Chapter 1 #2
The woman at the gas station knows my face, not my plans.
Nobody followed me from the house, I'd have caught headlights on that road in the dark.
Whoever tried to run me off the road didn't trail me out of town.
They were already in position on the pass, ahead of me, which means they didn't learn where I was going by watching me leave.
They learned it before I left. That cuts the list down to the people who knew the night before, and there was only one other person in that house.
Callum. He left while it was still dark. He's the only living soul who knew I'd found what June hid and that I was running it out of the valley before sunup. And a few hours after I told him, somebody was waiting on the pass who knew exactly where to wait.
I don't believe it. I need to be clear with myself about that much, before anything else.
I do not want to believe Callum is responsible.
But wanting not to believe a thing isn't the same as being able to rule it out, and six years on a crime beat taught me the difference cuts the wrong way more often than it doesn't.
My phone goes off in the cupholder. His name is on the screen, and my stomach does something I'd rather it didn't.
I almost let it ring out. Then I don't, because not answering tells him something too, and I'm not ready to give him that yet. Speaker. Both hands stay on the wheel.
"Where are you?" No hello. Just the question, flat, like he already knows I won't want to answer it.
"Good morning to you too."
"Greer." Just my name, low, and I hate that it lands somewhere under my ribs even now. "You're not at the house. Your car's gone. Tell me where you are."
"Alive. Which is probably disappointing to one of us."
The pause is a half-second too long. Not guilt. A man rerunning the last few hours and not liking the math or the implications.
"What happened?"
"Why do you assume something happened?"
"Because you answered like it did."
He's not wrong, and that's the trouble with him. I watch the road unspool flat and gray ahead of me and decide how much to hand a man who I'm not sure I can afford to trust.
"Somebody tried to run me off the pass an hour ago," I say. "Came out of nowhere. Tried to put me in the reservoir. I'm still here. They're wrapped around a guardrail."
The silence that comes back is different this time. I've heard a lot of men go quiet on a phone. This silence has weight to it, the quiet of someone deciding what he's going to do about what he just heard.
"Did you see the driver?" His tone remains cold, impersonal.
"I saw high beams and a black windshield."
"Plate?"
"No."
"Where are you, Greer?"
"You keep asking me that. You're the only one who knew I'd be on that road this morning." The words are out before I decide to say them, and the quiet that follows tells me he caught every implication I packed into them.
"I'm not the only one who knew. I'm the only one you told." A beat. "If I wanted you in that water, you'd be in it. I've had every chance. Use that."
He doesn't deny it. He argues it instead, and the two aren't the same, and we both know it.
"That's the worst comforting thing anyone's ever said to me."
"It wasn't supposed to be comforting."
And there it is, the exact reason I let him into my mother's house and the exact reason I shouldn't have. He doesn't soften anything. He hands it to you with the pin already pulled and lets you decide whether to hold on, and God help me, I keep reaching for it.
"I'll call you when I get where I'm going," I say.
"Greer."
I end the call before he can put my name in that voice again and talk me out of the only good sense I've got left.
The shaking starts somewhere past the second county line, long after the danger's behind me. On the pass my hands were steady. It's the straight, dull, safe road that undoes them, the fear arriving late and all at once, now that there's nothing left to do with it.
My hands won't hold the wheel right. My eyes keep snapping to the mirror for headlights that aren't there and won't be.
Twice the tires catch the rumble strip and the ugly buzz of it is the only thing that keeps me in my lane, because the second I let myself picture the reservoir coming up through the windshield I'm no good to anyone, least of all me.
I pull off for gas I don't need, because stopping is a way of proving I still can.
I stand at the pump with my back to the cinderblock and my face to the road and I watch every car that passes, and I understand for the first time exactly how my mother spent thirty years.
The watching. The waiting for it. She lived inside that dread every day for thirty years.
I've carried it since before first light and my hands already won't hold steady.
The clerk rings me up without looking away from his phone.
I buy coffee that's been scorching on the burner since yesterday and a paper atlas off the rack by the door.
A phone can be followed, and I am done assuming that mine can't be.
I get back on the road before the stillness can finish what the pass started.
At a stoplight in a town too small to stop in for any other reason, I take the page out and look at the name in daylight for the first time.
It's a woman's name. I knew that before I left.
What I didn't let myself sit with in the dark is that I've heard it.
Not read it somewhere and lost it. Heard it, spoken, a long time ago, in the low register adults use when there's a kid in the next room they don't want catching it.
No face comes with it. Just the shape of it in someone's mouth, my mother's or my father's, through a closed door, in the years before that door shut for good and my father's coat stopped hanging by the back step.
A horn blasts behind me, some ordinary person with an ordinary place to be. The light's green. I drive on, and the name rides with me the rest of the way, refusing to settle.
I don't know who she is. I know my mother trusted her with the one thing she guarded more carefully than me. I know the name was in my house once, spoken low so it wouldn't carry. I could hear the intensity between my parents, but not the actual words. All I know is my father left right after.
As a child I didn’t question it, but the man who had come and gone numerous times before that, never came back. He left my mother with a sadness I never understood.
Twenty years I've called that leaving the plainest fact of my life.
A man walked out. Nothing underneath worth turning over.
Now there's a guardrail crumpled somewhere behind me and a stranger's name in my fist. The story I told myself about my father is starting to feel less like truth than like the version I was handed to keep me quiet.
The atlas takes me the rest of the way. Hours of it, the mountains flattening out behind me and the sun climbing over and starting back down, until the road delivers me to the edge of a town that's mostly grain elevators and a rail spur and streets laid out by someone who believed in right angles and not much else.
I drive past the address once before I stop, an old habit from the crime beat.
Look at the house before you let it look at you.
It's small and square and kept up, white siding, two porch chairs angled toward each other the way my mother angled chairs, like she was always expecting a conversation.
A car in the drive. Curtains open to the thin afternoon light. Somebody home.
I circle the block, park, and sit with the engine ticking down and the name in my hand.
The whole drive piles up behind me. The lights in my mirror, the reservoir, the curve that moved while I was gone.
I've spent the entire way here getting to this door and not one mile of it deciding what I'll say when it opens.
I get out before I can think better of it. Up the cracked walk, up the two steps, and my hand is already raised to knock before the part of me that's still afraid can talk me back into the car and onto the long road home to a town that just tried to keep me there for good.
I knock.
The woman who opens the door is sixty, maybe more, silver hair pulled back, an apron over jeans like I've interrupted her in the middle of something.
She's Chinese, or part, the cast of her features clear even before she speaks.
She takes me in the way the whole valley took me in when I drove through it, the quick scan that places you.
Except her scan stops partway, snags on my face, and her hand comes up to the doorframe like she needs the wood under it.
Whatever she's looking at, she's looked at it before, and it costs her something to do it again.
"You have his eyes, so did she," she says, before I've gotten a single word out. Not a question. Barely aimed at me at all.
Behind her, on the wall of a narrow front room, there's a photograph in a plain frame. A girl, maybe twenty, caught mid-laugh at whoever held the camera. I don't know the face. I know the eyes in it, because they're the eyes I've spent thirty years finding in the mirror and calling my father's.