“It’s me. I’m here.” I slid down the wall to a sitting position, holding one hand over my ear to hear better, to shut out Jack and Hudson, although the only sound in the room was the hum of the refrigerator.
“Want to know about your baby finger, the finger I put ahead of six other cases that I’m actually getting paid for?” James, a fellow UT grad who thought he should be curing cancer instead of figuring out the DNA tree of rich people’s dogs, was pretty much annoyed at the world all the time.
“Tell me,” I said. “Please.”
“It contains a high concentration of calcium sulfate hemihydrate. Or let me put it in layman’s terms. Your finger is plaster of Paris.”
I hung up the phone, my face hot and perspiring.
“A friend,” I said awkwardly.
Jack stretched and stood. Hudson gathered up the coffee cups and put them in the sink. We both followed Jack to the front door, Hudson casually holding his gun.
This couldn’t be over.
“Where’s your car?” I asked Jack suddenly.
“I parked it at the pond.” I wondered if he had considered driving it into the water, sinking away with everything inside it.
Jack turned at the door, a pitying look on his face.
“You and me,” he said, “we’re the same now.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll never feel safe again.”
And then he was gone, striding toward the fields, melting into the trees.
It is a cancerous myth, that children are resilient.
For the next twenty-one hours, I slept.
I woke to the air conditioner thumping on, whispering a breeze across the half of my body uncovered by the sheets.
I glanced at the clock radio by the bed: 6:08 a.m.
Hudson was a long lump lying several feet away in Sadie’s twin bed, breathing in and out in a steady rhythm.
The first thought punched its way through.
I wondered whether Jack would chase down his monsters. Get rid of them for both of us. The picture of the Hobbit and the Giant had disappeared with him.
The second thought: I should read Mama’s letter.
I slid out of bed, shivering in my T-shirt and underwear, and wrapped the Peter Rabbit comforter tighter around me before heading down the stairs.
The kitchen was spotless. The three coffee cups from the other night were washed and draining on a dishtowel. An old mayonnaise jar filled with fresh yellow daisies and purple dianthus from Mama’s garden sat in the center of the table—cheery flowers victorious against the wicked heat, not a cloying refrigerated arrangement left over from the funeral.
Sadie’s work. A little purple Post-it in her artistic scrawl stuck to the side of the jar said: I ♥ you. Call me if you ever get up.
I pushed aside congealing casseroles to find a lone Dr Pepper, then ventured to the laundry room and opened the middle drawer in Mama’s desk. The letter was faceup, exactly the way I’d left it before taking Sadie home.
I stuck the envelope under my nose, hoping for a whiff of her perfume, or the garlic she planted every year or the wax she used like a religion on her grand piano. It smelled … anonymous. I ran my finger under the seal, pulled out a single page:
Dear Tommie,
Already, I can feel my mind slipping away. You were here today, sitting across from me drinking a glass of tea. It would have been the time to tell you everything, but I couldn’t do it. I’m ashamed to say I am not that brave even now. But you are the bravest girl I know. Whatever you discover about me, about your father, about yourself, I hope that the only answer you need is that we loved you.
Be happy.
Love, Mama
It figured. She wasn’t going to tie things up in a pretty little bow.
I stuck the letter back in the drawer and walked over to my cell phone, both plugged in and charging. Sweet of Hudson to do that.
Five messages on my phone.
I was a little leery of reconnecting to the world, but what the hell. Maybe Rosalina Marchetti had another fake body part for me.
W.A. wanted to know when Sadie and I could meet to talk over more details of the will.
Donna had a dermatologist appointment at 2 p.m. tomorrow. I’d been getting Donna’s messages for two years even though I wasn’t Donna.
Wade, pushing his agenda, asked if I’d like to take some horses out to the wind farm this week for a ride.
Halo Ranch wanted to know whether I’d picked a moving company to haul my stuff home. I’d resigned by phone the day before Mama’s funeral for three good reasons: Sadie. Maddie. The weight of our inheritance.
Charla Polaski sounded the most desperate I’d heard her, with voices and clanking noises in the background almost drowning her squeak.
“I hate to leave this on a voicemail,” she said, “but, word is, your Daddy is planning to kill himself.”
CHAPTER 31
My pickup spun down Highway 377, a hot wind blowing through the open windows like God had turned on his giant blow-dryer.
It had been four days since I ignored the last phone call from Charla, ten days since Mama had died, one month since I opened the letter that said I was someone else.
Hudson was sleeping with me every night at the ranch. The pony sheets often ended up tangled and sweaty on the floor. One of Hudson’s war buddies remained a constant at Sadie’s trailer, but something more than a professional relationship was developing there, too.
I didn’t like driving alone. Being alone.
Nothing about my life was resolved since Jack walked out the door.
I took a fast glance at the map on the seat beside me and turned left onto the next county road, stirring up a flock of grackles, a species of black birds invented by the devil. Not a thing to recommend them, Granny would say. They devoured crops, dropped bombs of poop, and were too damn noisy. Nature’s reality TV stars.
The birds flew higher, black dots guiding my eye to a neat row of wind turbines stuck into the earth like white toothpicks. At this distance, the turbines were tiny, almost invisible against the clouds, but I knew that was just a trick of the eye, that they towered forty stories into the sky and weighed hundreds of tons.
Texas leads the way on wind farms, but we’ve been wrong about a lot of things. I don’t yet know what is best for my pieces of the earth, I’m only certain that Wade is about to tell me.
I urged the pickup forward and finally up a dusty hill, three enormous white blades rising up abruptly in front of me, a rotating sculpture against the blue sky. In seconds, the full turbine emerged only yards ahead, and I braked at the top of the rise, absorbing the scene. Seventy-four more turbines spread out into the fields beyond, spinning hypnotically, peacefully, a modern-day Stonehenge. They made a low hum, like a small jet flying overhead.
A herd of cows chewed grass obliviously in the field across the road. A long black horse-trailer was parked on the right side of the road in front of me. Wade. Our meeting spot on the land where Daddy, an oil and gas tycoon, agreed to try to harness the wind.
I pulled in behind the trailer and steeled myself for Wade’s hour-and-a-half lecture about grasping the future. As I stepped out of the truck, Maddie burst from behind the cab, rushing me with the force of an eighty-pound linebacker.
“Surprise! We got Mel!”
Wade appeared from inside the back of the trailer, leading a gray horse.
Mel. Or, formally on paper, Unchained Melody. A gift from Daddy on my thirtieth birthday. Mel arrived at Halo Ranch two years ago with a big red bow, like a Lexus.
I was stunned. Thrilled. If this was a bribe, I was happy to take it.
“We road-tripped to get her,” Maddie said. “Me and Wade.”
I threw one arm around Maddie and buried my face in Mel’s mane before lifting my head to speak. Wade gave me a curt nod.
“Thank you,” I told him. “I didn’t want to hire someone for that long ride. They cram them into those trailers. Mel goes crazy if sh
e can’t ride backward.”
“She let me know that pretty fast,” he said. “Happy to do it.”
“I fed her carrots and apples on the way,” Maddie said. “And I patted her a lot.”
“Lucky horse,” I said. “It sounds like a pretty cushy limo ride.”
Her face lit up with a grin. “Wade said I could ride with y’all today. I brought my helmet.”
The fact that she said this so earnestly broke my heart a little. At her age, I rode bareback, bareheaded, hair flying behind me like crepe-paper streamers, the kind of freedom everybody should feel at least once as a child.
Most sensible parents don’t let their kids do that anymore and certainly not Sadie. Maddie’s helmet was custom-made, reinforced, to cushion her brain and its small tumor in case of a fall. It was the invention of a medical equipment manufacturer and a professional hockey goalie with a brain-injured son. Still, it was heavy and hot. A precaution, doctors said. If she wanted to ride, she had to wear it.
She strapped it on, in all its pink and purple glittery glory, and for fifteen minutes, we worked to get the other two horses out of the trailer and saddled up.
“We need to ride on ahead several miles to a turbine that isn’t behind a cattle gate,” Wade said, as he tightened the last strap on Maddie’s saddle. “I want you to get a look inside at the computer that runs them.”
Fair enough. He delivered my horse. I could look at a computer.
We trotted a mile down the road, barbed-wire fences and wild cactus stretching into the horizon, until we reached a long, low picket gate. Wade rolled off his horse, jiggled a key in the padlock, and swung the gate open for Maddie and me to ride on through.
I pointed to a large rock ahead and she got the message. Race. We pushed the horses to a gallop, Maddie staying inches ahead, before we halted short at the finish line and turned around to wait for Wade as he finished securing the gate.
Did I see the black Jeep on the road first or hear the shot? Suddenly, Maddie’s horse was out of control, up on its haunches. Maddie was a still form in the dirt, her horse spinning, hooves dangerously near every precious part of her. I half fell, half jumped off Mel to pull Maddie away from the frightened horse and cradle her in my arms.
Blood on Maddie’s face, on her shoulder, her helmet in shattered pieces.
Eyes shut like a baby doll’s.
Smack in the middle of open land with nowhere to hide.
In three seconds, Wade had dropped to the ground and pulled a gun out of the waist of his jeans. God bless him, always carrying. The Jeep now blocked the gate. Tinted windows. Wade shot five times at the vehicle, shattering two of them. The driver gunned the engine and roared down the road, kicking up angry dust. Maddie’s horse shot off across the field.
Wade ran over to us, hunched, with a plan. A former federal marshal. My Daddy’s keeper to the end.
“Get on my horse,” he ordered. “She’s faster. I’ll hand Maddie up to you. Head to the truck. I’ll distract them.”
Surreal. His words, his twang, the giant machines whirling behind him on barren soil. A bad Western shot on Mars.
“I don’t know if we should move her—” I protested, futilely scanning the bare terrain.
“She’s sure to die if we don’t. Hurry.”
“That shot was meant for me. They’re after me, not you or Maddie. You take Maddie. I’ll ride Mel off somewhere. Let them follow me. I’ll beat them.”
Wade didn’t appear shocked that we were being shot at like a family of ducks. How much did he know? No time to ask.
“Please,” I begged. “Take Maddie.”
As we argued, the Jeep rounded the curve of the road where it had disappeared, flooring it, heading back.
Wade was nothing if not a practical man. He whistled and his horse obeyed, instantly at his side. In my next life, I would have him teach me that. He stuck his foot in the stirrup and threw his bad leg over. I lifted Maddie and he leaned down and pulled her up in front of him, steadying her limp body with one hand, the reins in the other.
“I’ll call for help as soon as I can get a cell signal.” He tapped his horse lightly on the rear and clicked his tongue. Wade’s instructions to his obedient horse to get the hell out of there.
Mel and I were flying in the other direction by the time I heard the next shot.
I was suddenly airborne. It’s always a surprise when you got tossed, but the instincts kicked in, and I willed my body to stay loose. If I knew nothing else, I knew how to fall. I hit the ground hard and rolled. Mel whinnied, reared back, and charged across the field, scared out of her mind, trying to find the door out of this alien landscape. I prayed she wasn’t hit.
I stumbled up and started running. Another shot struck the air. I ran toward a row of turbines, stopped at the first one, and raced up the five metal steps, jiggling the door before realizing it was padlocked. I glanced behind me. Two small black figures climbed the gate, staring a hole in me. One of them lifted his arm and fired again. He was too far away, wasting ammunition. Keep it up, asshole.
I ran zigzag. The way Hudson recommended to his suburban mommies, I realized, and almost laughed.
The next turbine in the row was locked and the next one and the next. I wanted to scream out in frustration but I didn’t have enough breath. Another shot. Much closer. There was only one more turbine close by, and it appeared half-finished, the enormous blades still lying on the ground. But the door was a black hole.
Open.
I almost fell inside and slammed it, searching frantically for an inside lock or something to block the door. Nothing.
I stood, wheezing, inside a white tube large enough to hold several people. The shell of an impressive computer planted in the center, unfinished. It was too late to get out, to run again. They were close now. My eyes followed a ladder up, two hundred feet or more, a round tunnel to the sky.
A bullet pinged off the side of the turbine. I started to climb. The next shot bit into the outside steel near my ear, but I did not stop. I hit the middle landing and stepped off the ladder, legs trembling. I had a decision to make. Cower here or keep climbing. It was stifling hot inside the tube, my body dripping, palms slick with sweat.
I pushed the hair out of my face and glanced down a hundred feet.
Bad idea. Dizzying. Terrifying.
I looked up. Equally terrifying. A closed metal hatch, a hundred feet up, taunted me at the top.
It would either open when I got up there or it wouldn’t. I imagined pushing uselessly against it, clinging to the ladder while they shot at me until I tumbled down, down, down.
Up, I urged myself. Up.
I could see the hooks on the turbine wall to attach a safety harness that I didn’t have. It made me giggle, the silly horribleness of it all.
Rung after rung, hand over hand. Keep moving. A foot from the top, the door below me kicked open, and I willed myself not to look down.
I slammed at the metal hatch, a desperate submariner emerging from a sinking ship. It flung open so easily I nearly sobbed.
A bullet ricocheted off the inside of the turbine.
“Shit!” someone yelled. “What the hell are you doing?”
Foolish boy to shoot in a fish barrel.
I clambered up into the open air, the hatch clanging shut behind me.
For a second, I stared, blinded, dizzy, hair whipping into my eyes.
Rapunzel standing on the roof of her high-tech castle.
A 360-degree-view of pinwheels in motion.
I fell to my knees and crawled to the side of the platform.
Sweaty. Wild-eyed. Furious.
I pulled Daddy’s Beretta from the holster latched to my ankle, cocked it, gripped it with shaking hands, pointed it at the hatch, and waited.
Lucky me, I was carrying, too.
There are monsters rising out of the ocean in the gray waters off the Dutch coast, giant wind turbines drilled deep into the seabed. The wind’s force against the enormous blades is said
to be like the rush of semi-trucks charging them at full speed.
Someday, wind turbines will fly in the air like kites, capturing the highest, fastest currents.
People dream about these things, and they happen.
I dream about surviving this.
It took four minutes for him to climb up, to savagely throw open the hatch. It took one second for me to pull the trigger and forever for him to fall, screaming down the rabbit hole.
From the top of the world, I watched his friend run across the field, a skittering bug. Zigzag.
I wondered who taught him that.
Then I heard a crack, like a twig snapped.
He fell and didn’t get up.
They were both waiting at the bottom.
The dead guy I sent down the barrel.
And someone else.
He held his hands up in the air, relaxed, a willing prisoner, even though my gun was holstered, too far down to reach. He was tall and ripped with taut muscle, not young, not old, dressed in silver and white Asics running shoes, desert camouflage pants, and a skintight tan T-shirt. His face was so nondescript I could stare at it for five minutes and not be able to describe it.
“Your father sent me,” he said, and I wondered which father.
“Did you shoot him?” I nodded to the dark lump in the field. “Is it over?”
“Can you walk?” he asked.
“I think my arm is broken.”
His face blurred and I swayed.
I felt surprisingly cold.
And then I was on the ground, mesmerized, the blades spinning overhead and lulling me away.
CHAPTER 32
I heard a voice from far away, up at the top of the well, and I tried pushing through the blackness to reach it, but I was so tired and someone had placed a large rock on my chest.
Get this rock off of me. I tried to scream it but there was no sound. Maybe it wasn’t a rock. Maybe my soul was stuck, a grackle in my chest, pressing, unable to get out.
No white light. Did I not make it to heaven? Could I try again?
My eyes flickered at shadows. I worked my lids harder, opening and shutting, until all the lines and colors filled in. The rock floated off.
Playing Dead Page 27
