Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Cole
The streets are empty the way only a Sunday morning in Roan can be empty — not quiet, dead, like the whole town got scooped out and left to bake.
Heat shimmers off the asphalt in thin, wavering lines.
The cicadas are cranked to eleven, a constant electric whine that lives in the back of your teeth and doesn't care if you're listening.
We take the Ford because mine's boxed in behind Eileen's car and I don't feel like shuffling vehicles in this heat.
Trevor tosses me the keys without a word, which is its own small surrender, and I take the long way to Lakeview.
Habit. Same route I'd take tailing someone or being tailed — right at the hardware store, left at the dead light, cut through the abandoned gas station lot where the weeds have punched up through the concrete.
Trevor sits beside me with his arm out the window, elbow on the door frame, his profile doing that thing where it looks carved from something harder than bone.
He hasn't said a word since we pulled out of the drive.
Just nodded when I told him where we were going, and then the silence settled in, the kind that doesn't ask permission.
The note's in my pocket. 447 LAKEVIEW DR. Block letters, pressed hard into the paper. I've memorized it. Could recite it backward. Could draw the thing from memory if somebody put a gun to my head, which in this town isn't the rhetorical exercise it should be.
Lakeview Drive is two blocks of faded ranch houses with chain-link fences and satellite dishes tilting at the sky like they're trying to escape.
Number 447 sits at the far end, a beige box with a concrete porch cracked down the middle.
A rusted wind chime hangs from the eaves, motionless in the dead air.
Blinds drawn on every window. The yard is patchy — brown grass against bald dirt, a single plastic flamingo lying on its side near the walkway like it gave up mid-strut.
I pull to the curb half a house down. Engine off. Key out. The silence after is thicker than the engine was, nothing in it but cicadas and the tick of the cooling block.
"Stay here," I say. Not looking at him. Staring at the house like it might start talking if I stare hard enough.
Trevor doesn't argue. Doesn't ask why. Just drops his elbow further out the window, his fingers drumming once on the frame — a short, tight rhythm I clock without meaning to — and settles into the seat like a man used to waiting who's made his peace with it.
Something about it — the lack of pushback, the easy compliance — lands in my chest and stays, warm and uncomfortable and unwelcome.
I get out. Close the door soft. The heat hits like a wet blanket, pressing through my shirt before I've taken three steps.
Thirty feet of cracked sidewalk and dead grass to the porch.
I count my steps. Old habit. Twelve. Thirteen.
Fourteen. The concrete radiates the day's heat back up, and by the time I reach the porch my shirt's stuck to my spine and the cicadas have become one relentless note that doesn't change no matter how far I walk.
The wind chime hangs above the door, five rusted tubes, none of them moving. I knock — three solid raps, knuckles on wood, the sound flat and swallowed by the heat. Wait. Count to fifteen. Knock again, same rhythm. The kind of knock that says I'm not selling anything and I'm not leaving.
Nothing.
The porch creaks when I shift my weight. I step left, peer through the gap between the blinds and the frame. Dark inside. Not lights-off dark — the kind that means the blinds were drawn tight enough to kill the sun, and somebody took the trouble to leave no crack.
I step off the porch. Move along the side of the house, boots crunching dead grass and the odd bottle cap.
The siding's faded to the color of old teeth.
I press two fingers to each window frame as I pass, listening for weight shifting inside, for fabric against fabric, for anything that doesn't belong to the cicadas or the heat or the AC humming three houses down.
The blinds don't move. No shadow behind the glass. No floorboard complains. The house holds its breath the way only empty houses can — a stillness with weight to it, the kind that tells you nothing living is inside, because living things make noise whether they mean to or not.
I round the back corner. Trevor's sightline cuts off here — the angle of the house puts me out of view from the truck, and I feel the absence of his eyes on my back like a draft.
The backyard's small and fenced, chain-link sagging in the middle.
A plastic kiddie pool upside-down near the fence.
The back door's a slider with the kind of flimsy lock any idiot with a credit card could beat in ten seconds.
I don't. I press my palm to the glass and listen.
Nothing. Try the handle — locked, but it gives a little under pressure, cheap hardware installed by someone who didn't care how long it lasted.
I could pop it. I've got the tools in the truck.
A flathead and five minutes would get me through, and part of me — the part that's lived inside this thing for two years, that tracks girls who disappear and watches houses that go quiet — wants to.
I don't. The same something that's stopped me since the start stops me now — the line between finding the truth and becoming the thing you're fighting. I haven't crossed it. Not here. Not today.
Two minutes at the slider with my hand on the glass and my heart doing something complicated, and then I move. Back around the far corner, boots on dead grass, the cicadas still screaming like the world's ending and they're the only ones who got the memo.
One more time on the porch. I knock harder, the heel of my hand against the wood, three strikes with enough force to vibrate the frame. The wind chime stirs — one tube catches it and swings, hits its neighbor with a dull flat clink that's obscenely loud in the dead air.
Nothing. No footsteps. No voice calling hold on. No shadow behind the blinds. Just the chime settling back to still and the cicadas and the heat pressing down on the porch roof.
I walk back to the truck. Twelve steps. Thirteen.
Fourteen. Slide in without a word. The vinyl's hot enough to burn through denim.
I don't care. Hands on the wheel at ten and two, and I stare through the windshield at the beige house with its cracked porch and motionless chime and its blinds drawn tight against the world.
Trevor doesn't ask. He's looking at the house too, profile still carved, and I can feel the question in the air between us — heavy, specific, the kind with only one answer, and the answer is nothing good.
I don't give it to him. He doesn't ask for it. We sit with the engine off and the windows down and the dead July heat filling the cab, and the house across the street does its best impression of empty, and neither of us is buying it.
We sit. Engine off, windows down, the cab filling with heat like it's being pumped through the vents. My hands stay at ten and two even though we're going nowhere, parked at the curb of a dead street watching a house that might as well have NOBODY HOME nailed to the door.
Trevor doesn't move. His arm's still out the window, fingers loose on the door panel.
He's watching the house the way I'm watching it — not staring, scanning, the focused attention of a man who's learned that details matter and missing one can cost you.
His profile is sharp in the dead light. Jaw set.
The muscle there jumping once, twice, the tic he's had since the war, the one that surfaces when he's holding something back and the holding's costing him.
Neither of us says anything. One minute.
Two. The cicadas keep up their whine, so constant it becomes its own kind of silence.
Sweat runs from my temple down my neck. I let it.
The vinyl cooks the backs of my thighs through my jeans, and the discomfort's almost welcome — something specific to focus on besides the hollow feeling in my chest getting wider by the second.
My knee bounces. Once. Hard. I catch it, press my heel into the mat, force it still.
Trevor drags a hand through his hair. The dark strands fall back almost exactly where they were, which is irritating in a way I can't explain and don't want to examine. His voice, when it comes, is low and dry, pitched for the cab and nowhere else.
"Maybe she's throwing a brunch without us." A beat. "BYOB. Bring your own binoculars."
I cut him a look. Not the kind you give a buddy who makes a bad joke — the kind that strips paint at twenty paces, honed by ten years of practice and two years inside a case with no room for humor, especially the kind that lands too close to the bone.
My jaw aches. The muscle jumps and I can't stop it.
"This isn't a joke." Flat and hard, each word dropped between us like it has weight.
"Tally was scared. She showed up. She gave me her address on a paper she'd folded so many times the creases were going soft.
She said Sunday, when they're all in church, come alone.
" I jab a finger at the house. "That's not a woman who flakes.
That's a woman who had something to say, and something changed between Tuesday and today. "
Trevor turns his head. Slowly. Controlled, deliberate, the way everything about him is until it isn't. His eyes find mine across the console. Dark brown, almost black in this light, going very still, very focused, like he's reading something in fine print on the back of my skull.
"What exactly do you think we can do about it," he says, "sitting in a truck on a dead street with the engine off and the temperature climbing?
Call the police? The same ones whose reports you've got blacked out in your notebooks?
Drive to the station and ask Calloway if he's seen our witness lately? "