11. Jessika
ELEVEN
JESSIKA
More vandalism happens on a Wednesday.
I find it when I go out to the barn at six in the morning, the spray paint is red, and it's been done sometime in the night, and it covers the south wall of the barn in letters tall enough to read from the driveway.
HE SHOULD'VE STAYED GONE
I stand in front of it for a long time with my coffee going cold in my hand.
He. Which he. Grant, I assume, the most obvious target, the county's ongoing subject of ambient disapproval, but it could be Morgan. Morgan, who also left. Morgan, who is also a subject of various stories that change depending on who's telling them.
Inside, my father is still asleep. Nova leaves for school in twenty minutes.
I photograph the message, go inside, call the sheriff's department, and wait.
Two deputies come. The younger one, the same one from the Route 9 incident, walks around the barn with a flashlight and writes things in his notepad and asks me questions, I can tell he doesn't particularly expect an answer from the questions.
He takes his time with it. He's not hostile. He's also not particularly motivated.
Before he leaves, he says: "Ms. Mills, I want to ask you something and I want you to understand it's professional concern, not anything else."
"Ask," I say.
"Grant Vance has been at this property several times in the past two weeks."
"Yes. He's been helping with fence repairs."
"And you feel comfortable with that?”
I look at him.
"Deputy," I say carefully. "Grant Vance has done nothing to suggest any reason for discomfort. If you have specific information relevant to this incident that involves him, I'd ask you to share it with me directly."
The deputy seems to consider something.
"No specific information," he says. “Just county history. People's concerns."
"I know the county's history with Grant Vance," I say. "I'm part of it. Thank you for coming out."
He leaves.
I stand in the driveway and look at the red letters on my barn.
County history.
What county history is, in my experience: the story people tell about someone when the facts have gotten complicated enough that the story is easier to manage than the facts.
Grant spent four years in prison and fifteen years after as a ghost story, a cautionary tale, the Briar County devil who haunts the back roads, and that story has been useful enough to enough people that no one has been particularly motivated to check whether it's accurate.
I've been part of constructing that story.
I go inside and tell Nova the barn wall has graffiti that needs painting over.
"What kind of graffiti?" she asks.
"The petty kind," I say. "Eat your breakfast."
Grant comes that evening. He's in the driveway for a moment before he comes to the door, which means he saw the barn wall. The paint is still there, I decided, on reflection, that I should photograph it in daylight and keep a record before covering it.
When I open the door, he looks at me.
"I can paint it tonight," he says.
"You don't have to do that."
"I want to."
There's something in the way he says it, not defensive, not performing the want, just a straightforward statement of fact. He wants to. So he'll do it.
"Okay," I say.
He has the paint covered by nine o'clock. We stand in the barn door looking at the fresh white paint and the smell of it in the cold air.
"Second incident," I say. "Not the last."
"Probably not," he agrees. No drama in it.
"Are you going to be careful?" I ask. "I mean, this is pointed at you. Or at us. If you're here and things escalate?—"
"Things have been escalating since before I came back around," he says. "The gate, the letters burned into the barn, the paint.” He looks at me. "This isn't random, Jessika. Whoever is doing this has an interest in your property. My presence might be making them louder but it's not the cause."
I know he's right.
"Holcomb," I say.
"Or someone connected to him. Someone who wants us—" He pauses. "Someone who wants you to stop asking questions about Morgan."
We stand in the cool barn doorway.
"I'm not going to stop," I say.
"I know." Something in his expression. "Neither am I."
The horses breathe behind us in the dark. The October night is clear and cold and the county is quiet the way it's quiet when something is gathering.
We don't say anything else.
It's enough.
The horse is on Route 9 at six in the morning.
I get the call from a deputy I don't know, young voice, trying to sound professional, telling me that one of my rescue horses has been found running on the county road about three miles from the ranch property.
No injuries, but she's in the middle of traffic, and the deputy needs me to come collect her before something terrible happens.
I'm in my truck in three minutes.
Sullivan, a chestnut rescue my dad brought in six months ago, still skittish around strangers, is standing in the ditch on the north side of Route 9 when I arrive, two deputies in their cruisers trying to create a barrier and she's having none of it.
She can smell the fear on people who don't know horses, and deputies in flashing lights are not helping.
Grant is already there.
I don't know how he got there first. His truck is half on the shoulder with the hazards going, and he's in the ditch with Sullivan, no sudden movements, just his big quiet body angled toward her, speaking low. She's tossing her head, shaking it off, wanting to run.
And then she doesn't.
She puts her nose on Grant's chest and just stops.
He gets the rope on her in about thirty seconds, and then it's just a matter of walking her calmly back to the trailer I've backed around and hitching her up, and Grant does most of that too while I check her over for cuts and find nothing worse than some scraping on her left foreleg from the road surface.
She's okay. She's okay.
When I look up, both deputies are watching Grant with expressions I recognize from the sheriff's station: the particular watchful wariness that Briar County has developed around him. Like they're waiting for something. Like his competence here is somehow suspect.
The younger one says: "Mr. Vance, you want to explain how you happened to be out here?"
Grant straightens. Looks at the deputy with the flat patience of a man who has had this conversation many times.
"Scanner in my truck," he says. "I was up early."
"Uh-huh." The deputy looks at the horse. At Grant. "You have any idea how this animal got onto the road?"
"The gate latch on the north pasture was compromised last night," I say before Grant can answer. "I discovered it after the storm. The gate wasn't secure."
The deputy looks at me. "Compromised how?"
"It looked like the wire had been cut."
A beat.
"Any idea who would do that?"
I look at Grant. He's looking at the deputy with perfect stillness.
"Someone's been making threats," I say. "Against my property. This is the third incident in two weeks. I'd like to file a report."
The younger deputy writes something down, without enthusiasm.
The older one, fifties, weathered, with the look of someone who has learned to wait out situations, says: "Ms. Mills, I'd recommend keeping a closer eye on your property. And on your associations."
The pause before associations is deliberate.
He means Grant. He is standing four feet from Grant and talking about him as though he's not there.
Grant's jaw tightens. I can see it from where I stand. But he doesn't say anything, and something about that restraint, that practiced, costly restraint, tells me how many times he's been in exactly this position.
"Thank you, Deputy," I say, in my attorney voice, which leaves no room for what I actually feel. "I'll be in touch about that report."
They leave.
Grant loads the last of the trailer equipment and I come to stand beside him, and he's looking out at the road where the traffic has started moving again.
"The older one," I say quietly. "He's done that to you before."
"Yeah," he says.
"How long has it been like that?"
"Since I got out." He turns to look at me. His eyes are tired in a specific way, the tiredness of something that doesn't have a solution, just a management strategy. "It's better than it was."
I look at him. At the ink on his arms in the early light. At the way he's built himself into something the county can't break, no matter how consistently it tries.
"My phone got an anonymous text last night," I say. "While the storm was going on."
His attention sharpens.
I take out my phone and show him.
The text reads: He’s lying to you.
Grant goes completely still.
I watch his face.
It does something complicated, a rapid sequence of things, and then closes.
Something in his chest moves. I can see it, the quick physical release of something held too tight. He looks back at the road.
"Somebody's digging," he says. "Whoever sent that, they’ve gone into records."
"County commissioner's wife mentioned your prison records."
"And someone else has been tracking my movements. The NA meeting photograph." He thinks. "This is targeted. This is someone who wants to discredit me specifically. Make you distrust me."
"Why specifically?"
He looks at me with an expression that says: You know why.
Because we're getting close to something. Because Morgan knew something and someone wants it buried. And Grant, with his hands in this county's complicated history, is the obvious fulcrum.
"We need to move faster," I say.
"On Morgan's laptop?"
"On all of it." I pull out my keys. "Can you come tonight? After Nova's in bed. We need to go through everything."
He nods once.
"And Grant." I hold his gaze. "Thank you for being here this morning."
"Don't thank me for that," he says. "That one was just about the horse."
But when he almost smiles, it undoes about fifty percent of my carefully maintained composure.
I drive home with Sullivan calm in the trailer behind me and Grant's truck following at a steady distance, watching to make sure we're not followed.
And I think: what we are doing is extremely complicated and probably inadvisable and there is not a single part of me that intends to stop.
The morning after Sullivan's highway escape, I find myself doing something I haven't done in years.
I Google recovering addicts.
It starts with a late-night search the way most of my worst habits do, lying in bed with my phone while the house is quiet and my brain is too loud, typing words I won't say out loud because saying them implies something about myself I'm not ready to examine.
I search Grant Vance first. Then I search NA sponsor Briar County.
Then, somehow, I'm forty minutes into a rabbit hole about addiction recovery, relapse rates, what it looks like when someone is genuinely rebuilding, versus what it looks like when they're performing rehabilitation for legal or social reasons.
The distinction, apparently, matters.
I put the phone down. Pick it up again. Put it down.
The thing I keep returning to is the NA community bulletin.
The one I found the first night I searched his name.
Grant Vance listed as a volunteer coordinator.
It was dated three years ago, and it linked to a brief quarterly newsletter for a recovery program that operated out of the First Baptist Church in Calwell.
I've driven past that church my entire life.
I didn't know Grant had ever set foot in it.
At breakfast, Nova is quiet in the particular way she's been quiet since the night at the sheriff's station, not hostile, which is something, but contained.
Like she's been turning something over in her head and hasn't finished with it yet.
She eats her eggs without complaining. She feeds the two barn cats that have adopted her without being asked.
When I mention that I'm going into town for ranch supplies, she says she wants to come.
Small mercies.