Faultlines (24 page)

“No, of course not. I don’t—”

“It doesn’t matter to me, you know? I mean if he was driving that night or not. Either way, he’s my son, and I love him. I would give my life for his, do anything to keep him safe. Huck should know that. Everyone should. It’s just that simple.”

And just that complicated,
Libby thought, watching Sandy go. She didn’t have a good feeling about any of this. In fact, her stomach ached with apprehension, the sense of foreboding, of some ill wind brewing. But from what direction it might come, she didn’t know.

Libby got into Beck’s truck, tracking Sandy’s progress across the parking lot. Debating whether it was wise, letting Sandy go. Watching as her truck backed out and another car, a light-colored sedan, fell in behind it. Libby kept her eye on both vehicles as they turned left out of the lot. Ruth had wanted to talk to Captain Perry in Wyatt about Ricky. But like Sandy, Libby was wary of that.

She pulled her cell phone from her pocket and called Ruth.

“I’ve been trying to get hold of you,” Ruth said when she answered. “Was your phone off?”

“What’s the matter?” Libby asked.

“After we talked earlier, I called Aunt Tildy about Ricky Burrows. You know how she is. She knows everything about everyone in this town.”

“But he isn’t from here.”

“Oh, but he is. He’s a descendant of the Scroggins family. He was born here. Fran’s sister, Jewel, is his mother.”

“No, that can’t be right. Ricky’s what? Late twenties, early thirties, maybe? Fran’s in her seventies—”

“Jewel was a lot younger. Aunt Tildy called her a change-of-life baby. She said Jewel’s mama was way over forty and didn’t handle the news of the pregnancy well.” Ruth sniffed. “Maybe that explains why Jewel was such a nutcase. She sure did a number on Ricky.”

“What did she do?” Libby asked.

“There are various stories, that she locked him in a closet or chained him up outside with the dog if he misbehaved, but the worst thing was the day she went to Ricky’s school—he was in fifth grade at the time—and started shouting about aliens and a massive invasion, screaming they had to leave the building immediately or they’d all be killed.”

“Oh my God, that’s horrible.”

“I know; the kids were scared to death, Tildy said. Ricky was so scared and humiliated he wet himself. He was sobbing, a complete mess. It was awful for him. You know, the cops came, medical people. The way Tildy described it, it was total chaos.”

“I can’t imagine the effect it must have had on Ricky. But how does Tildy know all this?”

“She worked in the office. She brought him home with her that day. She let him take a shower, found him some clean clothes, and fed him. They played checkers until his dad could come for him. She told me he came to see her.”

“What? You mean like recently?”

“A few days ago. I almost fainted. It’s so scary, thinking of the hours he was in her house alone with her. Tildy said she thought he came by because he remembered her kindness to him when he went through all of that.”

Tildy was kind. Libby loved her, too, but she was also old and garrulous. When it came to this or any other story, no way did she even begin to approach the status of a reliable source. Libby was on the verge of pointing this out when Ruth said she knew what Libby was thinking.

“I didn’t entirely trust Tildy’s story, either, so I called Fran.”

“She confirmed it?”

“Yeah, that and worse. Fran was contacted not long ago by someone at a Colorado mental hospital who told her that her nephew, who’d been locked up there for the past five years, had escaped. Fran had no idea he was there. But evidently this person found her name in one of Ricky’s files and wanted her to know he might be headed to Texas, specifically to Wyatt and home, and he was dangerous.”

“But how did he get out?”

“He got hold of a knife and managed to incapacitate a male nurse. He didn’t kill him, but after he took his uniform, he sliced the guy up badly enough that he passed out. Ricky left him in a closet, then he walked out pretty as you please. It was hours before they discovered he was gone.”

“This is unreal.”

“Ha! Wait till you hear this part. Fran said Ricky had a fascination with knives even when he was young, and he liked carving things up, including the occasional animal. Fran said Jewel thought he might have a future in forensic or mortuary science.” Ruth’s laugh was dark, truncated. “Fran also said they tried to help both Jewel and Ricky. There were psychiatrists involved, antidepressants, yada yada, but the situation didn’t improve.”

“It must have been heartbreaking,” Libby said.

“I’m sure, but you see what this means, don’t you? That it has to be Ricky who gutted the hog at your place and the Graysons’. He’s the one who left the dead rats in your mailbox, the hummingbird on your kitchen floor, the note—”

Libby’s pulse tapped lightly in her veins. “But why?” She asked the same question she had asked earlier. “What’s his motive? What does he want?”

“I don’t know. He called the Graysons trespassers. Maybe he wants the ranch—the Little B?”

“But that’s crazy.”

“Yeah, well, we are talking about a mental-hospital escapee, a known lunatic. Fran told me the police in Colorado issued a BOLO when Ricky escaped, but that’s two months ago now.”

“And he was here, right under my nose—”

“All our noses, Libby. Don’t go blaming yourself.”

“But I should have warned Sandy.” Libby felt awful. “Suppose she finds him and he goes off on her? What if he uses a knife on her?”

“Sandy? Sandy Cline? What are you talking about?”

Libby gave Ruth the gist of her meeting with Sandy, scooting by Ruth’s exclamatory
Oh my God
s and
You must be kidding
s, getting to the heart of it—that of all people, Ricky had apparently witnessed Jordan’s accident, and Sandy was trying to track him down. “She’s afraid Huckabee has already pressured one witness. She’s worried about him getting to Ricky first, but I think he may have already.” Libby paused and let out a little groan. “But what am I doing, Ruth? As you have so often pointed out, it’s really none of my business, is it?”

“No, but now that we know all of this, how is either one of us going to feel if this all goes wrong and Jordy lands in prison for something he didn’t do? Or Sandy gets hurt trying to convince Ricky he has to testify for Jordy, assuming she can find him?”

“You haven’t spoken to anyone at the police department in Wyatt, have you?”

“No,” Ruth said. “I wanted to talk to you first.”

“Good. I’m coming to pick you up. We’ll go to the police in Greeley,” Libby said.

Ruth said she’d be waiting, and Libby clicked off her phone.

She wasn’t a mile from Inman’s when it rang again. She pulled over to check the ID, and when she saw who it was, she answered quickly. “Jordan? Is everything all right?”

She didn’t know what prompted her to ask. Some weird intuition, she’d guess, and when he answered, “No,” and said, “Can you come and get me?” her heart fell against the wall of her chest.

“What’s wrong? Where are you?” She was already keying the ignition, pulling cautiously back onto the road. She didn’t like driving and talking on her cell phone, but it seemed imperative.

“I’m at my dad’s apartment,” Jordy said. “I’m really sorry to bother you, but I’ve called my dad like a hundred times, and he’s not answering his phone. I didn’t know who else—”

“It’s fine, Jordan. I don’t mind that you called me.” In fact, she was pleased that he thought of her in terms of someone who would help, and she found that disconcerting. “But what’s going on?”

“It’s my mom. She’s at my aunt Jenna’s, and I think she’s in some kind of trouble.”

14

I
t happened in a flash.

Sandy saw the light-colored sedan in her rearview as she left Inman’s, and her temper flared. She slowed, letting the car come close enough to her tailgate that she could tell the driver was a woman.
Patsy Meade. Surprise, surprise.
The snarky voice in Sandy’s brain was a cover for the jolt of her alarm. She would never know what demon took possession of her, making her veer off the crumbling edge of the country road into the tall grass that verged on the pavement. Patsy did the same, stopping behind Sandy, their bumpers only inches apart. Sandy looked at Patsy in the rearview for a moment, then, heart hammering, she jumped out of her truck, thinking,
Fine
. Thinking,
Bring it on
. Thinking,
Lady, you picked the wrong day
.

It was irrational, totally not a smart move, but Sandy headed toward Patsy’s car anyway, mind racing, primed for battle as soon as Patsy got out. Before she could open her mouth, blasting her indictment, shouting her accusations, Sandy would set her straight. But Patsy didn’t get out. She just stared at Sandy through the windshield, flat mouthed, empty eyed. Motionless. Sandy’s step faltered. She thought of all the whacked-out people in the world, the crazy things that could happen. Suppose Patsy had a gun? Suppose she was only waiting for Sandy to get close enough that a single shot wouldn’t miss? Had Michelle died, then? And Patsy had gone over the edge?
Oh God—

The certainty came down on Sandy hard enough that her knees buckled. She flailed her arms to keep her balance. Backed up, stopped. Stupidly, she had left her cell phone in the truck. Turning away from Patsy’s eerie gaze, Sandy looked into the field at her right. The wind blew, hot, dry, noising in her ears, whipping stray tendrils of hair across her face. A cow moseyed over to the barbed-wire fence, and she thought how beautiful its eyes were, liquid and brown, somehow ancient and wise. She wondered if she would take the vision of the cow’s eyes with her into the next world. If there even was a next world. Her dad didn’t believe in an afterlife. This was it, he said. You get this one shot, then nothing.

Nothing.
When she was growing up, the idea of nothing had scared her more than the idea of eternity.

How long did she stand there, waiting, for what, she would never be sure. Fate to show its hand? Another driver to come along, a hero who, magically, divining the situation, would stop and peacefully resolve it? It was probably only moments, but it felt like the fearful eternity of her childhood. The sound of a car engine cranking to life—Patsy’s car engine—jerked her gaze around. Her awareness now was of her vulnerability, the vast open space around her and how easily Patsy might run her down. Sandy retreated, taking backward steps, breath coming in shallow dips, feet tangling in the grass. But when Patsy dropped the car into gear, she reversed, giving herself room to clear Sandy’s tailgate, and then without a glance at Sandy, she drove away, leaving Sandy to stare after her, immobile, for long, disbelieving seconds.

After a while, feeling chilled despite the heat, she hugged herself. The fear that Patsy might come back or that she was parked off the road up ahead, lying in wait, kept her motionless. It was the thought of Jordy, that she needed to be with him, that got her moving. And after all that she’d learned from Libby Hennessey, she had to get hold of Roger, too, she thought, heading to her truck. And Jenna. She had to talk to Jenna. Sandy didn’t care what it took. She got into the truck and shut the door. She was trembling; she didn’t feel safe. But there was no place safe right now, and there wouldn’t be until she got Jordy clear of this, whatever
this
was. She was shaking so badly she had trouble keying the ignition. Then she gave the engine too much gas, and it nearly died. She glanced at herself in the rearview and almost didn’t recognize the half-panicked woman looking back at her.
Settle down,
she told herself.
Breathe breathe. Just breathe.

After a minute, feeling calmer, she drove onto the road, checking her watch, fumbling for her phone, thinking of the client waiting for her. More than an hour now. She looked in the rearview at the plants she’d bought at Inman’s, wilted over, unhappy in the heat. Sandy drove, hunting the roadsides for any sign of the light-colored sedan, brain churning. She managed to key in Roger’s number, and when he didn’t answer, she left a message that she had a hunch that involved Jenna, and she was going there. She tried Jordy, too, but when his voice mail picked up, she only asked him to call her, saying it was important. She didn’t want him to worry.

Clicking off, she thought of calling Emmett, and instead dialed her client Martha Langston, making her apologies, pleading a family emergency. Martha was gracious; she didn’t ask for details. Given the Cline-family notoriety, Martha probably didn’t want to know unless she was a fan of reality TV. Sandy dialed her mother’s cell phone after that, but clicked off before the call could go through. She didn’t want her mother to alert Jenna she was coming.

She was jittery, gripping the wheel, hunched over it like an old woman. Every time she crossed paths with a light-colored sedan, her heart stopped. She had no idea what might happen when she got to Jenna’s. She would bull her way into the house if she had to; she would put her sister down and sit on her if that’s what it took to make her listen. Sandy snorted.
Dream on,
she thought. She could scarcely breathe, she was so on edge.

Jenna’s neighborhood, her street, her bungalow, in an older subdivision of Wyatt, looked the same as it had in the days when Sandy had come here routinely. But it felt alien now. It felt scary. She pulled to the curb and stared at the front yard. She and Jenna had put in the flower beds, planting them with a mix of mostly native perennials that were drought tolerant and deer resistant. Jenna never minded the deer, though. She had bottle-fed more than one motherless fawn. She’d nursed injured rabbits and raccoons, too, and once rescued a fox that had caught its leg in a tangle of rusty barbed wire. Travis and Jordy had grown up tramping through the woods with Sandy and Jenna, learning its lore, its dark, loamy secrets. It killed Sandy, remembering those days, the boys with their heads together, comparing the bounty scored on their treks—a feather, a nest, chunks of quartz that glittered in the sun like diamonds, pink-veined granite, the odd arrowhead, a fossil, and once the completely intact skeleton of a whiptail lizard. Thinking of those days made Sandy want to cry, and she tightened her teeth to keep from it.

Suddenly it made her so goddamned angry—that fucking accident, the blind fucking stupid idiocy of it, and the horrible consequences, twin horrors of unfathomable loss and endless grief. And what for? What was the fucking point? What was the use of life when it was this fragile and over so soon? Sandy knew without Jenna even telling her that she wished the cancer had killed her. Then she would have been spared this cruelty, the worst one of all, outliving your own child, the one you carried beneath your heart.
Ah God,
Sandy thought. She could just howl with the pain of it.

Instead she bailed from the truck, wiping her eyes, sniffing back a nose full of crud. She knew Jenna was home; she’d left her garage door up and her SUV was inside. Walking up the long, sinewy driveway to the back door—they never used each other’s front doors—Sandy wondered if Jenna was watching her, if even now she was running through the house to bolt the back door, barring Sandy’s entrance.

It caught her off guard to find Jenna standing in the doorway behind the closed screen, and even though the shadows under the covered porch were deep, Sandy knew her eyes were hard and her mouth set in a forbidding line. But she was there; the door was open. It must mean something.

“Hey,” Sandy said, and the syllable came out croaky and tentative on what was little more than a puff of air.

“Mom and Dad aren’t here,” Jenna said. “I told them to pack up and go home.”

“They were hovering,” Sandy said, because she knew.

“I was suffocating.” Jenna held the door open, but even as Sandy’s relief and the leap of her jubilation lifted her heart, Jenna was sidestepping her hug, and the look on her face was dark and forbidding.

Sandy followed Jenna though the mudroom into the kitchen. Sandy paused at the marble-topped island. Jenna walked around it, going to the opposite end as if she needed not only distance but also a physical barrier between them.

“I’ve packed up Jordy’s stuff. I want you to take it when you go.”

Sandy had the sense that Jenna would welcome a fight, that she would grab at the chance to distract herself from her agony. How did she do it—pass by Travis’s empty bedroom? Open a kitchen cabinet to see the mug he had decorated for her when he was five? If she ever gave in to it, Sandy thought, if she were to slip over the black edge of her grief, she’d be gone forever. She looked so exhausted; she’d lost so much weight, ten or fifteen pounds, Sandy guessed. “Why won’t you let me help you?” she asked.

“You? I don’t even want you in my house.”

“You don’t mean that.” It took every ounce of Sandy’s self-control to keep her voice level.

“Yes, I do,” Jenna insisted, even as Sandy raised her voice, talking over her.

“Jordy wasn’t driving. I’ve got proof.”

“You’ve got nothing but a head full of delusions about Jordy, a head full of the lies you tell yourself about him so you can sleep nights.”

“That’s almost funny, Jenna. Jordy says he’d rather take the blame for the accident—anything to save
your
delusions about Travis. Jordy can’t stand for Trav to be remembered as having been responsible for something so horrific.”

“So he’s falling on his sword, is that it? That’s a great way to play it.”

“He’s not playing, Jenna. There are witnesses.”

“Every one of whom has identified Jordy.”

“I don’t know about all of them, but I do know Huck pressured Nat Blevins somehow into changing his story.”

“Why would he do that?”

“To protect you. Because he loves you. He can’t stand that this has happened. It was awful enough for you, losing John. And now Travis, too? It’s unthinkable. All you have is your memory. It’s the last thing, the only thing now, Huck can save for you.”

“You’re wrong.” Jenna traced her eyebrows, shoved her hair behind her ears.

It needed washing. And it was seeing that—and how broken Jenna was, how fragile and vulnerable—that kept Sandy from launching herself at Jenna, as she’d done a few times in their childhood, with the intention of bringing Jenna down and causing her bodily harm. Their mother was right. Jenna was incapable of sorting out her emotions, much less controlling how they were expressed.
I mean, my God,
said the voice in Sandy’s brain,
she can’t even wash her hair.

Jenna went to the kitchen sink and stared out the window. Sandy went through the house to Jenna’s bathroom and found her shampoo. Bringing it and a towel back into the kitchen, she stood next to Jenna, bumping her gently aside with her hip. She turned on the tap.

Once the water was the right temperature, Jenna wordlessly lowered her head under it, and Sandy moved the sprayer around, gathering and releasing Jenna’s shoulder-length hair to thoroughly wet it. Then, working in the shampoo, she gently massaged Jenna’s scalp, her temples, the back of her neck, giving herself to the ritual, letting herself be soothed by the sound of the running water and the citrusy scent of the shampoo rising on the steam. She closed her eyes, blindly mapping with her fingers the shape of Jenna’s skull, the mystery of its uneven knotty surface. It was when she was rinsing the soap from Jenna’s hair that she became fully aware of Jenna’s distress, the heave of her shoulders, her grating, uncontrollable sobs, and without a second thought, she pulled Jenna up and brought her around, wrapping her in a tight embrace.

Heedless of the wet soaking their shirts and puddling the floor, they sank to the floor, backs to the cabinet, clinging to each other, rocking together. Sandy made the little humming noises their mother had always made when she held them, crying and inconsolable, as children. She had made these noises, holding Jordy, and even Travis, when the boys were small.

Minutes passed; gradually, Jenna grew quiet.

There was only the rough hiccup of her breath when Sandy at last reached up, groping for the towel. Pulling it down, she blotted Jenna’s face, wiped the soft, nubby terry cloth over her hair. “Mom said you haven’t cried very much.”

“Couldn’t,” Jenna said.

“It’s good, then. You needed to.”

Jenna smiled ruefully. “I need a tissue.”

“Use the towel; it’ll wash.”

Jenna did, and they settled back against the cabinet, shoulders touching.

“Have you heard anything about Michelle?” Sandy asked after a moment, and it seemed odd, but they had to start somewhere. They had to find the way to say all the hard stuff, to try and fix what they could, and now was the time, when Jenna’s defenses were down.

“She’s still in a coma. Why?”

Sandy told Jenna about her two confrontations with Patsy. “Earlier, when I stopped, I don’t know what I was thinking. It was totally possible she had a gun, that if her daughter died she might want to kill me. Or Jordy.”

“Wouldn’t you, if Jordy had died and Michelle had been driving?”

“Probably. But, Jenna, Jordy wasn’t driving.”

She started to get up, but Sandy went up on her knees, putting her hand on Jenna’s arm, stopping her. “Please listen to me. You remember when I told you how I thought Huck was dogging Jordy, ticketing him for no reason.”

“Oh God, Sandy, not that again.” Jenna got to her feet. “It’s such a load of horseshit.”

“No, it isn’t.” Sandy stood up, too.

“You need to get Jordy’s stuff and go, okay?” Jenna sounded as if she were running out of the patience it took to be nice. She left the kitchen, finger-combing her still-damp hair back from her face. In the bathroom, she made a ponytail and fastened it with an elastic band.