to hold it out for a handshake, maybe to raise it in condemnation. Or blessing. But Dylan never saw the offering of the doctor’s outstretched hand because he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, lift his head. Lucas dropped his arm to his side and turned away without saying anything.