In the Clearing

by Robert Dugoni

  “I just got home from the banquet,” he said. He wore black loafers, slacks, and a button-down beneath a V-neck sweater. Tracy detected a subtle humility to his demeanor not present when they’d spoken at the golf course. Reynolds looked tired and emotionally spent. She wondered if he’d been drinking.

  “I won’t take up much of your time,” she said. “Just a few questions.”

  Reynolds stepped aside. The dogs retreated. Like the exterior, natural wood and stone dominated the decor, keeping a rustic theme. Tracy didn’t note a single family photograph amid the paintings and sculptures as Reynolds led her to a den. Entering, she noted a handgun on a poker table, along with a cleaning kit. She smelled the distinct odor of Hoppe’s No. 9 cleaning solvent.

  “Doing a little maintenance?” she asked.

  Reynolds looked to the table as if he’d forgotten the gun was there. “Actually, I was just starting to watch a movie.” He gestured to a very large television across the room. Bradley Cooper, wearing an Army uniform, stood frozen on screen.

  “American Sniper,” Tracy said. “Late to be starting a movie.”

  “I’m usually up late.”

  “You don’t sleep well?” she said.

  “No. No, I don’t. Can I offer you a drink?” he asked, moving again toward the poker table and the gun, the wet bar to his right.

  “No, thank you,” Tracy said. “You have a lovely home. Is it just you?”

  “Just me,” he said, offering a wistful smile “Well, and Blue and Tank here. I’m divorced. Twenty-five years now.”

  “It must get lonely out here.”

  “Not with Blue and Tank around. I’m used to being alone.”

  “No children?”

  “No. You?”

  “Also divorced. Also many years ago. Also used to living alone.”

  “No dogs?”

  “A very needy cat.”

  Reynolds offered her a leather chair facing the stone fireplace. Tracy noted a large gun safe in the corner of the room, the heavy door partially open, the stocks of rifles visible. Reynolds took a seat on a matching sofa near one of two table lamps offering soft light. The two dogs hopped onto the couch and curled up beside him, Blue keeping a watchful eye.

  When Reynolds crossed his legs, his slacks inched up, revealing tan socks. “So what can I do for you?”

  “I’m just returning from Seattle,” Tracy said. “I spoke with Tiffany Martin, Darren Gallentine’s widow, and his two daughters.”

  “Oh?” Reynolds scratched Blue behind the ears and about the head.

  “The daughters were seventeen and fourteen when their father took his life. They never knew why he did it.”

  “He didn’t leave a note, then.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “A terrible thing,” Reynolds said.

  “You can’t imagine unless you’ve gone through it,” Tracy said. “We like to believe our parents are perfect, but then you realize they’re human, with all the same faults and imperfections. I think that’s the hardest thing to accept.”

  “You have personal experience.”

  “My father shot himself.”

  “I’m sorry.” Reynolds continued to pet his dogs. His right foot bounced rhythmically.

  “Darren was in therapy at the time he killed himself.” Tracy paused, making sure she had eye contact. “The therapist kept a file. The family had never asked to see it. You can imagine. On the one hand, it could provide answers; on the other, it could reveal faults and imperfections. They’d decided to move on. Only they found that it wasn’t so simple to just move on from something that traumatic. Their father certainly couldn’t. Neither, apparently, could Archibald Coe. Hastey doesn’t appear to have either, and, despite appearances, I don’t believe you have.”

  “I can assure you I don’t know what you’re talking about, Detective.” Reynolds didn’t sound defiant. He sounded tired.

  “Yes, you do, Mr. Reynolds. Because I have Darren Gallentine’s file, and he told his therapist what happened the night Kimi Kanasket died. I’m talking about how the four of you were out drinking beer and getting high. About how you were upset because Cheryl Neal had gone out with Tommy Moore, about how fate, cruel and horrible, put Kimi Kanasket in your path.”

  His foot continued to bounce. “No,” he said. “I was at home.”

  “Maybe that’s what you told Buzz Almond when he came to your house to take pictures of the Bronco, but I know now that was a lie. Darren’s account was very detailed. You got angry. You had a temper then, one you’ve done remarkably well to overcome, it appears, and you chased Kimi into the woods with the Bronco. You didn’t mean to run her down. You weren’t even thinking straight. You were just angry. You were angry a lot back then. You were just a boy, who had to watch his mother die of cancer and grow up without her, trying to live up to his legendary father’s expectations. You were under a lot of pressure and stress. The whole town was expecting a lot of you, in particular. You were the golden boy, the all-American. That’s a lot for any eighteen-year-old’s shoulders to bear. The other three—Darren and Archie and Hastey—they were part of the Four Ironmen, but they didn’t have the same pressures. You were the center of attention. You were the star. I imagine you were feeling the pressure, particularly that night, on the eve of the biggest game in this little town’s history.”

  “I told you, Detective, I never put much into all that stuff about being the Four Ironmen and all-American. Those were just labels others placed on us, on me.”

  “Maybe you didn’t, but others did. Your father did, and whether you admitted it then or not, you wanted to live up to those expectations. That’s why in the photograph of the four of you with the trophy, the others are smiling, but you just look relieved. I imagine you were—relieved to have the season behind you. Relieved to be moving on, away from Stoneridge, away from the memory of what you’d done, away to college, where you could just blend in. You didn’t mean to run down Kimi. It wasn’t premeditated. It was a horrible thing to have happen. But it happened. And the four of you were scared out of your minds. You didn’t know what to do. Your whole life had changed in an instant—if anyone found out, all the accolades and attention and publicity would be forgotten, replaced by one horrible incident that would forever define you. Eric Reynolds, an all-American with a full ride to the University of Washington—a murderer, a felon who threw away his life because he couldn’t control his temper.”

  Reynolds looked like he’d taken a sedative, only partially present in the room, as Tracy continued to recount what transpired that night. Tracy had no doubt the part of him not present had gone back to the clearing, back forty years, to that horrible moment. And she had no doubt that, despite all of his seeming success and wealth, that he’d gone back to that night many times. He just hid it better in public than the others, hid it behind the façade he’d created, behind the big house and the successful business and the gregarious personality, but Eric Reynolds was riddled with guilt. That was the reason he lived alone, unmarried, without children, unable to sleep. That was why the gun was on the poker table, and Tracy bet it had been on that table many other nights.

  “Kimi threw herself in the river,” he said. “She was upset because Tommy Moore came into the diner that night with Cheryl Neal.”

  “And I’m sure you want to believe that, Eric. I’m sure that over the years you’ve done everything you could to try to convince yourself that’s what happened. Because the alternative was waking up every morning thinking you’d killed that girl—and that would have been just too horrible to face. That’s what our minds do. They protect us. They bury those memories that would cripple us, so that we can live with ourselves.” She looked to the still image of Bradley Cooper. “Soldiers understand it. They’re asked to do horrible things. They see horrible things. And they wonder if that makes them horrible people. Does doing a horrible thing make you a horrible person?”

  “What’s the answer, Detective?”

  “You
didn’t mean to kill Kimi Kanasket—not when you ran her over. That was an accident, an accident as a result of a bad decision fueled by testosterone and anger and drugs, but it certainly wasn’t intentional. It didn’t make you a murderer, Eric. And if you and the others had just owned up to what you did that night, Darren and Archie would likely still be alive, and Hastey wouldn’t have spent his life crawling into a beer can every day, and you wouldn’t be living out here alone.

  “But you didn’t do that. You all agreed to never talk about what happened. You left Kimi there, and you drove the others home, but when you got home you realized you couldn’t leave her body out there because it left things unfinished. So you changed into your hunting boots because it had started to snow, and you drove back to the clearing. You put Kimi in the back of the Bronco, drove her to the river, and threw her into the water. That, Eric, was a deliberate act. That’s what you can’t deny. You can’t camouflage it behind this façade you’ve created.

  “And when you were finished, you took the Bronco to Lionel Devoe, who was running his father’s businesses at that time, and you had it fixed and the windshield replaced, and you thought that was the end of it. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t the end because Buzz Almond wouldn’t let that be the end of it. And it didn’t have to be this way, Eric. That’s the most ironic and saddest thing of all. It didn’t have to be like this.”

  “It didn’t?”

  “No,” she said. “Because Kimi wasn’t dead.”

  Reynolds stopped petting the dogs. His foot no longer bounced.

  “She was still alive, Eric, and if you had just done the right thing, if you had just called for help, Kimi would have lived.”

  Tracy watched the remaining color drain from Eric Reynolds’s face, leaving him as pale and sickly as a corpse.

  Reynolds didn’t stand when Tracy rose from her chair. The two dogs sat up, watching her. Tracy considered taking the gun, but she had no right to confiscate it, and Eric Reynolds had access to many guns and rifles, and he’d no doubt had those guns out many nights but had never used one. She didn’t think he would use it tonight either.

  Tracy left him physically sitting in his chair with his two dogs. Mentally, however, she could tell he’d returned to the clearing, a place no doubt he frequented often in his dreams. She wondered if this time Reynolds was staring down at Kimi Kanasket, trying to comprehend what Tracy had just revealed, and wondering what might have been if he’d only done the right thing.

  CHAPTER 33

  Tracy didn’t have to wait outside Reynolds’s gate or along the side of the road. If she was right, she knew where he’d go when he mentally returned from the clearing.

  And he would go. He’d go because he wouldn’t be able to not go.

  She’d kept her promise to Jenny and remained in phone contact, advising her of her intent. The backup followed.

  Tracy parked just up the block, not worried about her truck being seen. Reynolds didn’t know her truck, and it blended nicely with the other trucks and older-model vehicles on the block. Then again, she doubted Eric Reynolds would have cared even if he did know. The two sheriff’s vehicles were one block over, out of sight.

  Snow began to fall through the gaps in the trees, the kind of large, heavy flakes she and Sarah used to catch on their tongues and watch float to the ground from Tracy’s bedroom window, as excited as on Christmas Eve. They knew the snow would stick, and that meant a possible snow day from school and playing all day in the backyard with their friends. It was one of the best memories from her childhood, one she clung to and refused to have taken from her.

  The sound of the big Silverado’s engine preceded the glow of its headlights in her truck’s passenger-side mirror as it approached. She imagined the Bronco limping down the same street that night forty years earlier, broken and damaged. Eric Reynolds drove past Tracy without turning his head, continuing to the small one-story home in which he’d grown up, though his gaze still seemed to be forty years in the past.

  He parked the Silverado behind the Dodge Durango in the cluttered carport beneath plastic roofing that had yellowed with age and was covered in pine needles. He’d bought the truck for his father the prior Christmas, an extravagant gift, but without his father, Eric Reynolds would have become nothing. That’s what he’d thought. That’s what he’d been led to believe all these years. He’d been led to believe that without his father, he would have been in prison, a convicted felon, and never would have had all the accolades, the smiles and the waves and the greetings from old acquaintances, which seemed to always begin “Remember when . . .”

  He stepped from the truck. The porch light over the side door clicked on, casting a sickly yellow light—such a contrast to the pure-white snow beginning to blanket the ground and flock the trees. The door pulled open, and his father stepped out while putting on his glasses. Despite his age, eighty-two now, he still looked and moved well. People said Ron Reynolds had become an older version of himself, still powerfully built with large forearms and chiseled features, still wearing the crew cut that had survived every decade and every style that had come and gone.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “What did you do, Dad?” Eric Reynolds asked. “What did you do?”

  Saturday, November 6, 1976

  Ron Reynolds checked his rearview mirror for any sign of approaching headlights. Not seeing any, he turned off the road into the brush and proceeded slowly down the path. The right fender and hood were smashed, but the metal grille along the front bumper had done its job and absorbed most of the impact. Rather amazingly, both headlights still worked, illuminating a light snowfall.

  Eric had come home wide-eyed and gibbering almost incoherently about needing to call the police, needing to let someone know. His pupils were as small as pinheads and as black as night. It took a strong slap across the face just to get him to calm down and to stop talking. He’d started to cry, great gasps and sobs, almost wailing. Then he started gibbering again, about Kimi Kanasket, about how he’d killed her.

  Ron Reynolds had been angry when he’d learned that his son had snuck out of the house the night before the biggest game of their lives. He had been waiting for Eric to return, thinking about how or if he could discipline him, but when he heard those last words, his blood had run cold and his legs had gone weak.

  “What are you talking about?” he’d asked.

  Eric sat on the couch sobbing, shaking his head.

  “Tell me, Goddamn it!”

  And Eric told him. He told him about how he’d snuck out to drink beer with Hastey and Archie and Darren. He told him about Cheryl Neal going out with Tommy Moore. He told him about how, while they were driving home, they came upon Kimi walking along the side of the road.

  “I didn’t mean to hit her, Dad. I swear to God, I didn’t mean to hit her.”

  “What are you talking about? What do you mean you hit her? Did you punch her?”

  He told his father how they’d exchanged words, about how he had lost his temper and chased her into the woods in his car. “I just wanted to scare her,” he’d said. “But then we went over a hill and . . . and I couldn’t control it. The front end, it just came down. She must have fallen, Dad. She must have fallen, and the car, it just . . . We have to call somebody, Dad. We have to call someone.”

  Ron had rushed outside, disbelieving until he saw the damage to the car. Then the gravity and magnitude of the situation hit home. It was the damage that made him realize that everything . . . everything they had worked for had potentially been lost.

  When he went back inside, Eric had gotten up from the couch and held the telephone.

  Ron ripped the cord from the wall and yanked the phone from his son’s grasp. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “We have to call the police, Dad! I wasn’t going to, but we have to. We can’t just leave her there.”

  “Call them and tell them what? Huh? What are we going to tell them? That it was an accident?”r />
  “It was an accident.”

  “Do you think they’re going to believe that? Four white boys chasing an Indian girl in their truck. To what end? Huh? To what end, Eric?”

  “Just to scare her.”

  Ron grabbed Eric by the hair. “Scare her? Or rape her?”

  “No, Dad. No.”

  “Drunk. Smoking weed. They’ll never believe your bullshit. I don’t believe your bullshit.”

  “We wouldn’t do that, Dad.”

  “They’ll prosecute you. They’ll prosecute all of you. And they’ll convict you. And everything, everything we have worked for since you were born will have been for nothing.”

  “We can tell them, Dad. We can explain what happened.”

  “And do you think that girl’s parents, all those Indians, are going to understand? Huh? What do you think they’re going to do? Just accept what you’re telling them? You think they’re going to say, ‘Okay, well, it was just an accident. Thanks for letting us know’? And what about tomorrow, huh? What about the game? Do you know how many college recruiters are going to be at that game? Do you have any idea the trouble I’ve gone to for you? It will be over. It will all be over—the scholarship, college, the NFL. You can kiss it all good-bye, Eric. Is that what you want?”

  Eric dropped onto the weathered couch, breathing heavily, tears streaming down his face.

  “What did you tell the others?” Ron said. “What are they going to say happened?”

  Eric looked up at him. “Nothing. They’re not going to say anything. Their parents don’t know they snuck out. They’re going to say they were in bed, getting ready for the game.”

  Ron pointed a finger at him. “And that’s what you’re going to say. Do you understand?”

  “Dad, I can’t—”

  “You’re going to say you were home in bed getting ready for the game. And I’m going to say I was here with you. Do you understand? I’m going to lie for you, boy. I’m going to put my ass on the line and lie for you. Do you know what that means? It means that from this point forward, we’re joined at the hip. You go to prison, and I go to prison with you. You understand? I’m not going to prison. So you’re going to say you were home in bed. You got that?”