Below Zero (10 page)

Joe sat back, rubbed his eyes. “This can’t be true. This can’t be happening.”

Joe looked at the time stamp: 12:58 A.M. He sat back, his mind racing, trying to put together what he’d just read. There was a lot there; locations, names (Robert), disjointed facts. “I’m tempted to call the number.”

“Don’t!” Sheridan said from the hallway. She was in her nightgown and her feet were bare. “If you call they might hurt her, Dad.”

“Hurt who?” Lucy asked, looking from her sister in her nightgown to Joe and Marybeth in their robes at the kitchen table. Lucy was dressed for school in a denim mini, a white top, flip-flops. She narrowed her eyes and put her hands on her hips. “Hey, what’s going on? Why isn’t Sherry dressed for school?”

Sheridan said, “April’s alive.”

“I CAN’T EAT,” LUCY SAID, SITTING BACK IN HER CHAIR AND dropping her fork on the table in front of her with a deliberate clatter. “I just keep thinking about April.”

They were at the breakfast table. The morning was dawning crisp, clear, and cool outside. Sheridan and Lucy had met Tube and thought he was sweet and hilarious. Tube showed his astute political instincts by curling up equidistant between their chairs. Joe had never been around a dog that was so self-assured and manipulative. Tube’s acceptance was instantaneous, and Tube knew it.

“You need to eat something,” Marybeth said. “I can’t send you to school without breakfast.”

Lucy crossed her arms over her chest and tilted her chin up. “I’m not going to school. Sheridan isn’t going, so I’m not going.”

“She was up half the night, Lucy,” Marybeth said softly.

“And I didn’t sleep the other half,” Sheridan said.

Joe and Marybeth exchanged a quick look. Had she heard them when they went to bed? Sheridan gave no indication she had. Joe breathed again.

“April calls and no one tells me,” Lucy said, looking from Marybeth to Joe to Sheridan, accusing them all.

“It’s not like that,” Marybeth said.

“It’s exactly like that. Sheridan told me she
wanted
to talk to
me.
”

Sheridan turned from her sister to Joe. “I wonder what she meant by ‘footprints.’ Do you think she remembered what you always tell us when we go camping?”

Said Joe, “Leave only footprints, take only memories.”

“Yeah—that. Do you think she remembered it?”

Joe was cognizant of Lucy’s smoldering at once again being left out of the conversation. He said, “I don’t know. What do you think, Lucy?”

She sat back and crossed her arms over her chest and refused to be drawn in by such a transparent ploy.

“Honey,” Marybeth said to Lucy, looking to Joe for help, “we weren’t sure it was April at the time. We still aren’t completely sure.”

“Sheridan is. Right, Sherry?”

Sheridan looked away, confirming Lucy’s statement.

“Lucy,” Joe said, treading into dangerous waters, “we aren’t sure. It doesn’t make any sense. We’re still trying to figure out what’s happening.”

“You people always leave me out,” Lucy said, her face a mask as she fought back her emotions. “My foster sister calls and you don’t wake me up.”

There was the silence of the guilty.

“She was
my
sister,” Lucy said. “I think about her every day. Nobody else does. I never really believed she died.”

“Lucy!” Marybeth said, raising her fist to her mouth.

“It’s true. I never believed it.”

Said Marybeth, “Don’t talk like that.”

Joe and Sheridan watched the exchange in chastised silence. Lucy had always been happy-go-lucky, fashionable, pretty, and very observant of Sheridan’s mistakes so she wouldn’t make them herself. In many ways she chose to make herself peripheral. She kept her own counsel. And she was so rarely righteously angry that Joe was slightly stunned.

“I want to talk to her,” Lucy said.

Sheridan said, “You can’t call. She said not to call.”

Lucy glared at her sister and reached across the table and snatched the phone.

“Lucy!” Sheridan said, looking to her mother for help.

“I’m not calling,” Lucy said, opening the phone, finding the text thread in an instance, and writing a message so quickly—a blur of practiced thumbs—that she pressed SEND before Sheridan or Marybeth could wrest the phone away. Then she handed the phone back to her sister and gave one last spiteful deadeye to all of them in turn before grabbing her backpack on the way out the door.

There were a few beats of silence.

“Wow,” Joe said.

“This will take some work,” Marybeth said. “She’s got a point. We’ve got to consider the fact she’s growing up. She’s not that little girl anymore.” She looked blankly at the kitchen window. “Lucy’s growing up whether we want her to or not.”

Sheridan snorted as she read aloud the message Lucy sent:

LUCY’S BLOW-UP seemed to hang within the walls of the house like a scorching odor long after she left for school. While Sheridan slumped down the hall to take a shower and get dressed—a process that would rarely take less than an hour, Joe knew—Marybeth listlessly cleared the dishes, something on her mind.

When the sound of the shower coursed through the wall, she turned to Joe and said, “Let’s go for a drive.” He nodded. By her tone and her choice of words, he knew where they were going.

They took her van to the Twelve Sleep County Cemetery, ten minutes away, in complete silence. The cemetery was on the east bank of the river, overlooking a bluff and a shallow bend. During the flash flood three years ago, the river had swollen as if suddenly hungry and had eaten into the soft dirt wall like a beast. The horrified citizens of Saddlestring formed a sandbag brigade that diverted the wall of water before it ate too deeply into the bluff and devoured the coffins. The sandbags were still there, scattered and broken and sunken into the embankment, six feet above the current benign level of the river. Looking at the river, Joe saw violence in remission, a sleeping brute capable of rearing up whenever it wanted if for no other reason than to remind them who was in control.

April’s grave was one of those nearest the bluff above the river. The headstone was small and thin, a wafer of granite, all they could afford at the time. It used to be shaded by river cottonwoods, but the trees had washed away in the flood and so had the shade, and the high-altitude sun burned the grass and whitened the stone itself, aging it well past its six years. All it said was:

 

APRIL KEELEY
WE HARDLY KNEW YOU

 

 

And her birth and death dates.

“We used to come here every month,” Marybeth said. “Remember? Then it turned into every few months.”

“Yup.”

“Joe, we haven’t been here for over a year. I feel really guilty about that.”

Joe nodded.

“Did we forget about her?”

“No,” he said. “Life went on, I guess. Let’s not beat ourselves up.”

They stood in silence. The only sound was a whisper of breeze high in the remaining treetops that sounded more like the river than the river itself.

She said it: “Is it possible there is someone else in the grave, Joe?”

“I was thinking about that.”

“An unknown child? It’s too painful to even consider.”

Joe said, “I didn’t see any other children in that trailer, Marybeth. Only April.”

“But we know the Sovereigns had other children with them. We don’t know what happened to them after the fire.”

Joe remembered the week after the raid when the county coroner and the team from the state Department of Criminal Investigation dug through the charred trailers in the campground. The snow had finally stopped, but in its place an incredible blanket of cold—day after day of twenty, thirty below zero—had descended on the mountains as if to punish them for what had taken place. He had purposely looked away when the investigators cleared blackened sheet metal from the site of Brockius’s trailer, when the coroner shouted out that he’d located three bodies—two adults and a child. Joe had no doubt at the time who they were: Jeannie Keeley, April’s birth mother; Wade Brockius, the leader of the camp; and April. Joe never looked at the bodies, didn’t need to. All he saw were the body bags—one stuffed full like a sausage (Brockius), one stiff and thin ( Jeannie), and one with a body so small it seemed empty. The body bags were carried by investigators to an ambulance and taken away. The autopsies of Jeannie and April were cursory—neither had dental records to match up, and the state chose not to run a DNA confirmation because at the time the process was slow and expensive and no one doubted who the bodies were. The decision was made in no small part because of Joe’s own eyewitness testimony.

“We could have the body exhumed,” Marybeth said. “I don’t know how to go about it, but I can find out.”

Joe shook his head. “It could take months. We’d need a court order. To get the order we’d need to go to a judge and explain what this is all about. We’d need to try and convince the judge that April might be out there somewhere. We’ll need more than those text messages, Marybeth. Even I can’t completely convince myself she’s alive. We need more.”

“We need her to text again,” Marybeth said.

“At the very least.”

“Joe, there’s something else.”

He knew there was. She’d alluded to it the night before, when she said she’d been doing an Internet search using the place names from the text thread.

 

 

 

“I DID AN ADVANCED
Google search,” Marybeth said, seated at her desk in her office. She wore her reading glasses that made her look serious and thoughtful, Joe thought. She tapped the monitor of her computer with an index finger. “I did several combinations of the words Chicago, Madison, Cheyenne, Mount Rushmore and words like crime, murder, killing, police. I got thousands of hits, of course. Then I narrowed down the search to the last two weeks, because April said she’d been on the road for two weeks, right?”

“Right.”

“So since she said she used to live in Chicago, I assumed the two weeks in the car started there. Of course, we don’t know for sure, but that’s what I’m guessing. So I narrowed it down to the second week of August. Guess how many murders took place that week?”

Joe shrugged.

“Eight. It’s a big place. Of the eight, four were ‘gang-related,’ but I guess we can’t rule them out until we get more information from April. The others run the gamut, from the murder of a doctor—wife arrested—to a truck driver in a suspected road-rage incident. And a brothel owner got shot in the head but nobody saw anything. So who knows?”

Joe agreed. “All we’re going on is that one line she wrote—
some people died.
We just don’t know enough. We need to get her to tell us more.”

“Right,” she said, doing another Google search. “But let me see if I can find what I found last night. Madison is smaller than Chicago, of course, and there was an unexplained murder there eleven days ago.”

Joe’s antennae went up because of the way she said it.

“Here,” she said jabbing the screen. “From the
Capitol Times.
I’ll print it out, but here’s the headline: CONTROVERSIAL BLOGGER SLAIN.”

It meant nothing to Joe, and he shrugged.

The printer purred, and she snatched out the sheet that slid out and handed it to Joe.

 

“Interesting,” Joe said. “I’ve never heard of this website, have you?”

“No, but when we get done here, I’m going to spend some time on it,” she said. “But first I’ve got to show you something else.”