Chapter 5 #2
She's been managing this man for a long time.
She says, even and polite, "Hello, Todd."
He climbs her porch steps and holds out the flowers. "Hadley. Honey. It's been too long."
I almost cringe at the way he says honey.
I don’t move from the bottom of the porch steps.
Hadley takes the flowers because she's a woman raised in a Texas household and she'd take flowers from a man pointing a gun at her chest.
She sets them on the porch rail.
Todd holds out the framed photograph. "Brought you something else, too."
She takes it.
She looks at it for half a second.
She sets it on the rail beside the flowers without looking at it again.
Todd doesn't sit. She doesn't offer.
He shifts his weight on the porch boards, settling in like he plans to stay a while. "How you been, honey?"
I watch his right boot find a comfortable angle. Watch Hadley's grip tighten on the sweet tea glass.
"I've been fine, Todd."
"Garrett's mama's been worried about you. She hasn't heard from you in a while."
Hadley's chin lifts a quarter inch. "I called her two weeks ago."
"She said it's been longer than that."
"It hasn't."
He laughs, soft, and waves a hand like he's clearing smoke.
"All right, all right. I'm not gonna fight you on it.
I just told her I'd check on you while I was through here.
" His eyes track down her body and back up before he speaks again.
I notice it. "You doin' okay out here, honey? All these men around?"
I'd put money on the count being just one man he's actually worried about.
The one standing six feet behind him.
"I'm doin' fine."
He steps a quarter step closer to her. "You look tired."
"I'm not."
Another quarter step. The porch boards creak under him.
"You've lost weight."
Hadley's free hand goes flat against the rail behind her. The other hand has gone white on the glass.
"I haven't."
Five times he calls her honey in ten minutes. I count.
I also count the steps he's taken toward her since she greeted him.
Three. Three quarter-steps, each one disguised as a shift of weight, each one closing the distance between his body and hers by a few inches.
He doesn't know I see him doing it.
He probably doesn't know he's doing it himself.
But his body is moving toward her the way a dog moves toward a meal, and the woman against the porch rail has run out of porch to back up against.
I take one step up onto the bottom porch board.
Not a full step onto the porch. Just enough that Todd hears the wood take my weight.
He stops moving.
He doesn't turn around, but his shoulders go an inch tighter.
He knows exactly where I am.
Hadley's hand has gone white on the sweet tea glass.
Todd makes small talk about Garrison. A cousin who had a baby. A neighbor named Linda who's been asking after her. The funeral home on Main Street that just got new owners. Garrett's mama wanting Hadley to come up for the anniversary next month.
Todd opens his mouth like he's got more small-town gossip lined up—somebody else's baby, somebody else's funeral, somebody else's reason for Hadley to come back to Garrison—and Hadley cuts him off.
"Thank you for stopping by, Todd."
Her voice is even. Polite. Texas-raised and steel-spined.
It's a voice I haven't heard out of her before. I've heard her exhausted. I've heard her wary. I've heard her tender.
I haven't heard her use the voice she's using right now, which is the voice of a woman whose entire body is bracing for something her brain hasn't admitted yet.
The voice of a woman ending a conversation she can't end any other way.
Todd's smile flickers. He hears it, even if he doesn't read it. He keeps going. "You sure you're doin' all right? Garrett would want me to—"
I clear my throat.
Just once. From the bottom of the porch steps.
Todd looks down at me.
He turns finally, like he's just now remembering I exist and pastes the smile back on. "I'm sorry—I didn't catch your name."
"Rogue."
He waits for more. I don't give it to him.
"Rogue," he repeats. The name sits awkward in his mouth. "That's a nickname?"
"Yes, sir."
He glances down at my forearm—at the Shotgun Saints patch inked there—and back up to my face. His Adam's apple moves once. "You work for the ranch?"
"Yes, sir."
"What do you do?"
I hold his eyes for a second longer than is polite. "I'm Mrs. Cross' supervisor."
He looks at Hadley, looks at me and looks back at Hadley.
He's reading the room and he doesn't like what he's reading.
He says, "Well. I'll let you get back to your day, honey. Maybe I'll come by again before I head home. Just to check in."
Hadley says, "Call ahead next time, Todd."
Todd's smile flickers. "Of course," he says. "Of course, honey."
He goes down the porch steps. I let him pass. I follow him back across the gravel toward the gate, six feet behind him the entire way.
At the Explorer, he turns.
He tries one more smile. "You and Hadley, y'all close?"
"I'm her supervisor."
"Just want to make sure she's safe. Out here. With all these men."
"Her safety isn’t anything you need to concern yourself with."
"Yeah, well, Garrett would've wanted me to look out for her."
I don’t respond to that.
He hesitates. "I'll be in town a few days. Stayin' at the Hampton in Marble Falls. Mind if I come back?"
"This is private property. Call ahead."
"Of course. Yeah. Yeah, of course. I just—since I drove all the way—"
"Have a good drive back to your hotel."
He stares at me for a few moments too long, and then gets back in his Explorer.
The door slams and the engine turns over.
He pulls out onto the county road and drives away, kicking up dust.
I stand at the gate until the dust settles.
Inside ten minutes I'm back at my monitors.
I pull Todd's full file. I've had it built and ready for two months. The folder opens up clean on the right screen.
Todd Vincent Whitley.
Thirty-four. Account manager at Bell Insurance in Garrison.
Bachelor's from East Texas State.
Lives alone in a two-bedroom rental on Pecan Street.
No kids. No pets.
Membership at a CrossFit gym he goes to three times a week.
Part of the First Baptist church of Garrison every other Sunday.
Bank balances. Two accounts at Chase, one savings, one checking. Combined balance just under nine thousand.
Credit cards on three issuers, all current.
No criminal record. One speeding ticket in 2019.
I pull his phone GPS for the last sixty days.
He's driven past Hadley's old address in Garrison eleven times since Garrett died.
He drives by between five forty-five and six fifteen on weekday evenings, on his way home from work. The address is six blocks out of his way.
I pull his Google search history.
None of this is legal. None of this is gonna show up in any court. That's not what it's for. It's for me. So I know.
Search history for the last six weeks:
Is it appropriate to date your best friend's widow?
How long after a husband dies should you wait to ask out the wife?
Widows who remarry quickly
How to talk to a grieving widow
Texas common-law marriage requirements
Sharp Texas Sharp Shooter Ranch
Sharp Shooter Ranch employees
Motorcycle club Sharp Texas
Shotgun Saints MC
Are the Shotgun Saints MC dangerous?
How to convince a woman to leave a dangerous situation?
Texas custody single mother fitness
I sit at the monitors and I read all of it.
My jaw is set. The dot of blood from where I bit the inside of my cheek a minute ago is metallic on my tongue.
I ping his phone.
He's headed south on US-281, just past Marble Falls.
He'll be at the Hampton in about forty minutes. He's already booked the room—I can see the reservation on his email.
I make a note. Hertz return tomorrow morning at the Tyler location. Hotel tonight at the Marble Falls Hampton, room number TBD until he checks in. Drive time home to Garrison: about six hours from Marble Falls.
I shut the right monitor down and sit in my chair for a long time, trying to keep myself calm.
The dogs at the kennel are quiet.
The cicadas are loud through the open window.
I'm going to let Todd think everything is fine, for now, but I’m coming for him.
* * *
The next day passes and somehow it’s late afternoon.
I'm on my porch with a Lone Star sweating in my hand.
Across the yard, Hadley is out behind her cabin with Nash.
She's showing him how to weed the little vegetable garden she's been putting in at the edge of her porch.
Tomato cages staked in a neat row. A patch of basil. Two pepper plants. The kind of garden a woman makes when she's deciding to stay.
The sunflowers Todd brought her are nowhere in sight. She threw them out the second he was off the property.
I watched her do it through my front window—straight from the porch rail to the trash bin at the side of her cabin, plastic and all.
The framed wedding photograph is still on her porch rail.
She hasn’t touched it.
She's been on the porch for forty minutes, working in her garden, and she has not once looked at that photograph.
I drink half the beer.
I look at the photograph on her porch rail.
I think about going to get it.
About walking across the gravel, picking it up, and taking it to my cabin and burning the picture in my fire pit while she watches from her porch and not saying a single word to her about it.
About every way I could take it without making her think about it any more than she already has, because the only thing worse than that photograph sitting on her porch rail tonight is her having to make a decision about what to do with it.
The decision is mine. I'll get it after dark.
She doesn't have to know it's gone until she wakes up tomorrow and finds the rail empty.
I finish the beer and watch her teach my boy how to pull a weed.
That fucker called her honey.
That alone earned him a grave.