CHAPTER TWO
By the time Selena left the interstate behind, she felt scraped raw.
Seven hours in the air had done that on its own.
Seven hours beside a man in a golf shirt who had dropped potato chip crumbs all down his front in the first twenty minutes, then spent the rest of the flight snoring through his mouth while he slept in short, foul bursts.
Add two hours of airport lines, a bland coffee that tasted burned, and the car rental clerk who had insisted on calling her ma’am every other sentence, and the trip had become less a journey than a slow punishment.
Now she drove through the dark with both hands on the wheel and her shoulders knotted tight. This was a drive into both unknown and known territories. A place she’d grown up in, but a place she had left behind a long time ago. She wondered just how much it might have changed.
The road narrowed as it wound deeper into Harlan County.
Hills rose on either side in uneven black shapes.
Trees crowded the edges, their branches bent and twisted in the headlights until they looked like crooked hands reaching in from the ditches.
The beams swept over guardrails, reflectors, leaning fence posts, and mailboxes planted far apart from one another like warnings.
Nothing out there had changed enough.
That was the first thought that bothered her.
She had been telling herself all day that fifteen years was a long time. Long enough for roads to feel smaller, for buildings to come down, for memory to lose its grip on a place. Long enough for Harlan County to become just another point on a map she used to know.
Instead, the dark outside the windshield kept proving how little distance mattered once the land itself started recognizing you.
A bend in the road brought a narrow bridge into view.
Selena crossed it, listening to the tires scuff over old planks beneath the asphalt overlay, and thought of her father’s truck rattling over the same bridge years ago with feed in the back and dirt on the floorboards.
Things seemed so easy back then. So simple.
Then came an image of her sister.
That thought arrived with less warmth.
Selena knew exactly how that conversation would go if she spoke with Diane tonight. First surprise. Then anger dressed up as concern. Then the questions.
When did you get in?
How long are you staying?
Why didn’t you tell us sooner?
Why haven’t you called in months?
All fair questions.
That didn’t make her want to answer them.
The truth was, Selena had built a new identity for herself; a competent, some would say talented, FBI agent.
That job had taken over and become who she was.
But her family, her old friends? Selena wasn’t sure they’d accept this other version of the little girl they’d seen grow up.
The little girl who was scared of the dark.
The little girl who always doubted herself.
Those doubts were still there, swirling around inside.
Selena had only learned to hide them better.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, there was a fear that returning to her home county would somehow tear down this newer version, leaving the old wounds, the old uncertainties, exposed for all to see.
Selena had decided to minimize her contact with family and friends.
In and out. Get the job done and get back to her life in DC.
The life she had fought so hard for. She had no intention of staying with family while she was on this case.
Not with her father’s judgmental ways, not with her sister watching everything she said for signs that she might vanish again the second it was convenient.
Selena did not have the energy for explanations.
Not tonight. Maybe not ever. She wasn’t even sure what those explanations were.
When she left Harlan County at twenty-five, she left it with both hands on the wheel.
She had built a life elsewhere and taught herself not to look back too often.
The rearview window held only pain and regret.
Now here she was, driving straight into the middle of it. The center of her previous life. All because she was being punished for ruffling political feathers in Washington. It just didn’t seem fair.
A strange pressure gathered in her chest.
She hadn’t expected that part. Irritation, yes.
Resistance, certainly. But not this creeping unease that seemed to rise from the dark, twisted roads themselves.
No good would come from old reunions. Family had history.
History meant obligations. Obligations meant stories people thought they were owed.
And then there was Connor Chase.
Selena tightened her grip on the wheel and gave a small, humorless shake of her head.
Connor as sheriff still sounded ridiculous.
He had been wild when they were teenage sweethearts.
Even though he was a deputy by the time she left, it still seemed like a bad fit.
A boy who hated anyone telling him what to do becoming a lawman?
Selena had been certain it would crumble down on top of him.
Maybe a part of her wanted that to be the case, but she had to admit to feeling some happiness for him when she heard he made sheriff.
You can’t wipe away years of love and marriage completely.
The hate doesn’t always win. Sometimes old wisps of what’s left vent through the old wounds.
A memory surfaced without permission. Summer heat.
The high school parking lot. Connor at seventeen, shirt untucked, sun in his hair, standing beside the principal’s sedan with a mischievous look that usually meant trouble was already well underway.
By the time anyone realized what he had done, the car had been smothered in mayonnaise from hood to trunk.
Not a few streaks. Not a prank anyone could wash off with a bucket.
A thick, gleaming coat of it, slapped across the windshield, door handles, mirrors, roof.
It had taken several large jars of the stuff to turn the entire car white.
He had gotten suspended.
Selena could still see the grin he wore for the next two weeks. Satisfied. Unrepentant. A little proud of himself, even while adults fumed around him.
That boy had hated authority on principle.
Now he was authority.
The thought might have amused her if it hadn’t unsettled her, too.
Headlights flashed around the next bend.
The oncoming car came too fast.
Selena saw it instantly, saw the way the beams bounced with speed, saw the front end drift wide as it rounded the corner, chewing up more of the road than it should have. She jerked the wheel right. Gravel spit under her tires. The rental shuddered hard enough to throw her against the belt.
The other car roared past.
No horn. No brake lights. Just a dark shape and white glare and then nothing but its taillights shrinking in the mirror as it vanished behind her.
Selena held the wheel and kept the car straight.
For half a second her mind stopped seeing the road ahead and was engulfed by another memory. A terrible one.
A different road rose in its place. Wet blacktop. A body twisted wrong. A woman lying in the wash of headlights with one side of her face pressed to the pavement, eyes open and moving. Not dead yet. Not then. Looking at Selena with a panic so raw it still lived in memory like something preserved.
Hit-and-run.
An old file. An old county rumor. Old pain with Connor wound through the middle of it. She had held him responsible.
The image came hard and bright, then lingered.
Selena swallowed and reached for the radio.
Static burst from the speakers before a country station came through, faint and scratchy. Steel guitar. A man singing about loss in a voice too cheerful for the subject. She left it on anyway. Anything to put a layer between her and the dark.
A roadside sign appeared ahead in the headlights.
WILSON MOTEL
VACANCY
The red neon around the word VACANCY flickered on one side. The arrow beneath it pointed down a short access road lined with cracked asphalt and weeds sprouting through the seams.
Selena eased off the gas. She was now at the boundary of her old hometown.
The old Wilson Motel sat on the outskirts of Elmsview exactly where she remembered it, a low row of rooms with faded doors and a narrow office at one end under a slanted awning.
The paint had once been white. Years of weather had pushed it toward yellow-gray.
A soda machine stood outside the lobby with one dead fluorescent tube buzzing behind it.
“This’ll do,” she murmured.
She turned in.
The tires rolled slowly across the lot. Two pickup trucks sat parked near the far end, both dusty, one with a dog box in the bed. A porch light burned outside Room 6. Nothing moved behind the curtains.
Selena killed the engine and stepped out.
Night air touched her face at once. It carried damp grass, river mud from somewhere not far off, and the faint smell of cut hay, sweet and bitter, that had dried in fields her whole childhood. Home had always had a smell to it. She had forgotten that. Or maybe she had tried to.
The recognition sat badly and tenderly at the same time.
Bittersweet was too soft a word for it.
She took her bag from the back seat and headed for the lobby, hoping the room would be clean enough, hoping the mattress wouldn’t sink in the middle, hoping she could get a few hours of sleep before walking into the sheriff’s office in the morning.
Most of all, she hoped she could focus on the case, keep her head down, and get out of Harlan County as soon as possible.
The lobby bell gave a dull clack when she pushed through the glass door.
Inside, the air smelled of old carpet and lemon cleaner. A television mounted in one corner played a late-night sitcom with the volume low. Behind the front desk sat a man in his forties wearing a gray sweatshirt and reading glasses. He looked up from a ledger, his expression polite but blank.
Selena set her bag down. “Hi. You got a room?”
“Sure do.” He pulled the glasses off and stood. “Just need one?”
“That’s right.”
He slid a registration card toward her. “How many nights?”
“I’m not sure, let’s say for the next four, just for now.”
“All right.”
Selena took the pen and started filling out the form. Halfway through writing her surname, she felt his gaze sharpen.
He leaned forward slightly. “Raven?”
She looked up.
Recognition came to him in pieces. First the name, then the face, then the surprise of finding both standing in front of him after years.
“Selena Raven,” he said. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
She studied him for a second before it clicked. “Eric Wilson.”
A smile tugged at one side of his mouth. “Couple years ahead of you at Elmsview High.”
“I remember.”
“Didn’t think you would.”
“You had a Camaro with no muffler. The whole county remembered.”
That earned a short laugh. “Boys will be boys.”
He took the card back once she finished and glanced over it. “You in town visiting family?”
“I’m here for work,” Selena said.
“So, how’s life been treating you?” he asked with a grin, a toothpick now hanging from his lips.
“Eric, it’s nice to see you, but I’m beat.”
Eric nodded like that answer told him enough and not nearly enough. “Room four is clean. Quiet, too. At least as quiet as this place gets.”
“Sounds perfect.”
He reached to the wall rack and took down a brass key on a plastic tag. No key card. Of course not. He placed it in her hand. “Ice machine’s around the side. Coffee in here at six, if you’re up.”
“I will be.”
“Welcome back to Harlan County, Selena. If you get lonely and want to catch up…” He looked wide-eyed, like a wolf eyeing a succulent lamb.
“Thanks,” Selena said, too tired. “No doubt I’ll see you around.”
“I’m here all the time,” he answered, enthusiastically. “You have a good night.”
She left the lobby with the key in hand, crossed the dim lot toward her room, and told herself that maybe all her reunions would be that easy to slip out from.
But she knew they would not.