Chapter 7
Jem got home late, which meant Tean had already started to cook, so he had to rush through his usual welcome-home routine with Scipio—only a million kisses, this time, instead of the traditional ten million—and grab an apron and slide the pan of ground turkey off the heating element about fifteen seconds before it passed from browned to blackened.
“Where did that come from?” Jem said.
“I don’t know. I found it in the pantry.”
“Well, I didn’t buy it. Did you buy it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then maybe don’t drink it.”
“Oh, I wasn’t going to drink it. I was going to add it to the turkey. Kind of like you do with the salsa sometimes. Only we don’t have any salsa, and this is tomato—”
Jem was proud of himself for keeping his voice steady and not sounding like—what?
A hysterical TV mom? What was the name of the mom in Malcolm in the Middle?
Were there ever hysterical dads, because if not, that seemed super sexist. “Do you mind if I cook, babe? You know it helps me when I’m in a funk.
And Scipio needs more of his favorite dad’s plays. ”
“You’re his favorite dad,” Tean said, but he scruffed the Lab’s ears and headed for the back door. “Because he’s a traitor.”
Scipio lingered—he and Jem had a solemn, shared responsibility as the family taste-testers, to make sure everything was good enough for Tean—but when Tean grabbed the bucket of balls, Scipio sprinted for the door.
Traitor was a good word for him, sometimes.
Once Tean was safely out of the house, Jem dumped the V8 down the sink.
A quick check of the fridge and pantry informed him they were out of salsa, but he found tomato paste, cumin, chili powder, garlic—everything he needed.
He seasoned the meat and let it simmer. No tortillas, but they had sweet potatoes, so those got forked over and went into the microwave.
By the time Tean and Scipio were coming in—Scipio panting from chasing the balls, Tean’s cheeks glowing from the cool evening—dinner was ready.
“This is delicious,” Tean said. “You can’t even taste the V8.”
After cleaning up, they got ready to go. Scipio didn’t like being left at home alone, of course, and Tean always said the best thing was not to make a fuss. So Jem tried not to, but he did promise the Lab two more rounds of fetch, a walk, and three snuggles on the couch to make up for it.
By six, they were on the road in Tean’s truck, crawling south in the tail end of rush hour.
Not that it was all that different from the rest of the day.
Pretty much everybody had to use I-15, since it was the major north-south corridor through the state, and that meant traffic tended to run the range from bad to awful.
It didn’t help that the drivers ran the range from loony to batshit.
A woman in the car next to them was reading a book propped against the steering wheel.
An older man was trying to get a nose hair with what looked like electric clippers, craning his head to see himself in the rearview mirror.
One skinny guy in a suit and fedora was playing the saxophone and trying to steer with his knees.
On either side of them, commercial and light industrial buildings lined the frontage roads, a legacy of Utah’s weird zoning laws that made the I-15 corridor seem like a single, never-ending strip mall.
They passed Sprinkler World. They passed a Costco swarming with families.
They passed collision centers, bath-fitting supply stores, the occasional stretch of noise barriers with the roofs of houses peeking over them, and The American Boys School, which had an enormous US flag across the front.
Jem wasn’t sure, but his gut told him it might be a breeding ground for little conservatives.
At the Shops at Southtown—which everybody just called Southtown, or Southtown Mall—they finally exited the highway, only to find themselves in a slowly snaking line of traffic past more strip malls—a Kneaders, a Valvoline, a sports medicine clinic, the Jordan River Car Wash, which sounded like where Jesus would have gone after he’d gotten his oil changed at the Valvoline.
Now, though, there were homes mixed in—small ones at first, old brick ramblers, a few vinyl-sided houses that would probably be described in a real estate listing as cottages.
They worked their way down side streets. There were neighborhoods in South Jordan with a lot of money, but this clearly wasn’t one of them—more of the same small homes in brick and vinyl siding, ramblers and split-levels at least fifty years old.
The house where Tean stopped didn’t look like anything special: another brick rambler with an old tree at the corner, a lawn that had gone yellow already, and a flower bed that held nothing but bare mulch.
Tean eased his hands away from the wheel slowly, as though his fingers were stiff. He must have sensed Jem’s question because he said, “I’m fine.” And then his mouth twisted, and he said, “I really don’t want to do this.”
“You can stay here,” Jem said. “I’ll talk to her.”
But Tean shook his head, opened the door, and got out of the truck.
The sun had disappeared, with only a faint afterglow brightening the western edge of the sky.
The porch light was off, which left them standing in shadows that deepened by the second.
When the wind picked up, Jem shivered inside his jacket; the smell of wet leaves hung on to him even after the air stilled again.
For a house that was supposed to be occupied, little light showed behind the lowered blinds, and no sounds reached them.
Tean knocked. Then footsteps moved inside the house, and the door swung open.
The woman who stood there was pretty in a Utah way: White, blond, thin. Her eyes were dark with fatigue or grief or both, but otherwise, she could have been any Instagram mom. She didn’t even seem to notice Jem; she saw Tean first, and she drew her mouth into a line.
“He’s not here.”
Tean hesitated. “I know. I’m sorry to bother you, Lucy, but I think we need to talk.”
She drew in a breath, then let it out again. In one hand, she still clutched the door handle, like she might slam it shut at any moment. “No. No, I don’t think so. I’m busy, Tean. And I don’t know if it—it’s not going to change anything.”
Horror grew slowly in Tean’s face as he realized how she had interpreted his statement. “No, that’s not what I meant.”
“Teancum, I—” Lucy took another of those steadying breaths. “I can’t do this right now.”
“We’re trying to help,” Jem said.
She turned to take him in. “I’m sorry. Who are you?”
“Jem Berger. We think Ammon confessed to protect someone. That’s why we need to talk to you.”
She stared at them blankly.
“Lucy,” Tean said. “Please, may we come inside?”
“I don’t—I don’t think so.” She flexed her fingers around the door handle. “The lawyer said not to talk to anybody.”
“Ammon wanted us to help,” Tean said. “That’s why he asked you to call me.”
She opened her mouth, the no already forming.
“Unless you did it,” Jem said. “And that’s why you don’t want to talk to us.”
Tean gave a tiny, helpless shake of his head.
Color rose in Lucy’s cheeks. “That’s insane.”
“Why?” Jem asked. “He’s protecting someone. Why not you? I mean, it makes sense. You’re a mother. You’ve got a mother’s protective instinct. You find out some guy—”
“Stop.” The words came out jerky and mechanical. “Stop. Stop!”
“Of course you were angry. And then the police showed up, and Ammon realized what you’d done. So, he confessed.”
“He wouldn’t do that.” She seemed to be trying to come up with more, but all that came out was “You need to leave.”
“Lucy—” Tean tried.
“Why not?” Jem asked. “You’re his wife.”
“We only need a few minutes.”
“The mother of his children.”
“Please, just so we can ask a few questions.”
“Why wouldn’t he confess if he knew he could save you?”
“Because he doesn’t love me!” The words hung in the air, ripped out of her. Lucy put her free hand on the jamb, as though to steady herself. The hint of red in her cheeks deepened. And then she started to cry.
“Lucy—” Tean began again.
She shook her head, and he cut off. For a few seconds, she wiped her cheeks, shaking her head. And then she said, “Fine. Fine.”
And she stepped back into the house, the door hanging open behind her.
Inside, they had to pass through a cramped nook that served as a vestibule or foyer or whatever you wanted to call it, and then they stood in the living room.
The old rambler had been updated at some point—to Jem’s eye, probably ten or fifteen years ago.
Honey oak floors looked like original wood that had been sanded down and stained.
The walls were that sandy-tan-beige-gray that had been so popular for a while.
A massive, built-in entertainment center dominated the far end of the room, with an equally massive television.
Facing this were a lumpy sectional sofa and a knock-off La-Z-Boy.
Being a cop didn’t pay great, and it probably didn’t help that Lucy was a stay-at-home mom.
The décor tended toward Mormon via Deseret Book: a scale replica of the Jesus statue from the Temple Square Visitors’ Center; a full set of The Work and the Glory—they’d been in some of the foster homes Jem had lived in, and he recognized them on sight, massive hardback books that told the story of a family of early Mormon converts; more books written by church leaders—one of them, with blue flowers on the cover, stood on a little display stand next to a framed art print of the same flower.
On the wall behind the sectional hung an oversized photo of Ammon and Lucy standing outside the Salt Lake City Temple, fifteen years younger, him in a black suit, her in a white dress.
Lucy held up a hand behind her as she disappeared down the hall. Her murmured voice floated back to them, and then the sound came of a door shutting. A moment later came a knock and then words that sounded like a question.