Twenty
WE SIT RIGHT there in the dirt in what little shade the tractor can provide, our backs against the side of it.
It’s been years since I’ve seen him, but it’s an old man sitting next to me now, one way older than his years. It was the same as how Mitchell Garland had aged almost overnight after Gideon had died in the crash.
I’d taken one journalism course at UNC, for the fun of it, mostly, and remembered the professor telling us one day that the best stories in sports often come out of the losers’ locker room.
He was right on his facts, but a little off on his emphasis. Those locker-room stories are about people who had only lost a game. The man in front of me, even though he still has his farm, looks as if he’s lost everything, including what appears to be the will to keep going.
I give him a quick sideways glance and suddenly can see him at church before I went off to college, me sitting there with EJ and Leamon with Holly, the little girl in her church clothes.
I ask, “Isn’t Burt Webb the one you should be talking to? Or Sheriff Hader?”
Sheriff Nash Hader runs the County Police with an iron fist. Two of those, actually.
Leamon turns to look at me, and even that small motion seems to take everything he has in him.
“I’ve talked to both of them until I was blue in the face,” he says.
“More Burt than Nash on account of Holly being local. He’s been back to the farm on multiple occasions with his forensics team, mostly Holly’s room because she got took right out of it while I was asleep that night.
But with each passing day and each passing week, Silas, I feel more and more desperate. ”
He reaches over and grabs my forearm with a farm hand that feels like a vise. “She’s all I got,” he says, his voice raw and low at the same time.
“Tell me what happened,” I say. “I feel as if I only know parts of it.”
He stares out at the perfect rows in our field. Maybe he’d been laying down ones just like them over at his place before making the drive over here.
“I’d never locked the house at night until those other girls started disappearing,” he says.
“So I know I locked up that night, and slept with my shotgun in the bedroom, which I’d taken to doing after the other girls got took.
I put her to bed, and we prayed together, like always, and then I went to bed myself. ”
He closes his eyes, and when he opens them back up, he says, “Somehow whoever it was got in through the kitchen door. And in the morning, when I went up to tell her to start getting ready for school, because that girl of mine sure could… sure can sleep, she was just… gone.”
He sucks in thick air and says, “Somebody took my baby girl like a thief in the night.”
I take in some air myself.
“I can’t imagine what you’re going through, Leamon, I truly can’t,” I say. “My dad had at least lived a full life before somebody took it from him. Took it from me. But this is a child we’re talking about. Your child.”
He grips my arm again. “I know she’s still out there somewhere!” he says, his voice suddenly as hot as the day. “And you’ve got to help me find her.”
“Leamon…”
All I got, and as far as I get.
“I’ve come to you because I just know I would have come to your daddy if he was still with us,” he says. “He was always the biggest man in this town and now I’m asking you to be the same.”
We sit there in silence. I see him clenching and unclenching those big hands, probably not even aware that he’s doing it.
“You’re the only one who can talk to the Crocketts,” he says finally.
“Whoa,” I say. “You think they had something to do with this?”
He’s staring off again. “I do,” he says. “I rightly do. They’re pure evil and this is an act of pure evil. And if they didn’t have a hand in it themselves, they by God know who did. Briar or those two boys or all of them at once.”
“I hear you, Leamon,” I say. “I do. I hear your pain. But I’m just back here, like you said, and I’m not sure that I can do any good.”
“I used to think that your father was the only one in this town who wasn’t afraid of Briar Crockett,” he says. “He would’ve gone right at him on all the drugs being peddled in his school, and I believe he would have gone at him on this if I asked him to. And maybe even if I didn’t.”
He turns back to me again. “Talk to him, Silas,” he says. “You don’t have to accuse him of anything. Maybe you could even ask him for his help.”
“All due respect,” I say. “But why can’t you do the same?”
“Because he owns me the way he owns just about everybody else around here,” he says. “Everybody except the Tuckers.”